How to Rapidly Grow Your Profits: Think Cross-Functional Excellence

Yes, you have heard it countless times before – at least I hope – but how many of you are working on developing the most radical, mind-boggling, cross-functional programme that your firm has ever seen? Arguably, right now, this issue is more pressing than anything else. You can enshrine it in the credo: It is far better to market to existing clients than to chase your sorry tail looking for new – “OMG not another lawyer trying to sell me” – clients.

Cross-functional excellence has the power to literally explode your client base and start delivering supreme, bottom-line growth. No BS.

One easy exercise to consider, whether your cohort of clients is (largely) private or corporate (or some other shade in between), is to enquire internally how many service lines they have bought since they first instructed the firm. My guess is that the majority will be on the bottom rung: one service line or at best two. You should be aiming with the lifetime client to assess their complete needs and to sell every conceivable line that you can.

This is not some grand, take over the world plan, but rather you should see it as acting (completely) in the client’s best interests. Let’s face apart from losing out commercially, do you really want to see the client go off and instruct someone else when they could just have easily instructed your firm who would have done just as good a job or, more likely, a better job than your competitor, given, at the very least, your intimate knowledge of the client’s affairs.

There are many reasons why cross-functional excellence is not made of supreme importance but, chief amongst those, is the breaking down of barriers that go towards the lack of trust.

You have heard about the Ultimate Question framed by Fred Reichheld: “Would you recommend the firm to a friend?” but that could just as easily be couched in terms: “Would you recommend this client to one of your colleagues?”

In my experience the answer to this question is seldom straightforward, but the reality is that most lawyers never actually believe that even their most illustrious colleagues will do as good a job as them. If anything, the majority are forced into doing something that they do not truly believe to be the right thing. Now, of course, there are exceptions to the rule but things don’t happen as often as you think.

The trust issue, internally, can be broken down into a number of layers:

• Layer 1: I DON’T KNOW THE PERSON;
• Layer 2: I KNOW THE PERSON BUT I HAVE HEARD THAT THEY CAN BE AWKWARD TO DEAL WITH;
• Layer 3: I ASKED MY COLLEAGUE TO DEAL WITH THE JOB BUT UNBEKNOWN TO ME THEY WERE TOO BUSY AND REFERRED IT TO SOMEONE WHO I WOULD NEVER HAVE REFERRED THE JOB TO IN A MILLION YEARS; and
• Layer 4: I WOULDN’T TRUST THEM TO DO THE JOB: THEY SCREWED UP THE LAST TIME I GAVE THEM A NEW JOB/CLIENT.

There is no point assembling everyone from all the relevant departments and delivering a message from on high that henceforth everyone needs to give greater attention to cross-selling, if the trust issue is not first of all addressed. This brings into relief the point of yesterday’s post on straight talk. You need to get past the hurdle of going to speak to someone who may take a very dim view of a more junior fee earner impliedLY criticising their work. You will need to handle the situation very carefully and with a heightened sense of doing the right think.

But if you can crack the trust issue then you will move well beyond the talkers (for the sake of it) to the doers. And more than that if everyone plays by the same rules then you will start to see many more introductions made between departments and a much more collegiate feel to the firm.

There will no longer be the slip of the tongue comments referring to this client as “my client” and each client will be viewed in the round.

The firm will want to undertake some filtration process so that not every client is considered suitable to grow with the firm or to be cross-sold. You may want to ditch some clients, the alternative being that they will be OK for transaction work but they are unlikely to have the potential to grow in the long term.  There are no absolutes here but statistically it stands to reason that the more service lines that the client buys from you, the more unlikely it is that they will go elsewhere.

As an aside it would be a good idea to have some minimum service standards so that whichever part of the firm is dealing with the client, they will see no difference in how they are treated.

If you do succeed in breaking down the trust issue – no mean task – then agree a programme that involves:

• a sharing of information on each client relationship;
• how the introduction from one fee earner will be made to the next;
• how you will organise yourselves internally – will you have regular meetings?
• are you comfortable with the scope of the retainer? You don’t want to get into a nasty, drag down dispute where the client sues you for not giving general advice and you then seek to rely on the scope of your retainer;
• Are you going to reward staff if they do make a cross-functional sale?
• Are you content that you have the skills to service the client’s professional needs (think about financial advice) or do you need to collaborate with a competitor?
• Will you offer the client a new fees arrangement if they do decide to put all their business with the firm? It would be as well to consider this from the off before you start trying to up sell.

The critical issue of cross-functional excellence is that you are trying to make your life easier. Why keep banging your head against a brick wall when it comes to identifying new work when it potentially lies at your feet? If you haven’t noticed this is the way that the larger firms continue to structure their business.

Now is time to seize the moment. See the future with less competition but with more of your current work under one roof.

Straight Talk your Way to Change (of some sort)

Far too much time in professional practice is spent looking at fees, billable hours and work in progress. I am not sure now if it was Peter Drucker who coined the immortal expression “What can be measured can be managed” but that is entirely apposite to law firms.

But when it comes to soft systems – people principally (and to a lesser extent information systems) – most partners work on the basis of management by abdication. In addition, and despite the risk issues, they feel they can afford to keep things at arms length on the basis that leaving someone to sink or swim is a way of providing a benchmark of success but too often it only serves to demotivate or demoralise.

For me the sine qua non of professional practice both within and outwith is … trust – trust in your people. Charlie Green and David Maister have written extensively on this fundamental area.

But one issue that I think could be addressed now is the issue of straight talk. This is dealt with in Stephen M R Covey’s, Speed of Trust under the 1st behaviour of the second Wave of Trust. As he says:

“”Talk straight” is honesty in action. It is based on the principles of integrity, honesty, and straightforwardness.”

Of course straight talk can be taken too far and is sometimes used as mask for cruelty, rudeness or a lack of thoughtfulness. But a lot of the issues that remain to be dealt with in law firms – under-performance of partners, profitability and the right people doing the right work – is just not being addressed as quickly or as meaningfully as it might otherwise be. In a sense this is perfectly understandable given the fragility of the economy; and no doubt those in charge will not want to rock the boat, particularly if in doing so there might be a domino effect.

You can picture it now: the partner who is challenged on his or her department’s profitability who in a fit of pique threatens to leave the firm and take their clients and/or their team with them.

But we all know that this is storing up problems for the future and things will be even worse if under-performance or a poor attitude has been tolerated in the tough times.

Most of the time the reason why people don’t like addressing issues in a straightforward manner is for fear of the consequences, and no doubt that means weighing up the pros and the cons. However, the need to develop this area, if a firm is going to embrace and progress change, should be considered a priority.

Whilst of course there is no easy answer to this conundrum, perhaps one way to address it is to make it clear that the atmosphere of suspicion, mis-trust and a ‘them’ and ‘us’ culture has to change if the firm is to grow sustainably.

Consideration could be given to saying that each party will be able to talk in confidence and invite constructive feedback on the nature and tone of what is being said. Now I accept that this sounds weak but like all soft issues there are no cut and dried solutions but rather a need to change the status quo gradually, thoughtfully and with tact. It is not sufficient to skirt round the issues and spin should be banned. But don’t be under any illusion when someone is tackled on an area which they know exists but has been overtly avoided for such a long time it will usually result in an extreme reaction. You have been warned. You also need to keep the conversation from straying into your or their autobiography, meaning that a lot of the old wounds are likely to be reopened.

Perhaps one way to address this is also to tie in the mode of communication. Too much of what we say, the non-verbal communication, has been completely lost with the over reliance on emails. Even telephone calls seem to be a rare occurrence. And it is certainly as well not to make a big issue of it. “Can we meet up for a chat” or more threatening still “We need to have a chat” is hardly likely to put the person at ease and produce the best outcome. Lawyers being lawyers will simply be primed for the worst.

In the long run if this area can be tackled and significant improvement made it will transform a culture that may previously have resisted change to one that encourages it.

Professional practice, perhaps because of the label, may fall back on the notion of “If it ain’t broke, why fix it” but we all know that that is simply wrong. The profession needs to modernise and whilst technology, outsourcing, efficiencies and a focus on value based billing are all important they will count for nothing if: (a) you cannot have an open conversation with your people about the need for change; (b) you are not trusted and your word is meaningless, particularly around job security; and (c) change will be harder to bring about or bring about in the time scale that you would like to see.

Next time you are tempted to avoid a subject area stop yourself and ask the question: “What is the worst thing that could happen?” Yes your mind might move to a doomsday scenario but the contra position has to be that those on the other side will not be so secure as you think and will or at least should recognise that without change the firm will simply not grow and that means going backwards. How quickly will not be determined just by the economy but more so by the emergence of other brands or business models coming into the market.

On a final point perhaps one of the reasons why straight talk is not part of the culture of legal practice is because of the lack of leadership. Can you imagine any of the great leaders being as indecisive as is often the case? My own experience is that by and large the most accomplished leaders that I worked under were the ones that I respected most for having the ability not to sugar coat, say it like it was and be clear in their point of view without being rude or nasty. I may not have liked what they had to say but I would much rather have heard it from them than some half-baked message being delivered from on high.

5 Common Mistakes Law Firms Make with Marketing

Many law firms talk endlessly about marketing as if it were the Holy Grail of business development, but as I said in my previous post, marketing is simply a substitute for a uremarkable product/service.

If law firms really want to get good at this, then they need to be much more thoughtful about the process.

Here is my Top 5 Mistakes to avoid:

1. Stop talking and start doing

The bumbling decision-making process you have set up nearly always conspires against you. Lawyers love to debate the semantics. In my world, he who hesitates has lost.

For some reason law firms think that what they are embarking on is novel, special or different to their competitors when in reality there are very few initiatives that have not been done before. You need to accept that the hardest part of any marketing exercise is to simply make things happen.

Start doing more stuff.

2. No Consistency

It doesn’t matter what department you work in, there is no consistency and it feels like the firm is lurching from one thing to another, without a clue where they are headed. A piece of advertorial here, a press release here, a newsletter there and another bit of sponsorship that is forced upon you by someone who really should know better than to ring up on the hoof and tell you that everyone else is doing it, so therefore you must be doing it. Nonsense.

Marketing is intrinsic to a firm’s success and priority number 1 right now is superpleasing your existing and loyal clients rather than going on a hunt for newbies all the time. How many firms I wonder have undertaken a systematic exercise in making sure they know who their best clients are, working out a remarkable way of keeping them secure and then looking back at the orphans – those clients who have been allowed to sit on a database with no contact – to see how many of those might still be willing to instruct the firm?

One of the issues for lawyers, unlike, say, the financial services sector, is that they seem to think that once the file is closed, so is the possibility of the client being marketed to. Don’t adopt this mindset. Assume all clients are lifetime clients.

3. No Marketing or Business Development Plan

If you have one, how many times a year do you review it. Once, twice or possibly once a week? Umm.

Any plan is there to assist you and not to tick a box for compliance reasons. It is a living, breathing document and is there to guide, inform and importantly to make sure you are spending time on the right things.

As a very simply exercise, I would looked at the Pareto principle – the 80/20 rule – and make sure that your efforts are initially focused on the 20% and cross-selling as many of my firm’s service lines as possible.

Business plans previously may have been forced on people from above but one tip, I would try to ensure going forward that everyone is bought into your proposal. Ideally they should have the ability to make suggestions or even rewrite it. In that way you are far more likely to find that people are committed to making things work.

4. Stop treating marketing as an afterthought

Firms don’t treat business development and marketing seriously enough. No matter what, billing and recording time takes priority. It doesn’t matter how much priority it is supposedly given with novel charging codes, when the chips are down marketing always plays second and sometimes third fiddle. But this is ludicrous. If the fee earners haven’t got time to do it, then who is supposed to do it? And this impacts on the consistency point. Stop ~ Start ~ Stop ~ Start.

5. No measurement

Any small business, which is ostensibly what most law firms are, would want to know the ROI for a media campaign etc. but law firms seem content to work on the smoke and mirrors principle. Sometimes it comes down to the fact that as the firm has always done something they should carry on with it.

But the reality is that if you were going to spend, say, £10,000 on a new website or £10,000 on paid advertising wouldn’t you want to know how much you had got in return?

If you were to employ a direct sales person, then you would give them a target and expect them to meet it. Presumably you would have worked out how much profit you would have made.

This analogy is no different to any marketing effort even if some areas are harder to measure than others.

If all this seems too much then don’t be surprised if the results are equally unrewarding.

I simply don’t believe that happenstance rules and firms don’t want to work systematically and profitably on their marketing efforts. But the truth of it is that unless you are consistent and persistent with your efforts then you will fail.

Next time you hold a meeting make sure you don’t let any of these overwhelm the process and you work on driving the results to the bottom line.

The future for law firms Is … [..in Your gift]?

Hardly a day goes by without the latest piece of news forecasting the demise of the profession. Well, may be it’s not quite that cataclysmic, but there isn’t a whole bunch of good news out there.

But, in a sense, this is also symptomatic of the legal profession and, indeed, the way a lot of businesses are run – they are reactive to the things around them.

Look at Nokia, once a model of innovation, now effectively admitting that the development of their operating system has failed before it even got going, and having to get into bed with Microsoft to inject life into the brand.

Up to now firms have been able to rely upon the lack of competition as a reason not to innovate or change their business model. But with the opening up of the market and the technological changes that are taking place, it won’t be long before even the most loyal clients will start to wonder if they are getting best value or the process can’t be improved. You only have to look at the way our shopping habits have changed over the last 30 years to realise that clients will almost always look to buy on price or efficiency, even though it is debatable whether they have got best value. Of course, we all like to talk about the “customer experience” but the reality is that most clients will not pay for it.

Let’s face it if you were starting up a legal practice right now would you select the same people, business model and pricing options? No, then why are you allowing your firm to operate in this way without considering radical change?

In reality the only way that firms can control the future is by inventing it. But how many, right now, are looking at their clients in a different way and looking to provide a service that is so remarkable so as to nullify or ameliorate the likelihood of their market being stolen by a competitor?

Next time you have a meeting, try to put yourself in the position of the client and ask the question:

How can we ensure that the client is so WOWed by the experience that they tell all their friends, relatives and acquaintances?

Customer satisfaction means just that: providing more in value than you take in payment. That doesn’t mean offering a cheap service. It means offering a service that is uncompromising and where firms do not live up to their clients’ expectations they stand for something whatever that means.

More time needs to be spent working on the edges, the parts of the firm that differentiate you from the competition. What is the fastest service you can provide? What is the most expensive service you can provide? What is the most accessible form of service?

This is not thinking outside of the box. No, it is a question of working at the very limits of your firm’s current capability.

This time round, the timetable of change ushered in by The Legal Services Act, outsourcing and different business models is sure to catch a lot of firms off guard. There will be many partners right now who have decided to adopt a wait and see approach on the basis that they can reengineer something later on. But when the provider has deeper pockets and more sophisticated systems that will be very difficult. They will innovate at a far quicker rate than most firms can live with.

Your strategy right now should be focused on seeing the future – but the future for your firm and from a client-centric perspective. Don’t let others dictate what you do. You must control your destiny. It will be those firms that are able to drive through the fastest change that are likely to stay the course and see the biggest wins. For the rest they may just find that by the time they have worked out what is going on it is too late to make the changes sufficient to keep the practice alive.

How to cut your legal marketing budget to Zero

For legal practice, marketing, business development or sales is a modern invention – the labels at least.

We all know that firms and select partners were previously doing a lot of things mentioned in my previous posts and upon which many books have been written. First among these is having regular and frequent contact with their clients. And after that was the ability to deal with each client as a human being and not just as another ‘billable matter” or a means to get the chargeable time up (I always thought that expressing things in this way was incredibly dehumanising).

But the fact is that any product or service that is remarkable will need next to no marketing: the bush fire of word of mouth will drive sales.

Even the social media platforms that have received such wide acclaim and are free will still require feeding with memorable content and staffing to drive the next stage of the influencing process. Right now there are a lot of people who think that social media is the saviour of the profession as if ‘new’ media means better than ‘old’ marketing. Think again.

Marketing is a tax on law firms that could be eradicated if only firms started to insanely focus on developing and enhancing the experience with their clients. They need to start imaging a world with bigger and more sophisticated brands and clients whose loyalty and custom will be cherished and not taken for granted.

Firms need to stop under delivering on their service and over charging their clients. They need to understand what value looks like and to properly understand their clients’ needs. Of course no one client is the same and what works for a FTSE 100 company/GC may be different to acting for a private client but if you take the time to speak to your client(s) you will quickly understand what they want. Too much of what law firms do is created in a vacuum. It is underpinned by an ego mentality: lawyers know best.

It is easy to deride the idea of WOW service but in reading various case studies about businesses that epitomise this concept (Zappos nearly always coming out on top), I have yet to read anything about a law firm. Why is that? Do you really need to ask? But in all seriousness it must be one of two reasons:

1. They don’t care enough to make it happen; or
2. They are delusional: they think that the service is WOW when in reality it is at best mediocre.

If every person within the practice was focused on being the most of something (a lawyer), providing a service that was the best in the world then given the plethora of law firms it wouldn’t be long before clients started talking about you. After all clients want to feel that they are getting the best and if every time they mentioned legal services your name came up then at the very least new clients would be compelled to check you out.

Next time you sit down to discuss marketing ask yourself what you would do if you were in start up mode and had no money. At the very least you might decide to embark on a programme where you aimed to superplease each and every client, embarked on a proactive programme for generating word of mouth referrals and reached out to your clients for feedback.

The biggest competitive threat for lawyers

Is not the Legal Services Act or Tesco law.

It is the inability to let go.

There are innumerable areas that remain frozen in aspic but perhaps the one that warrants special mention is the billable hour.

From those entering the profession to equity partners, this is practically the only option that has been offered up. I don’t recall ever one single partner saying to me:

“Why don’t you ask the client what they think the job is worth?”

And the reason?

It must be blindingly obvious: The client would come up with a figure that was likely to be less than that which the lawyer would charge or, more contentious, could get away with.

I can hear some of you muttering: “How on earth would the client know?” But that misses the point.

You should know, given the statistically available information, how much each case is going to cost within a range of +/- 5%. If you don’t then it is simply because you haven’t bothered to collate the available information.

Take your average piece of litigation – say a defended debt recovery case which is allocated to the multi-track.

Have you collected the costs information for the last 50 cases and analysed them?

No.

Why not?

I’ll tell you.

Because:

(a) it is too much like hard work;

(b) it would give you information that might not be that helpful to convincing the client to instruct you on a predictable scale (“Are you having a laugh? How much!”);

and (c) it might bring about a more compelling argument to proceed with a fixed fee model.

Lawyers are apt to consider the cost/benefit of each case but not enough. And certainly if you were armed with information that was correlative to your case, wouldn’t it be helpful rather than guessing each time, even allowing for detailed costs estimates that some firms insist on (and good on them).

For me the hourly billing model is out-dated, unhelpful to growing a practice and not meaningful, particularly given the way in which time is written off or discounts given on bills. I appreciate that it is a helpful management tool but that is only because law firms have not spent enough time working out a better one.

For those firms that refuse to change then it will only be a matter of time before others show how it is done.

Cleaning your teeth …

.. is a daily exercise and a matter of necessity.

I wonder how many people would bother if they had self-cleaning teeth which were immune from decay? I suspect very few. They wouldn’t see the need or have the desire.

But this is exactly how legal marketing feels.

We all know we need to do it or do it much better but we don’t because the work keeps rolling through the door. But if you haven’t noticed, it is becoming harder and harder to make money and with the voluminous regulation, the impact of the Legal Services Act and technological change driving increased efficiency, lawyers need to adopt a different mindset. It is no less than a paradigm shift.

As I have maintained for a long time, law firms and lawyers are free to choose. Free to choose their clients. Free to choose the type of work they do. And free to choose what they don’t do.

But much like the teeth that don’t need to be cleaned until they start dropping out (as teeth always do), they won’t do anything fundamentally different.

If you want to make a difference start with the end in mind. There are infinite options waiting out there for you. You need to open the door or lift the curtain.

Dream big. And the dream has to be something that keeps you awake at night. It has to be inspired. If it means luke warn or “oh hum” then that won’t cut it.

You have got to want it like nothing else before. This is intentional dreaming. Not wishful thinking.

See your practice.

See your clients.

See your lifestyle.

See the profit.

See the workplace (go check out Zappos).

But don’t just sit there and expect things to happen or something to fall in your lap. It won’t. Now is the time to unleash that entrepreneurial perspective. Stop making excuses and blaming others. Your practice is a reflection of you and your personality. The firm is a reflection of the partners and the people within it. Your clients are a reflection of the whole thing.

If all this sounds like too much hard work or someone else’s job then your career in law will be short lived or you will live out a miserable existence. At the moment you can only see the competition in a narrow compass and you gauge things accordingly. And if that is your horizon then you are living in the past and not even living in the moment. The future? Well that is in your gift.

Now is the time to start building your daily marketing habits just like you clean your teeth.

Don’t think that clients will continue to beat a path to your door. Reach out. Be remarkable and fall in love with your work again.

Law Firms: Everything is MARKETING

My thoughts:

•  the look and feel of reception (do you have a flower budget that allows you to buy fresh flowers every week? What about sweets?)
• the way that everyone answers the telephone (for God’s sake smile a bit more)
• the cleanliness of the toilets (who inspects theirs every hour?)
• your website (if you must have one then make sure that you have up to date material. So many firms have out of date and tired looking material. It just looks like you have forgotten you have one)
• your brochure (if you must have printed material make sure you read it once in a while)
• the typeface used on letters, emails and paid advertising (I deplore some of the useless typefaces unless you are selling magnifying glasses at the same time. What’s wrong with Times New Roman or Palatino or Garamond? And remember, despite all that legal training, less is more. You are not paid for the number of letters you can cram on a page)
• the signage for parking and lifts
• the way people dress (I still remember in the 1980′s going to see IBM and being super impressed with their dress code. I am not asking for clones but smart should mean smart. But please treat people like adults and don’t keep sending round emails to remind people. Talk to them and be grown up about it. Dress down days don’t work. If you are going to dispense with formal attire, will your clients understand why you have chosen to go down this route? For me it feels gimmicky)
• your bill (this has to be the worst example of marketing: “Professional services for the period [date] to [date]” with the scantiest of narrative. Think about the message very, very carefully)
• how you don’t deal with complaints (saying sorry at the first opportunity is marketing)
• making sure that all your staff live and breathe your values so that when speaking to people outside of the firm they WOW them and not bad mouth the firm (BTW check out your values: are they as good as “Radically Thrilling”, Steve Jobs?)
• how people behave at networking events
• the cars that partners drive (too many BMWs may not be the impression that you want to convey but then again may be it is)
• how much time you spend in the local community
• your sponsorship activities
• your CSR initiatives
• your suppliers
• how you pay your bills
• and the clients that you act for (if you must say you act for a certain client what message does that send out?)

The other key point that needs to be addressed is that very often those in marketing feel that they are the only ones who know anything about the subject but I wonder how many of them have actually sat in on a client meeting and I am not talking about Blue Chip companies where there is a relationship partner but the normal private client. How many of them have asked those clients what they like about the firm and what they don’t like about the firm? This is the plainest example of MBWA (Managing by Wandering About). It is about getting under the skin of the problem. But it cuts both ways. How many times have the lawyers or their support staff been invited to a marketing meeting?

This is not some random exercise that is said for the sake of it but so that each can understand the other’s point of view, be more empathetic and ultimately provide a better service to the client.

If everyone was told that they were in marketing just think what  a massive difference that could make to the firm.

Marketing is the most important aspect of professional services based as it is on building trust with the client. It is not just about fancy brochures or flashy websites it is much more about the people to people connection or the experience.

What are your thoughts on marketing in a law firm?

“Ready, Fire, Aim”

I first came across this expression in Tom Peters’ book, The Little Big Things. It is attributed to Ross Perot.

I return to it again because it encapsulates everything that legal practice doesn’t do.

No, their modus operandi involves an incessant need to debate every issue, canvass opinion, have endless meetings, prepare boring memo after boring memo and very often still seek more information or make no decision until they can be certain that they have bottomed out all the issues. Even where they do finally make a decision it has taken so long to get there that most people have lost their initial enthusiasm and don’t have the same heightened sense of anticipation. Hardly the most auspicious of starts.

Right now the challenge for law firms is to decide on a strategy that will enable them to stay in the game and give them a clear path towards growing a sustainable practice. As part of that process they will have to consider:

• Do they have the right business model?
• Do they have the right people on the right seats on the bus?
• Have they or do they need to invest substantially in IT or IT outsourcing?
• What are the growth areas where they face less competition from the consumer facing brands?
• How much working capital will they need to fund the business going forward?
• Who is going to drive the business development initiatives?
• Should they be promoting more people but not to partnership?
• Is the client base fundamentally weak and if so how do they strengthen it?
• Should they be considering legal process outsourcing?
• Are the staff properly equipped to drive through change?
• Are there any major threats which may in fact be capable of turning into opportunities e.g. a merger?
• Does social media have the power to reshape or reposition the brand?
• On a more molecular level, how do they get their fee earners to start recording more of their time and recovering more of their unpaid bills?

Frankly the list is endless (WOW, what an opportunity – seriously) and is likely to be no different even for some of the top 50 firms. They certainly don’t have all the answers.

Legal Services Act (“LSA”) or no LSA firms need to stop wondering all the time “What if”. Instead they need to become more action orientated. Of course, it is much easier said than done particularly when you are battling against the prevailing culture which is backward facing or certainly more inclined to tip its hat to the past.

Perhaps firms would be well advised to look to the sporting arena and see how professional athletes train and generally behave.

Can you image Sir Steve Redgrave waiting to see all the time if he had the right kit, that it wasn’t raining, the oars were the latest carbon fibre make or the boat was of a particular model (it would need to be big enough to house his enormous frame)? He probably wouldn’t have got very far in his career, but yet you hear that all the time from law firm partners who let relatively minor things stand in the way of meaningful progress.

If you are someone who has the potential to shape the firm and you are wrestling with the fact that you have too many choices then join the club. Accept that you are in no different position to the majority of law firms.

Your #1 job is to pick a strategic direction and go to work on the business rather than adopting a technician mind-set, burying your head in the sand and just doing the legal work. In other words if you spend all your time working out your strategy you will end up doing nothing or nothing to make a difference. You need to go to work on the execution part, having picked a general direction that hopefully everyone has bought into.

Remember – Ready, Fire [and then] Aim. If you keep aiming then by the time you have zeroed in on a mission critical path it is likely that your competitors will already have jumped you and be a long way down the road.

I am not suggesting that you should be slap-dash or complacent but all I am imploring is that you forshorten the decision-making process and do more stuff. You will need to continually and regularly quantify your efforts as otherwise you might be inclined to give up too early. If you think something it is not working don’t be afraid to change direction or increase resources. In the current market there are no sure bet winners but one thing is for sure the firm that executes most will win. Don’t adopt the mindset of failure. Consider that every adversity carried with it a seed of opportunity.

As my children constantly remind me you have to be in game to stand a chance of winning.

I repeat:

Do you really understand your clients?

“Your Marketing Strategy starts, ends, lives, and dies with your customer. So in the development of your Marketing Strategy, it is absolutely imperative that you forget about your dreams, forget about your visions, forget about your interests, forget about what you want – forget about everything but your customer. When it comes to marketing, what you want is unimportant. It’s what your customer wants that matters.”

Michael Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited

Many a marketing strategy has been crafted with the sole aim of growing a legal practice based on the historical perspective. Firms have looked to past experience and decided that the best way to grow is to separate still further their specialist areas or sectors, refine the offering and market accordingly. In marketing parlance, taking a vertical approach. And, of course, up until the crash that all seemed to be working out very nicely, thank you.

But I am here to tell you that that approach, in and of itself, will no longer work, or certainly past success will no longer be a predictor for (future) growth.

No, the only way to guarantee success is to truly understand your clients’ needs and wants to the point where hopefully you are ahead of the curve in predicting when the buying need will arise.

For the firm that has a mixture of commercial, institutional and charitable clients, the likely programme of understanding might look something like this:

1. Are they an existing client? Yes. If so, how much have you billed in the last 2 years? Is there a trend?
2. Have you been able to cross-sell any of your other services? If not, why not?
3. Have you put in place a SLA? If so, are you delivering on it?
4. Absent a SLA or one that is not very helpful to either side, is it worth creating Heads of Agreement to deal with your service standards, a money back guarantee where you mess up and a overrider so that if the client spends more than a certain amount in a given period you agree to rebate or discount your fees.
5. How many people have been to see the client and spend time with all the key people to properly understand the culture and the future direction of the business?
6. Have you been invited to key strategy or board meetings to offer an opinion? If not is that something the client would find useful?
7. Have you offered the opportunity to your client to do likewise i.e. spend time in the practice and attend any of your meetings?
8. Have you agreed on any joint CSR initiatives? Even if your interests may be slightly different is there any way you can help the client?
9. Have you asked the client to provide regular feedback or complete a regular client satisfaction survey which has teeth? By that I mean if you are not living up to their expectations that you agree to not only fix the problem but you will provide a discount or rebate off of the bill?
10. Are you prepared to move people around so that you get your best people on the work, rather than the people who are going to make the most profit? Who has the final say in this?
11. If applicable have you tried to introduce or  develop new business for the client? Likewise have you asked the client for recommendations and possibly an introduction elsewhere?

This list is for illustrative purposes only (we lawyers always so that …) but the point is that you need to get closer to your clients – much closer – and you need to develop a passion for their business so that you operate as an extension of whichever department you are serving.

The client should not feel worried if you start calling ‘out of the blue’ with your ideas, or to prevent or avoid a potentially brand-damaging incident or to report on something in the market that may have commercial value. Of course, they are not going to welcome a bill for simply doing your job – as they perceive it.

A programme or indeed any programme has to feel real. Lawyers usually start off, like any relationship, with lots of motivation, passion and enthusiasm but almost as soon as they find that they cannot bill or that the work starts to feel repetitive then they switch off and are looking for the next fix. If you know that is in the psyche then consider how you might address it. Perhaps, much like the beautiful game, you need to adopt a rotation system as long, of course, that the client is happy with a series of new faces.

As to the private client sector, the starting point is to start picturing every client as a lifetime client. Yes some will only instruct your firm a few times but they may, on the strength of your service offering, be your best advocates and refer endless new clients to you. The thing is you can never tell. Although it may seem a slightly artificial figure, I would always work on the law of 250. Meaning: clients will normally know of or be associated with at least 250 people and that is the sphere of influence that you are talking about for every single client. Imagine if every client referred just 1o people to you over the course of a year what a difference that could make to your practice.But you have to over-deliver on your service or as David Maister was fond of saying “Superplease”.

It goes without saying that a private client is not going to feel comfortable referring anybody to you if your service was average or expensive. This probably means having agreed service standards with private clients.

Most firms and certainly those with LEXCEL accreditation will have a client charter but rather than just being there for show, offer a guarantee if you fail to deliver.

Don’t be content with a day’s turnaround on returning a telephone call (it doesn’t have to be by you to count) but offer something like a 10 minute turnaround. Now that may look stupid to some but it sure is going to mean something to the client particularly in this day and age where we have to go through an endless series of ridiculous key-pad commands whenever we want to speak to a bank or service provider; and then you may find yourself waiting for 20 minutes. So much for customer service!

The biggest enemy for private client lawyers is not having enough time because they end up taking on too many cases. If that sounds like you then accept that whilst you continue with that old style approach you are going to lose clients or certainly you are not going to give yourself the best opportunity of capturing them as a lifetime client or getting endless referrals.

This for me is a compromise too far. Instead start looking at meaningful delegation; LPO; on-line provision; recruiting more staff; or only dealing with clients who have the potential to grow with the firm. In short you have to be much more disciplined about the way you manage your case load.

And don’t forget that once you have finished a job that is no excuse not to contact the client again. Have a tickle file where you remember to send something to the client, even if it is a small, branded gift or reminder of some issue that might float their boat. You may have to be a bit more organised with your contact file if you have a large number of clients but however you organise things, the point is that in order to generate goodwill with the client and turn the relationship into one where you are considered the trusted advisor then absent regular contact it will not happen.

If you manage to do this consistently and with passion then the rewards will more than outweigh the effort. However, don’t allow a culture of complacency to manifest and if you need to make it happen make sure you have this process included in the appraisal or bonus system. That is bound to focus minds.