Camerons are in the press for outsourcing their support services to Integreon. The exact scope has yet to be finalised - or at least made public.
Various people on the Lawyers's blog have voiced their concerns, but for most partners there is some double-mindedness that needs to be worked through. All law firms claim to put their clients centre stage. All firms are grappling with how to manage costs without affecting the client experience. All firms see support functions as an overhead. Oh yes they do. Look at your balance sheet. So all firms are looking at ways of minimizing support costs.
If Camerons believe that the services that will be run form a third party supplier are sufficiently generic to not compromise their strategic advantage, they will make savings by outsourcing. Recent common examples are cloud computing and servers, secretarial services from abroad or group catering facilities.
If they think that they can outsource Marketing & HR, does it not say something about the way that these people are seen by their partner colleagues? It seems to say that partners believe that their added value is less than the cost. And who's to say that they're wrong? But perhaps they are throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Perhaps different people with a different structure could provide better value and at less cost than outsourcing?
The aim of a website is to get business. Discuss.
Your firm’s website is part of the marketing machine, and as such should help you get business. However beautiful it is, however much time was invested in it, however much the managing partner likes it, if it doesn’t help you get more work, it’s just a work of art.
Something that serves no purpose but to look good.
So does your website get you business? Originally you couldn’t know. Now you can. You can track leads, track page ranking, track dwell time, track conversations and track a whole lot more. You can then write stuff that people want to read & comment on.
Ask marketing. And if you are marketing, be prepared to be asked.
Talk to every one your team, and ask what you could do to help them. This includes support staff. They will be astonished and rejuvenated. If you're too important or too busy to do this, you should step down from partnership. - Phone up a client and ask them how things are going. Not in legal matters, but generally. Then consider how your network of professionals could help that individual with his/her problems, and take action. Your client's loyalty will rocket.
- Find somebody to give honest praise to. Someone who who has done something you noticed that was good. It doesn't have to be earth-shatteringly important. But the person who receives the praise will remember it for months, and redouble their efforts in that area.
Demonstrate the behavioural change that you'd like to see throughout the firm. That's the core of leadership
Partners are not motivated by money.This comes as a surprise to observers, who cannot understand how people who earn so much can be said to not be motivated by money.
But it's true.
Few partners are energised to work to hit a financial target. The managing partner perhaps and the occasional "other". That's because most partners have a different goal. To work for good clients, who offer interesting work, and who are willing to pay full rate, without being asked or chased for fees. Yes, revenue is important, but they want it as the result of the above, not as the goal.
Despite this truth, business planning is often number-centric. Working back from PEP to margin, to chargeable rate and chargeable hours via machinations of the DuPont formula we decide targets, goals, measures and indicators. To a largely indifferent partnership. Managing partners try to hold partners accountable to numbers which have little or no motivational power. Some are hit. Some are not. But it is despite, not because of, the number-focus.
Meanwhile on the ground, most partners agree that they just want a fair remuneration system. There lies the problem. Who decides what fair means, let alone what it looks like in action? Whatever the definition and process, some partners will cry foul. Some will compare themselves against a colleague ("Susan never cross-sells"), others a former colleague ("Simon at Pinsents is a poor lawyer yet he gets £500K) and yet others stake a technical claim ("I should get credit for Eric's work because I made the introductions"), and so on.
These debates generate their own negative magnetic field, attracting the in-fighters, dragging down momentum. The test is, "does the remuneration reflect the desired behaviours?" That is, do the people who do what we want get rewarded? If "yes" - or in the real world, "mainly yes", well done. You will always have those who feel hard done by. The solution is to set up an appeals committee.
If you want to drive behaviour change, however, the focus should be on convincing the partners that your chosen strategy will bring in better clients and better work - a 100% recovery rate and pay-by-return of post are usually bigger challenges. You need not only "consulted-convinced", but "committed-convinced".
How?
You wouldn't want me to give away all my secrets, would you?
Some people are born curious. They always want to know how, why, who, when & what? And why not? And what if?
Curious people make great salespeople.
This is because they demonstrate the 2 characteristics of great salespeople:
- They ask the right questions
- They listen to the answers.
Clients love curious people, because they ask great questions which force the client to think. Then they help the client talk through the issues raised. Which makes the questioner be more like a valued consultant than a salesman - or even a lawyer.
Lawyers are trained to gain deep specialism in a narrow field. They ask questions in this narrow field to get the information necessary to do great legal work. As a result, however, they often miss joining-the-dots. They feel awkward asking questions outside their legal expertise, lest the client is offended or baulks at the question.
Too many fail to engage with their client's business, which is a shame, because clients love talking about their business.
"Knowledge speaks but wisdom listens" Jimi Hendrix
Things continue to get tougher
RBS have asked law firms to consider Mexican wave arrangements to drive down fees. Others are said to be following suit.
Tenders are no longer won by offering wafer-thin margins, as more and more firms drift towards low price as their key differentiator.
To lower price, most firms have considered off-shoring or outsourcing for routine work to reduce costs, but this is open to all firms, so cannot offer a definitive advantage.
Many firms are stuck in the middle - seen as neither volume producers or high-end practitioners by their clients. One solution being tried by some firms is the "Waitrose essentials" approach. These firms are looking at their standard offerings and finding ways of making them simpler to understand, simpler to buy, and tying the product to a bottom-line saving for the client.
This methodology requires some lateral thinking from the law firm partners, who will typically state "everything we do is bespoke" & "we cannot measure a bottom-line benefit for the client".
We have worked with other firms, in most sectors, and know this isn't true. In the meantime the firms that change will eat the lunch of those who say it isn't possible.
Stat 1. Facebook reports that half of the UK population over 13 has a facebook account. Half.
2. And it's not just for the young:
So what's your facebook strategy for engaging with your clients, your potential trainees, your coleagues and your own workforce ?
Law firms have a fascination with discovering what clients look for in a lawyer. Yet to the best of my knowledge, the answers coming back from clients haven’t changed for the last 20 years.
There are 4 As. I’m not sure who first described the relationship in these terms, but it’s as true now as ever. Clients are asking themselves:
- Affability – Do I like you, and do you like me? Clients don’t expect you to always be interesting, but they expect you to be interested in them.
- Ability – Are you good at what you do? You might ponder how I would know; much of it is your firm’s reputation, coupled with the professionalism you display when I meet you.
- Affordability – Can I afford you? This is not the same question as “how much do you cost?”. My willingness to pay is related to my understanding of the seriousness of my position and the perceived results of a successful outcome.
- Availability – Are you available to work with me, and are you keen to work with me? It doesn’t have to be you personally doing the work, but if it’s not you I’m buying you need to tell me why not upfront. If I’ve built trust with you, I’d prefer to work with you.
The Client's View
The client rates these factors in the order:
- Affability – I want to work with people I like.
- Availability – I want to work with someone who wants to work with me & can do so.
- Affordability – I want you to offer good value.
- Ability – Since you work for a good firm, I assume you're a good lawyer, so sector expertise means more than legal know-how.
The Lawyer's View
The lawyer commonly presents himself or herself in the order [with the underlying message in brackets]:
- Ability – I know your problem, have seen it before, and can fix it. [Be quiet and let me tell you the solution]
- Availability – You’ll get me, because I'm an expert. [In fact I’d rather not delegate anything to anyone]
- Affability- The main thing is that we are good lawyers. Let's concentrate on the matter in hand. [Just look at the brochure with the client quotes.]
- Affordability – Let’s not talk money. [I’ll tell you about our hourly rates in an e-mail after the meeting]
2 Implications
- If the lawyer is leading with the ability card, yet the client is looking for affability, we are immediately off to a poor start. You can mitigate this by showing your interest though planned questions. These allow the client to put the project in a wider context, and allow you to show your wisdom through the choice of question.
- A client can only decide affordability by setting gain against cost. We cannot assume that the client knows why we are recommending what we are, and what would be the costs/implications of not taking this action. Their budget may be too small, and we must therefore be open in discussing the overall cost set against the overall benefit. This is best done face-to-face.
Practical Implementation. The next time you are discussing a project with a client, ask questions that put the project in context. As the meeting progresses ask about the impact/costs of not doing the project, either now, or not at all. Ask & listen. Doing so will cover the affability, ability and affordability bases in a very professional manner.
Training departments in law firms spend a great deal of time and effort getting their training "right". We gather feedback from delegates, and constantly revisit the programme to get it as near perfect as possible.
Yet perhaps we shouldn't bother.
Over the past dozen years or so I've seen, delivered, read-the-course-notes-from and taken part in a huge quantity of training. Most of it was well designed and delivered, with a few exceptions. The subsequent impact, however, did not seem to be linked to the design or delivery of the training. Success depends on the willingness of the delegates to become participants.
In former days, when we had days rather than hours for training, a large part of the initial phase was spent "digging for pain" - drawing-out from the delegates the necessity for the training, their own personal journey, and how they would apply it. This phase prepared the ground for the seeds to be planted. Nowadays we move swiftly into the planting phase, throwing the seed out hoping that some will bed in.
This is not necessarily a bad strategy. The Darwinian process of the tough surviving means that those who are motivated and willing to really listen will succeed, and those who are just chair-fodder will fail. Capitalism at its finest. Yet we should not, in these circumstances, take the feedback from the non-participants too seriously. If delegates don't want to participate, modifying the training in line with their thoughts may be a big mistake.
It's not really a secret, is it? Business development planning doesn't work in a law firm.
Depending on your firm, the stated aims of business development planning will include:
- To enable the firm to accurately predict revenue, and hence match expenses
- To promote and facilitate "whole-firm" thinking
- To enable individual partners to be directed/encouraged before the year commences
- To encourage more creative thinking in client development
- To form part of the overall remuneration profile
- To allow sales to be tracked against predicted profile
- To enable marketing to allocate appropriate resources.
But even in firms where the aim of the bd planning process is stated, the plans aren't assessed against the aim. Do they really encourage creative thinking? Or facilitate whole-firm thinking, even if the "promoting" part could be considered a partial success? And who is really held accountable to whom?
Meanwhile, at the partnership level, the overall purpose of bd planning is a mystery to the partners, who complete tedious forms with initial gusto (the analystic part at the front, which can be cut-and-pasted from last years), and eventual imagination (the action-planning which forms the last few pages - often a collection of optimistic new contact meetings arrayed over the next few months). Don't even ask more junior lawyers the content of the plan.
Not that it matters. Once the plans have passed initial scrutiny we're already 3 months into the FY, and the plans aren't looked at until next year unless disaster strikes.
But something has changed. Disaster has struck. The "+10% fees" strategy, dressed up as a business plan, has come unstuck. Faced with declining revenues, stressed clients and empty diaries, partners are suddenly adrift. The very reason for the bd plan was to give structure to times such as these, yet the whole planning edifice has failed to give the point-of-need support which a partner needs.
If a business development plan can't help a partner faced with a empty diary, supported only by a telephone, e-mail and a slightly-neglected CRM system, it's useless. In fact it's worse than useless; it's like a parachute which you had for emergencies, which when unfurled is threadbare and useless.
So what's to be done?
Produce a real bd plan. One that's for you. One that actually engages with you, your clients, your network and your aspirations. One that you can scrawl on, update, and use for real direction.
If you want to see one, click here. It's not pretty. It's just very useful. And when you've completed it you can have a sensible discussion with others about who is doing what.