Legal Cheek
Legal Cheek’s career fair attendance skyrockets 20x with RingCentral Events
20x
attendees at their virtual fairs since they switched to RingCentral Events
5-10x
students attending smaller, focused events throughout the year
↑
more law firms than ever signing up to sponsor and co-host events
With RingCentral Events, we now host several times more students at our educational and recruiting events than when we conducted these events onsite. The growing numbers of attendees also attracts more law firms as sponsors and partners. I can state with certainty that RingCentral Events has grown our bottom line.
Alex Aldridge
Founder and Publisher
The most-read legal website in the UK
As a UK columnist and editor for such widely read national publications as The Guardian and Times Online, Alex Aldridge realized the legal industry lacked a source of news and insights aimed specifically at those new to the profession. To fill this void, Alex launched Legal Cheek: a news and career site for UK law students, recent graduates, and junior lawyers.
Within a decade of its launch, Legal Cheek became the UK’s most-read legal website. Today the site attracts more than a million monthly pageviews, boasts more than 400,000 social media followers, and has become a destination for some of the profession’s most widely attended career fairs and other events.
INDUSTRY
Online news and content
HQ
London, UK
YEAR FOUNDED
2011
EMPLOYEES
10
Making the case for virtual events
As Legal Cheek became the most popular online publication for aspiring lawyers, Alex began partnering with law firms to sponsor and host educational and recruiting events across the UK.
And although that side of Legal Cheek’s business enjoyed a strong growth trajectory, Alex notes that his organization found it difficult to host in-person events across such a wide territory.
“There are over 120 universities offering law degrees across the UK, and for a team our size it’s simply not possible to reach students at all of them via in-person events. With virtual events you can, and that’s very powerful as it helps law firms reach top students who they wouldn’t otherwise meet.”
But the career-fair side of Legal Cheek’s business went from difficult to nearly impossible when the 2020 COVID lockdowns began.
Research into event platforms yields a unanimous verdict
Looking into online event solutions, Alex found a positive profile on RingCentral Events in a widely read UK financial magazine. And in their own initial research, his team was impressed with how easily the platform allowed users to navigate throughout an event. But transitioning to online events represented a big shift in the company’s strategy, and the team wanted to be sure they found the right solution.
We reviewed several other platforms, and we agreed RingCentral Events remained the most impressive and applicable to our needs. It struck us as the most intuitive platform available. And it had the versatility–the stage area, webinar capabilities, expo booths, chats–to let us host every type of event we needed, from a few hundred people to many thousands.
Alex Aldridge
Founder and Publisher
Experiencing exponential attendee growth
Legal Cheek’s annual event schedule includes several large-scale career fairs with many law firms presenting and recruiting, as well as smaller, educational events typically sponsored and hosted by a single law firm. Alex explains that almost immediately in 2020, when Legal Cheek moved these events online, the company's attendee numbers skyrocketed.
Thankfully, Alex adds, Legal Cheek had no trouble scaling up its events’ sizes and scales because the team found the RingCentral Events platform extremely user friendly. “One of the pluses of RingCentral Events from the beginning was that everyone on my team could use it to build and host our events. It didn’t require much training because the system was so intuitive.”
“Our smaller events, which usually focus on a specific educational topic or introduce a specific law firm, used to attract 50 to 100 students when we hosted them at a university. Now we use RingCentral Events to run these as a webinar (on the main stage) and then use the expo booth where the firm can host a Q&A. The typical attendance for these is now 500 students.”
What makes Alex’s team even more pleased with RingCentral Events, he adds, is that the additional size of the events has not compromised attendees’ ability to have meaningful discussions with the law firms’ representatives. “In some cases,” Alex explains, “the virtual events allow for even higher-quality conversations than students could have with an in-person event where they’re in a loud, busy physical space.”
And as pleased as the Legal Cheek team is to see attendance at its smaller, topic-specific events jump from 100 to 500, Alex notes that the company’s large-scale virtual fairs have seen even greater growth.
The biggest career fair we ever held onsite drew 250 students–a number that thrilled us, by the way. The time and expense they required from both students and law firms limited how big these in-person events could get. But since we started running these as virtual career fairs on RingCentral Events, we now regularly bring in 5,000 students, a 20-fold increase.
Alex Aldridge
Founder and Publisher
Legal Cheek also uses the RingCentral Events reporting and analytics capabilities to continually learn from and improve its events. Citing one example, Alex explains that “At our career fairs, we have our law firm partners using different-sized booths at the expo. It’s very helpful for us to use the analytics to see how the sizes of these booths influence how well-attended they are. We can then use that data to encourage firms to take on larger expo booths at our future events.”
Exploring even more RingCentral Events capabilities
Alex points out that his team has enjoyed such success using RingCentral Events that he now plans to explore some of the platform’s functionality that Legal Cheek has not yet incorporated into its event processes.
“I find the hybrid-event capabilities intriguing,” he says. “We still run some in-person events, and we might want to supplement and enrich those with online content. I’m interested in experimenting with the hybrid features in RingCentral Events.”
Alex also explains that one of his team’s main goals is to maximize turnout among students who register for an event. With RingCentral Events, he explains, he sees functionality that could help.
About 70% of students who sign up for our events actually attend, which we believe is a strong number, especially considering all of our events are free. But I can also see that with tools like the Magic Link in RingCentral Events–which makes it much easier for attendees to access our events–we can get those turnout rates even higher.
Alex Aldridge
Founder and Publisher
Legal Cheek’s closing argument for RingCentral Events
Alex and his team feel vindicated in their 2020 decision to implement RingCentral Events, and he cites a couple of key reasons.
First, he notes, is the RingCentral team. “From the beginning, we had strong support when we needed it from RingCentral. That helped us make a large pivot in our business much smoother than it might have been if we didn’t have quick answers to our questions.”
A second reason, Alex explains, has been the continued improvement and innovations to the platform.
The word ‘innovation’ gets thrown around a lot, and usually it’s an overstatement. But as someone using this platform for years now, I can tell you RingCentral Events earns that label. This is a truly innovative solution that has directly helped my business grow.
Alex Aldridge
Founder and Publisher