Lawyers and marketing: Slow to learn and quick to forget?

It has been a tough year for law firms with increased competition, a continuing state of economic uncertainty and the pressures of more demanding client expectations. In such an environment, firms should be making the most of the many marketing opportunities now available to the legal profession but, as Nick Jarrett-Kerr of Edge International argues, it remains an area much underrated and abused.

It is sometimes hard to remember that it is less than 20 years since the Law Society relaxed its restrictive rules on marketing and advertising for solicitors in the UK - and less than that in much of Europe. In the two decades or so since the UK relaxations, however, the legal profession in the UK has been both slow to learn the best principles of marketing and quick to forget any sales and marketing techniques introduced to them. Indeed, for many lawyers, marketing and sales, in any organised sense, has long been denigrated as a sub-professional activity, the necessity of engaging in which has been at best grudgingly and unenthusiastically tolerated and at worst, actively resisted and ignored. At the same time, limited respect has been accorded to marketing professionals in law firms, who have been treated as low down in the hierarchical pecking order. In fact, little effort has been made, historically, to integrate marketing strategies and systems into the fabric of the firm or to recruit top professionals with board-level status.

Why lawyers get stuck in the mud

There are three main reasons why lawyers find it difficult to change lifetime habits when it comes to winning new clients:

1. “Why change? The old ways are best.”

For decades, even centuries, lawyers have been able to restrict their marketing strategies and activities to previously successful formulae, unconsciously applied. Successful businesses were built up on the back of the firm’s goodwill and a database of existing clients developed slowly over many years by dint of instinctive marketing, opportunistic activities and haphazard relationship building. In the past, and (for some lucky firms) even now, there has been little need to do anything different, despite the fast-moving and competitive age in which the legal industry now finds itself.

2. “I’m a lawyer, not a salesman.”

The behavioural patterns endemic in most law firms conflict with a methodical marketing ethos. These behaviours result from both the technical attributes and traits that characterise the good lawyer and from the chargeable-hours culture, which has developed in law firms in recent years.

After all, most lawyers chose the profession to practise law, and taking on a piece of legal work is what they find most interesting. By virtue of both training and inclination, lawyers can be or become introspective and focused on precedent. For those who developed their client bases in the dim and distant past, there can sometimes seem to be little incentive to go out and “do some marketing”. What is more, the cerebral and analytical traits expected of lawyers can militate against taking an entrepreneurial and wider view of life. In short, lawyers are among the worst in the business world at picking up the phone and making a cold call, or in following up an identified prospect.

Furthermore, if lawyers are rewarded and valued mainly for client work and profitability, the pressure is inexorably applied to the achievement of short-term, chargeable targets and objectives, rather than long-term, non-chargeable, business-development activities.

3. “What can I market that’s different?”

There is a third reason for the lawyer’s difficulty in embracing the principles of sound marketing. Successful marketing depends, at least in part, on being able to demonstrate that the services on offer are sufficiently attractive to dislodge the competition. The problem is that the services of one law firm, or indeed an individual lawyer, are relatively difficult to differentiate from the services of another. What makes one firm different from another (the overworked concept of “competitive differentiation”) is frequently rather intangible and depends entirely on the ability of law firms to meet the specific needs of their clients better, faster, more efficiently and cost effectively than the opposition. At the end of the day, it is easy to say, as some do, that it all comes down to the quality of people allied to the quality of client relationships; it is a more difficult proposition in practice where all leading law firms can appear broadly similar to the outside world.

In the face of these natural barriers, it is perhaps unsurprising, with the benefit of hindsight, that many law firms have decided to make greater strategic investments in their marketing departments, with the idea of focusing their lawyers on the legal work, which they clearly like and are best at. Such investments may have helped, but the temptation can be for marketing departments (aided perhaps by the inertia, obstinacy and general obstruction of law-firm partners) to become self-fulfilling islands of independent, frenetic operations providing hosts of expensive marketing activities from corporate entertainment, brochures and newsletters, to seminars, sponsorship and advertising. The introduction of sophisticated marketing departments has also provided a cop-out, allowing lawyers to abrogate to the specialists their general responsibilities to manage their own careers and to build their own client relationships.

The way forward – a quartet of best-practice initiatives

Most law firms will fail to reach their true potential unless they embrace a clear and organised marketing strategy and process.

Anchoring marketing best practice in a law firm has a number of elements. Clearly, marketing needs to take its proper strategic place on the management agenda, with marketing embedded in every aspect of the lawyer’s life and training – at appraisals, in partner-reward systems, in the recruitment process, and in training and development programmes. Equally, the managing partner must ensure that the marketing department (if there is one), and its staff, are fully integrated into the strategy and operation of the firm, and that the department supports and is aligned to the needs of the lawyers. Ultimately, however, every lawyer has a responsibility to develop his or her own career and, either individually or by proper teamwork, to build a client base. For the law firm to achieve real results, there are four particular areas where concerted effort should be made:

The managing partner should make every effort to ensure that an environment is created in which it is safe for partners and teams to engage in marketing activities without being criticised or undermined;
A client-facing culture needs to be engendered where the long-term business of building a better client base is regarded as part of the day job of every partner and not a voluntary extra-curricular activity;
Law firms should expend effort in developing their corporate curriculum vitae – their track record of experience;
Lawyers must be encouraged to build relationships with clients, prospective clients and other contacts.

1. Creating a safe environment

It is easy to find positive examples of successful marketing approaches but success can never be guaranteed. What happens, for instance, if a firm’s investment in a new department fails? What happens to marketing initiatives if the participants feel fearful and apprehensive about possible recriminations and attacks from the partnership when results start to prove disappointing? What is important here is for the managing partner to take steps to ensure that an environment is created where it is safe for partners to invest in their futures and, within reason, to take a few risks.

In the first place, there needs to be a deal struck on the amount of time each partner or some partners are going to divert from chargeable work to non-chargeable activities – a trade-off between profits in the short term and longer-term health.

This, in turn, needs a level of buy-in by the partnership and the departments – buy-in at a very basic level through partnership awareness of marketing plans and the short-term effect of those plans on chargeable hours. Second, marketing needs to be recognised as a valid and relevant activity. It needs to be seen as one of the critical areas of performance for every partner where his or her effort, contribution and successes, can be assessed, reviewed and rewarded through the firm’s appraisals and partner-remuneration system. Third, and perhaps most difficult of all, the values of the partnership as a collegial and mutually supportive organisation need to be strengthened and reinforced.

2. Building a marketing and sales culture in your firm

Even for firms with a strong tradition of marketing, there is a tendency, by a variety of marketing activities, to attempt to sell established service offerings to a grateful public. A better approach is to concentrate first on what the clients need, and to create a service offering and a marketing plan tailored to those needs. Whatever the approach, the difficult trick is to persuade lawyers to move out of the comfort zone of today’s chargeable hours and to acquire the habit of devoting some of their time to building their future. One example of attempts to achieve such a culture is ASB Law, a recent amalgamation of three south-east law firms, now making steady progress up the UK top-100 law firms. On merger, more than two years ago, an analysis showed that the merged firm was under-punching in the marketplace, had no sales culture, dysfunctional marketing activity and, as a result, was failing to develop clients.

As chief executive Christopher Honeyman Brown said: “We needed to do a number of things to realise the potential of the firm: change the firm’s operating environment, increase revenues and manage the costs and balance sheet better. I wanted to take the emphasis away from traditional business development and concentrate people’s minds on sales – to existing clients through our recurring relationships and to new clients. All partners and associates have now experienced a sales-development programme that gives them a real understanding of the key factors in making successful sales approaches. We have stepped-up our client-relationship management with an emphasis on understanding the client’s affairs, the issues they face and the solutions they seek. We have packaged and presented our traditional legal services into products that are better attuned to clients’ needs and we make sure that all our clients know all that we can do. We have substantially increased the awareness of our friends and contacts in the marketplace – those who refer work to us - of what we can do and how we go about doing it. Now there is a real sense of achievement every time a new piece of work is won and we celebrate that success, particularly emphasising the team that was responsible and reinforcing cross teamworking.”

3. Developing your individual and corporate CVs

Every year, there tend to be yet more surveys of key corporations to try to find out both what they think of their law firms, and what they want and need from their lawyers. Most of these confirm that reputation and industry expertise are key law-firm selection criteria. Last year’s Nisus study of FTSE100 companies’ perceptions of the UK legal profession showed, for instance, that the top three factors that are important in choosing a law firm were: “Understanding our legal requirements in a commercial context”, “track record and experience” and “personal chemistry”.

Law firms need to build up a résumé that demonstrates all these attributes to prospective clients. One firm that has methodically pursued this approach is my old firm, Bevan Ashford, particularly in the projects department. Projects work started at Bevan Ashford in the mid 90s, primarily focused on private-finance-initiative work for the existing client base of NHS Hospital Trusts. Having built up an expertise, a methodical process was employed to identify other prospective client sectors outside health (in both public and private sector) where the firm’s track record and understanding of the interface between public and private sectors would be of benefit.

A focused and very successful effort was made in a number of areas, including education and defence, to build a reputation, as well as both technical skills and industry-sector knowledge. Steve Hughes, head of the projects team, said: “This approach needed the full backing of the firm during the investment phase, with huge amounts of time spent in research, skills building and attending beauty parades. Many prospective clients were targeted not because of the profits they would immediately bring, but by virtue of the depth the assignment would add to our corporate CV.”

Hughes’s department at Bevan Ashford now boasts 25 lawyers, an equal mix of work between public and private sector, and a growing practice overseas.

4. Building strong relationships

The old sales adage – people buy people first – is still valid. All the survey findings point to the importance of a close working relationship, particularly the ability to work well with the client and the client’s team, responsiveness and the understanding and interpretation of the client’s needs in a commercial context.

Such relationship building comes naturally to some, but requires dedication and a massive investment of time outside working hours. Paul Cooper of Osborne Clarke, for example, has been living this philosophy for more than twenty years in Bristol. Everybody in the Bristol financial community knows Cooper, and Cooper knows them. He also knows a substantial part of the local business community. Many of his clients have become long-standing personal friends and this has enabled Cooper to achieve not only close working relationships, but also the status of trusted adviser.

Cooper’s philosophy goes to the heart of the solicitor-client connection: “It is essential to form relationships. Then people trust you,” he says. “So far as clients are concerned, you then get their work as a matter of course. If the relationship is with an intermediary he will put you on his recommended list. It may seem obvious, but you can’t win work if you are not asked to do it in the first place. The easiest way to do that is to get your mates to look after you because they know that you look after them.”

The establishment of close relationships will follow the client contact from company to company. Julia Holden, head of insurance and personal injury at Putsman.wlc, has exploited her contacts and relationships to the full in an insurance industry noted, among other things, for industry consolidation and employee churn. Over a period of little more than ten years, Putsman.wlc has managed to build up an insurance company client base of more than 40 insurance companies – and this within a firm that is not in the UK top-100 and did not start the process with a reputation as an insurance-law heavyweight. Holden said: “Over the years, I have tried to get really close to my clients, with frequent visits and by emphasising that nothing is too much trouble for me, if it will help them. As and when client contacts have moved on to other insurance companies, I have kept in touch with them with visits, newsflashes, and seminars, and this has almost invariably led to opportunities to do work or pitch for work. In fact, I have found that, by keeping in touch, doors seem to have opened up for me, without me having to push them open.”

Best practice in law-firm marketing does not need huge investments in expensive brochures, websites and marketing tools, or the lifting of regulatory controls. Equally, many firms can prosper without a large and well-manned marketing department. The main lesson for the profession in Europe is that the best way to achieve spectacular results in marketing is by empowering, encouraging and supporting people. It just happens that the same is true of every area in a law firm, from quality, client care and people management, to technology and financial performance.

Nick Jarrett-Kerr is a consultant at Edge International. He can be contacted at jarrett-kerr@edge.ai.