Please enjoy this blog post authored by Kevin Hartman, Associate Teaching Professor, University of Notre Dame.
Since the advent of legal CRM systems in the 1990s, data has become increasingly crucial for law firms of all sizes. It is now present everywhere, making the skill of interpreting and communicating data more important than ever. For legal marketers, this responsibility often falls on their shoulders. The key is to transform numbers into engaging stories that are both comprehensible and emotionally impactful for the audience.
Data visualization is a powerful tool in bringing these stories to life. By utilizing charts, graphs, and infographics effectively, you can turn abstract data points into memorable narratives that motivate people to take action. Whether sharing campaign results, client behavioral trends, or competitive benchmarks, thoughtfully visualizing data can enhance your insights and make them more prominent.
In this guide, we will explore essential techniques for effective visualization and offer practical advice for storytelling with data.
The Five Data Patterns Every Legal Marketer Should Know
Visualizing data expresses stories that are unrecognizable when the data is in tabular form, whether we're exploring patterns during data analysis or presenting our findings to an audience. To effectively visualize data, we must understand the five inherent patterns: Change, Clustering, Relativity, Ranking, and Correlation. Each pattern conveys a unique message and requires specific techniques to express that message effectively.
Let's take a closer look at these patterns and how we can bring them to life through visualization.
1. Change: Examining Trends Over Time
Visualizing change allows us to see trends, progress, and fluctuations over a period of time. This pattern is crucial when presenting metrics such as campaign performance, lead generation, or client retention over quarters or years.
Use Case: Change can be used to illustrate how client inquiries fluctuated before and after a thought leadership campaign was launched, highlighting the impact of marketing efforts.
Pro Tip: The use of annotations or trendlines can help draw your audience’s attention to significant shifts in the data.
2. Clustering: Identifying Groups and Patterns
Clustering helps us identify groups of data points that share similarities, often revealing distinct client segments or behavioral patterns. For legal marketers, this can be useful for identifying target audiences based on shared characteristics like industry or firm size.
Use Case: Clustering could uncover segments of clients engaging with specific content topics, allowing for tailored content strategies for different audience groups.
Pro Tip: Utilize color coding or size contrast to differentiate clusters for easier interpretation.
3. Relativity: Understanding Proportions and Comparisons
Relativity visualizations compare parts of a whole, making them useful for illustrating budget allocations, market share, or content performance across platforms.
Use Case: Relativity can break down a marketing budget by channels, showing which areas receive the most resources. When applied to text data as a word cloud, relativity can visually summarize client feedback themes.
Pro Tip: Avoid using too many slices in a pie chart; if there are more than five categories, consider using a tree map instead.
4. Ranking: Demonstrating Hierarchies and Priorities
Ranking visualizations help us understand how data points compare against each other, making them perfect for showcasing top-performing campaigns, high-value clients, or competitive positioning.
Use Case: Ranking client engagement rates across different service offerings can provide clarity on which strategies have the most impact.
Pro Tip: Visualizing rankings effectively means more than just showing who is at the top or bottom. Be aware of the broader hierarchy in the data and ensure that your chosen chart presents it in a way that resonates with the audience.
5. Correlation: Exploring Relationships Between Variables
Correlation visuals reveal relationships between variables, allowing us to explore how one factor influences another. This can be valuable when analyzing the link between ad spend and new client acquisitions or content frequency and lead generation.
Use Case: Correlation can highlight the relationship between email frequency and click-through rates, helping optimize marketing strategies.
Pro Tip: Ensure clarity by adding regression lines or r-squared figures to visually represent correlation strength.
By recognizing and effectively visualizing these five core data patterns – Change, Clustering, Relativity, Ranking, and Correlation – you can transform your legal marketing reports from dense and hard-to-read documents into visually compelling stories.
Bringing Data Patterns To Life: Key Storytelling Techniques
Visualized data is rarely enough to drive action. As legal marketers, you face the challenge of not only presenting data, but making it meaningful to partners, clients, and leadership. This is where data storytelling becomes vital. By turning numbers into compelling insights, you can influence decision-making and drive strategic growth.
A well-crafted visual ensures that your insights are not only comprehended but also retained and acted upon. Here are some fundamental guidelines to consider as you develop yours.
1. Make Data Memorable
Facts and figures alone can easily be forgotten, but when paired with striking contrast, they become memorable insights. When incorporating visual contrast into your charts, keep in mind that it will be the first thing your audience notices.
Make sure the contrast draws attention to the specific data pattern you want to highlight by using only one theme - whether that is through different colors, sizes, or shapes. When utilizing color contrast, stick to one consistent hue and vary shades of that hue (such as dark blue and light blue) instead of using contrasting colors (like red and green). This adds meaning without being overly distracting.
By purposefully incorporating contrast, you create a visually appealing chart that helps your audience understand the overall impact of the data.
2. Convey Clear Messages
Legal marketing often involves large amounts of data – from campaign performance metrics to client retention rates and competitive positioning. But without a clear and specific purpose, visualizing this data can overwhelm even the most engaged audience.
To effectively convey the meaning behind your visualizations, use titles, headlines, and other guided elements. The title placed immediately above the chart should clearly explain what data is being presented in simple terms, while a compelling headline at the top of the page should highlight the key insight from the visualization. Annotations and other visual cues can also be used to strategically frame the data.
By putting the chart's story into words, it becomes easier for readers to interpret and helps prevent misunderstandings.
3. Limit Distractions
Just as contrast draws attention to specific items and basic chart elements help convey a clear meaning, visual polish ensures that supporting data remains unobtrusive in the background. To create eye-pleasing data visualizations, focus on eliminating distractions from your charts.
The key to creating visually effective charts is simplicity. Whether it's in the form of clean lines, minimalist fonts, or limited use of images and icons, the focus should always be on presenting the data in its most straightforward and unembellished form. This means avoiding unnecessary elements like shadows or 3D illusions that can distract from the main message. Microsoft may offer the option to create a 3D Pie Chart, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. (Hint: It is not. Never, ever use 3D in a chart as it does nothing but make the data more difficult to read).
Crafting refined charts is not just about aesthetics, but also about effectively communicating your message. By prioritizing simplicity and clean design, you can ensure that your audience stays focused on the most important aspect: your story.
Your Immediate Next Step
You don’t have to be a data scientist to create impactful data stories. Modern data visualization tools make it easy to present intricate data in captivating and comprehensible ways. Here are three essential tools that legal marketers of all skill levels should be familiar with:
● Spreadsheets: Starting with programs like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets is necessary for every marketer. These tools are great for handling small to medium-sized datasets, creating basic charts, and building dashboards. It's important to master these tools before moving on to more advanced ones.
● Dataviz software: More advanced options, such as Tableau and Power BI, offer dynamic and interactive visualizations. Once you're comfortable with spreadsheets, using these tools will allow you to create even more complex and visually appealing visuals.
● Online platforms: Websites like Flourish Studio, Datawrapper, and Canva are perfect for designing high-quality infographics and presentations. Since these platforms are browser-based, they may not be ideal for sensitive data, but they can produce sleek visuals for data that can be safely uploaded to their sites. (Note: Canva does offer a desktop app now which can address many data privacy concerns).
Investing time in learning these tools will pay huge dividends. By mastering them, you can ensure that your insights stand out and make an impact.
Conclusion: Craft Data Stories That Inspire Action
The legal marketing field is overflowing with data, but numbers alone cannot motivate action. The skill of portraying data patterns in memorable, clear, and distraction-free visuals can transform complex metrics into compelling narratives that will resonate with your audience.
As we leave the holiday season behind and turn up the heat for 2025, challenge yourself not only to present data, but to tell stories. After all, the most impactful data stories do more than just share information — they inspire change. What story does your data need to tell next?
If you're ready to improve your data storytelling abilities, take a look at ILTA's resources for further insights on creating effective data visualizations and storytelling techniques for legal marketers.
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