4 Essentials to Drive Your Law Firm

With reliable data, better understanding, empathy and an appetite to deliver more value

There has never been a time quite like now, when feeling and showing empathy with clients, understanding their changing expectations and finding new ways of delivering better value to them has been so critical.  Read more below about these 4 essential initiatives:

1. The right strategy, made tangible and shared in context, with coherent plans and visual measures.
2. Reliable data and tools - onboarding, always-on listening, automated capture and enrichment. 
3. The right mindset and skills - Agile, O-shaped, Project Management.
4. Structured, responsive persistence to constantly develop more value in relationships.

KEY CHALLENGES

• Too many firms still struggle to make enough time for contact with enough clients.
  
• Lawyers struggle too often to establish enough meaningful empathy with business clients.
  
• Not a surprise as they often don't have the right, reliable and complete ammunition to work with.
  
• Client contact and relationship data held most firms is unreliable, not trusted and not used.
  
• Most lawyers are fearful of exposing their emotions and don't feel the need/confidence to do it.
  
• Talking about the transaction in hand is the easiest option - and most lawyers will focus time there.
  
• It's difficult to be confident about talking more widely, when background information is not available.
  
• Few lawyers yet feel comfortable exploring use of technology with clients - with many new options to explore.
  
• Lawyers rewarded on billing figures based on time, struggle to commit time to anything else anyway.

WHAT TO DO FROM HERE?

1]  Agree and communicate a coherent strategy and business development objectives for the practice that - at least - the leaders are determined to commit to and drive with persistence for the next 3 years.  Share an understanding of why that matters and the kind of culture you want to see here in 3 years' time. Use visual dashboards to constantly display, share and discuss performance on the key measures adopted to evaluate and drive performance.

We work objectively alongside your leadership team to research, evaluate opportunities and challenges, add new thinking to challenge established perceptions and test plans to bring this together, with the benefit of our experience of lawyers and the wider market for legal services.

2]  Use reliable up-to-date data without the need for lawyers to do anything more than they do now to get it.  Take advantage of automation to capture and enrich data on clients, introducers and prospects as your people work - to populate CRM,  evaluate "always-on" client feedback, prompting pro-active engagement - compiling it all centrally for everyone to see and use, all the time.

We can help you find and implement the right solution for your practice, taking account of your objectives and systems already in place.

3]  Equip your lawyers and others with a different understanding of what a client relationships should feel like, identifying the current gaps, failings and opportunities - where the strongest ammunition comes from the clients themselves.  Provide new skills to support more effective listening and engagement with clients.  Develop a better understanding of project management and what "agile" means in all areas of the business, from management projects to handling the legal work - and the tools (much of it available within Microsoft 365 - from simple to complex) that are available to support that.  Engage clients more to make use their input more on how to develop services that give them more of what they value.

You can tap into our experience of listening to clients to take you through an independent exercise, listening to a selection of your clients to identify opportunities, trends and gaps. Then feed this back to your people as part of your initiatives to develop and embed the culture you want at your practice.

4]  Get pro-active, persistent and structured in managing client relationships with this reliable data (captured automatically) and a very different attitude amongst lawyers with a better understanding of what good client relationships look like.  There is an opportunity to take advantage of the clear imperative now to develop new, innovative, probably more collaborative and tech-supported services that can deliver more value for clients, more cost-effectively for you.

We can help you to define, communicate and implement your marketing strategy with clear shared objectives that lawyers (with the tools and skills made tangible for the first time) can support.  With an effective approach to managing your client relationships and adoption of more digital marketing tools, you can segment both clients and prospects to communicate more meaningfully with them in the background - supporting the up front work of lawyers and others.

TALK TO US NOW

TO FIND OUT MORE about our approach and the tools we use to help you down this path, contact Allan Carton at acarton@cartonconsultants.com to set up a free 60-minute preliminary video or telephone call in confidence, with no obligation. 

Or, you can schedule this discussion here >>