KRC Research

Thought Leadership

Creating a thought leadership platform: Foley & Lardner

The firm recognized the significant business opportunity governance reform represented. Launching the Team would leverage the business opportunity and showcase the firm's strengths in key areas of the law. To do this, Foley & Lardner, working with Weber Shandwick, went beyond a typical "launch" and instead embarked on a campaign to measure the true cost for businesses to implement SOX while discovering attitudes associated with this data. The answers to these difficult questions would then become the platform the firm needed to seize control of the dialogue and generate broad recognition of the firm's leadership in this area.

Challenge

After years of success, the client was seeking to raise its profile as a consumer and customer-focused employee benefits expert in an increasingly competitive and volatile healthcare marketplace. To achieve this, KRC worked to pair research revealing employee benefits preferences with news about the client's services to highlight the company's role as a thought leader in employee benefits.

Research Solution

Working with Weber Shandwick and Foley & Lardner, KRC developed and implemented a research plan that would provide the firm with a clear picture of the financial impact of SOX - a measure no one else had. The qualitative and quantitative research approach included an open-end, paper-and-pencil survey of corporate financial executives, asking for estimated cost increases in areas related to SOX; a review of proxy statements filed with the SEC to generate hard data on the increases in audit and non-audit fees related to governance reform; in-depth, one-on-one interviews among service providers impacted by the new regulations; and an online survey of C-level executives to measure their attitudes toward SOX and governance reform.

Results

Over a three-month period, the program resulted in 220 media placements, including placements in top-tier venues such as the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times as well as targeted industry publications. Traffic to Foley & Lardner's Web site increased dramatically. In addition, Foley & Lardner received more than 254 requests for the research from organizations around the world, and the research study continues to be referenced by academic and regulatory groups. In 2004, the campaign won the Campaign of the Year Award from PR Week.

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