Low price doesn’t keep clients because  clients are irrational. And so are we.Read More

This week, a case study. You are the client partner for PLC Ltd In 2020 you invoiced them £10M.  Your costs were £7M. In 2021 they want a 10% volume discount but are unable to guarantee that there will be more work. Q1.  If your costs for doing the work are unchanged, approximately how much...Read More

The emotional outpouring around Brexit has been relentless.  The promised Zombie Apocalypse has yet to occur, but the combination of “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” remains daunting.Read More

It’s very easy for marketing directors in a law firm to lose the plot.  A marketing director who wants to keep their role often becomes focused on internal clients.  Paymasters become the audience, but in this case, the partners’ satisfaction is the potential clients’ loss.  Marketing is at its best when it is trying to...Read More

I still remember one of our clients describing the culture of law firms as being a “meritocracy of sales people”.  He said that being a good lawyer now matters far less to a firm than the ability to win work. He wasn’t particularly pleased, but he’s probably right. Once you get to a standard of...Read More

Thanks for all who commented on last week’s blog – both online and face-to-face. Perhaps a more nuanced headline would have been “business developent training may work, but you can’t prove it”. So what am I suggesting instead?Read More

My 3 recommendations are different.Read More

In an ideal world potential clients would identify themselves with a big sticker, and offer you cash up front on first meeting. In the real world you’re told that the answer is “networking” – a seemingly interminable process of casual meetings where we hope that something might happen. Sometimes it does, normally it doesn’t, so...Read More

Starting a New Year The magazines are once again full of calls to create New Year’s resolutions, or in corporate speak – goals and intentions.  Yet the name of the month – January – reminds us that the God Janus had 2 faces – one looking forward (to 2021) and one looking backward.  Yet it...Read More