Feature

posted 7 Sep 2005 in Volume 8 Issue 4

Collaboration calls

While marketing has curried favour among law firms in recent years, many marketers still find themselves working in isolation on specific ‘marketing’ projects. A more integrated approach, however, could go a long way to improving marketing and, indeed, overall business success.

By June Smallwood-Rose, marketing and client services director, Shoosmiths

Shoosmiths is a 150-year-old firm, which employs nearly 1,200 people across its seven offices. It increased its profits by 250 per cent over the past two financial years, and this summer reported a record turnover of over £60m, with profits of more than £11m.

The figures are impressive but the firm is aiming for greater successes – and has a clear plan of how it will achieve its goals. As marketing and client services director, I make up part of a management team that will make this happen.

The marketing function

I’ve set distinct marketing goals for Shoosmiths – including strengthening the firm’s image in both the marketplace and the legal press, improving client relationships, increasing marketing effectiveness, and boosting the number of large corporate clients the firm works for. It is a hefty responsibility, but since I joined the firm in November 2004, I have really got stuck into the role – and we are well on the path to bringing the plans to fruition.

In particular, the marketing team has a key role because we act as a liaison between the marketplace and our internal clients. We have to appreciate the needs of our external clients, while also working with the partners internally to help them meet those needs. But because I’ve worked in so many different areas of management – as a chartered accountant, HR manager and then business-development director at KPMG, and then marketing director at Wragge & Co –

I know that you can’t simply look at things from a marketing point of view; all departments have to work together.

When I joined Shoosmiths, I immediately looked at the structure and processes of the marketing department, and surveyed the views of the partners on the levels of service and support that my team was providing. I quickly recognised that there were pockets of fantastic things going on, but that the group needed leadership, consistency and co-ordination. A team restructure was swiftly implemented, including a couple of new posts, to create a national level of expertise in core marketing areas. The results? Well, we’re already getting positive feedback from partners and the team is happier, motivated and knows what we’re trying to achieve.

From there, one of my next tasks was to share the concept of ‘Valued Legal Services’ with the outside world. This is a long-standing project to ensure that all members of staff understand the firm’s values on how to deliver valued legal services to the firm’s clients.

Putting core values first

The Valued Legal Services programme was the culmination of a wide-ranging strategic review that took place three years ago, and which resulted in the establishment of our four basic core values:

Pulling together;
Talking business sense;
Taking the initiative;
Being ‘within reach and responsive’.

‘Pulling together’ is obviously about teamwork and communication, ‘talking business sense’ involves building a rapport with the client, while ‘taking

the initiative’ involves practices such as ‘telephoning the client before they phone you’. Similarly, being ‘within reach and responsive’ is as simple as the client

constantly knowing where their lawyer is, and the lawyer always leaving up-to-date e-mail auto-reply and voicemail messages when away from the office.

Shoosmiths prides itself on offering a superior level of service, which sets it apart from its competitors. But the vision of consistently delivering that care

from across the entire firm, sharing best practice and ensuring that potential clients are aware of our aims, was not then high enough on the agenda. The firm was doing a great job, but just not telling people about it.

Nor were the partners receiving sufficient recognition or reward for the client-care work they were doing. It’s essential that everybody involved with the client knows exactly what the client needs, and what is being done for them, and that there are service level agreements in place to make sure that standards are maintained.

Today, if our staff, including the more junior employees, exhibit high levels of client care, it will be formally recognised and rewarded. We are also working to reduce the barriers to delivery. For example, every person involved in client care now has an amount of non-chargeable time allocated to them – so there is no ‘cost’ to them in delivering that. Both of these things help motivate people to try even harder.

Valued Legal Services has put the culture, behaviour and values in place and it is a great platform on which to build exceptional client service.

Marketing and HR: An internal partnership process

As a director of a large firm, I am as reliant on the application of our core values as any client, but working in partnership with vital collaborators in the process, such as human resources director Louise Hadland, has been essential to success.

Since their introduction, the core values have become integral to achieving the firm’s long-term business objectives – and Hadland agrees that they have directly contributed to the recent results at Shoosmiths.

“We’ve just had two extremely successful years, and it is certainly not a coincidence that we introduced Valued Legal Services over the same period – especially as we haven’t significantly increased our publicity or marketing work,” says Hadland. “Good service isn’t rocket science; it should be common sense, and carried out routinely by every business in the country, but it isn’t. Every individual in this firm, from the chief executive to the cleaning staff, has to demonstrate that they practise client care – and basically, you don’t get promoted unless you do.”

In addition, the firm conducts quarterly induction programmes for all new employees, to ensure that they are fully aware of our values, and to demonstrate the skills that lie behind them.

The firm also recently produced an internal video featuring comments from a range of staff, which was shared across the firm to reinforce ‘what Shoosmiths

is all about’ – while a series of lively information sessions, possibly using either real clients or actors, is due to start later in the year. These will be aimed at helping employees put the firm’s key messages into practice whenever necessary – such as when dealing with the media or meeting potential new clients.

Both marketing and HR, and the firm as a whole, are now working hard to turn the values into Shoosmiths’ unique selling point, and to promote the range of benefits they bring to clients. We know that you can’t differentiate yourself in the marketplace through legal expertise alone – because all law firms should, in theory, give excellent advice. It’s actually the little things which make all the difference to our clients; it’s the service behind the advice that is important.

An integrated effort: IT and finance

Important though HR is for sharing ideas and project collaboration, the IT and finance departments are equally crucial to achieving my strategy. For example, finance and IT director Rosemary Kind is at the forefront of the firm’s efforts to bring its systems into the 21st century and beyond.

Some of Shoosmiths’ most recent IT projects have looked at how client information is stored and used to maximise efficiency and increase sales of legal services, while other new software examines which type of legal work is the most profitable.

Another new development is the innovative CV system, which allows all staff to upload details of their expertise onto the firm’s intranet, which is then posted onto Shoosmiths’s website. Staff can update their online CVs if they gain an important new client – and the firm’s internal system also carries details of skills, such as other languages, which may be useful to colleagues elsewhere in the firm.

The department has also co-developed the trademarked software ‘Prophet’, a debt-recovery system that allows clients to monitor their debt portfolios and interact with their dedicated account managers, online and in real time.

Yet another vital IT system involves customer-relationship-management (CRM) software. This ensures that only one set of data is kept on a client, in a central system that is constantly updated and effectively managed. Shoosmiths has also developed an extremely successful method of persuading all fee earners to log any relevant new information about a client as soon as they return from a meeting: if the CRM software isn’t updated, the lawyer does not receive his or her expenses.

In addition, staff from the IT team regularly attend meetings to offer specific help tailored to the clients’ requirements, including consultant work on issues such as security, development, data protection and outsourcing. I have worked closely with the department to help it become more client-focused, and it is no longer seen as a support function, but a vital team that is integral to the way the firm operates.

In the finance department, Shoosmiths is now moving away from the traditional idea of hourly rates, towards more imaginative fixed fees for jobs delivered over a specific length of time. Indeed, part of Kind’s role is to work with the client to decide how much the work is worth to them – and this approach brings the advantage that the client no longer has to watch the clock, while worrying about how much they are spending.

A streamlined pitch process

The IT department has also been critical in developing software that has transformed the way the firm conducts the vitally important pitch process. The new system examines both previous and current pitch documents, and holds a bank of all data, such as previous financial results, which could be relevant to other potential pitches – thereby saving large amounts of lawyers’ time in the future.

Before we introduced this system, we were reinventing the wheel every time, but this makes everything much more straightforward and streamlined. It’s indicative, really, of the processes that we are introducing across the board – that is, to make the simple things really simple, which ultimately reduces the costs to the client and means we can concentrate on what is important.

Ironically, part of our drive for increased profitability is actually to lessen the number of tenders the firm pitches for – but there is method in its apparent madness. Many law firms will pitch for every job going, but it costs between £10,000 and £15,000 a time, so it makes much better financial sense to only try for those we have a realistic chance of winning, which will contribute to the development of the firm – and which we can do well.

In the past, Shoosmiths pitched for huge amounts of work, and won approximately 30 per cent – but I am aiming to increase that figure to around 70 per cent, through targeted planning and a programme of repeated practice pitches. We have already seen an improvement in our pitch success rate, although I haven’t actually measured it yet. However, when I was at Wragges, I increased the rate from 40 to 70 per cent in two years – so I am confident I can do it here.

Support from the top

Our chief executive Paul Stothard has empowered the entire management team to take the firm forwards into the future and he believes the next three years will be crucial to achieving the firm’s goals.

“People have heard that we’re doing interesting things here, but some of our potential clients are still not sure what we stand for, and why they should come and work with us. If we can get that right, and build upon it, we could be in for a very exciting time – because we haven’t really scratched the surface yet of what this firm can do for its clients in terms of service,” he says.

In recent years, Shoosmiths has experienced the benefits of getting the firm working together – but it is also crucial, Stothard says, to ensure that in a firm with seven offices, all staff can trust each other to deliver the same level of service and understanding to their clients.

“When people change their service providers – and that includes anything from their legal adviser to their gas supplier – eighty per cent of the time, it’s because of bad service, not a bad product,” he says. “All law firms will claim they give good service, but I’m not convinced they do. We strive to really listen to our clients’ requirements, to talk their language, and to truly understand their business. Now we want to unite behind those messages, and send them out into the marketplace – so that everybody knows exactly what we’re about.”

Looking to the future

Once I have ensured that all our staff are fully conversant with the idea of valued legal services, my next task is to ensure that the rest of the world also knows about it.When I joined, lots of good things were happening at Shoosmiths, but we were one of the legal world’s best kept secrets – few people really knew what great work was going on here.

Running a legal firm shouldn’t just be about getting money out of people – it’s very much a two-way relationship between ourselves and the client, where we stand shoulder to shoulder with them. In 18 months’ time, I want people to really know who we are and what we stand for – and that we do things in a more enterprising way.

In fact, I think Shoosmiths could be said to be demonstrating its enterprising attitude simply by appointing three female staff to head up marketing, HR, IT and finance. It is quite unusual to find three women with such authority and responsibility, especially within IT and finance, but I think it’s very indicative of the way Shoosmiths works. There is a lot of trust and autonomy, which is fantastic – and this is exactly what makes the firm successful.

June Smallwood-Rose is marketing and client services director at Shoosmiths. She can be contacted at june.smallwood-rose@shoosmiths.co.uk