Here's how to succeed in legal practice

Start by really knowing your market

We regularly encounter two fundamental problems:

1. Many Law Firms develop marketing strategies but don’t align them to their HR or IT Strategy in order to develop the required capabilities
2. Many Law Firms make the mistake of allowing marketing initiatives to be driven by the requirements of small groups of individuals

Here’s how to allocate your finite resources to increase your chances of success in legal practice – being truly driven by a client focus.

Build you Importance/Performance Matrix

There will be services you provide, things that you do, that clients will view in one of three ways in the decision to brief you compared to your competitors. The 'importance to clients' may be:

1. those things that you must do for you 'win the business'
2. things they expect you to do to 'qualify' for inclusion in a shortlist of firms
3. of less importance, not considered necessary

In our experience, many firms misunderstand the three categories. When we have researched these on behalf of firms their ‘hospitality box’ at the local sports ground was ‘nice to have’ but fell into the third category above while demonstrating ‘client value’ was highly regarded and in the top category.

Well, so far, so obvious.

What becomes really interesting, and not so well known, is your 'performance against competing firms'. This may be viewed by clients in one of three ways in which you are:

1. better than competitors
2. the same as competitors
3. worse than competitors

From this understanding, one can build an importance/performance matrix of your services for your firm, see figure 1 below.

Figure 1. Importance-performance matrix showing where there is an 'excess' less needs to be done, whereas urgent action is needed if performance is worse than competitors in an 'order winning', high importance area.

Once you know what your clients think, you can build a map to improve the management decision-making (and business planning) that drives business improvement initiatives, see Figure 2.

Figure 2. Importance-performance matrix showing one firm's situation across eight key service areas

In this example, the firm is viewed as 'technically' brilliant yet it is failing to win as much as they could – client recommendations may not be all they should. Sponsorship is an 'excess' and less needs to be done, whereas urgent action is needed in 'client care' and 'value' performance of the firm; these are worse than competitors in two crucial 'order winning', high importance areas. Also, the case management system needs to improve – but perhaps only after the other two areas have been properly addressed.

You will know what fees you do make from which services. But do you know what fees you miss? Where should you invest to give the best return? If you want to build a matrix for your firm to help inform your management decision-making – contact your hub today.