Superior rainmakers know it is not their work product alone that binds clients to lawyers; lawyers' individual actions help clients to be successful. Nontraditional "extralegal" services -- sharing helpful networking contacts, taking the time to understand the client's business and life, training the client's management personnel to prevent future litigation -- are not fungible. They are personal services that are uniquely tailored to the specific needs of a particular client or group of clients.

Consequently, these are the sorts of actions that clients remember and that trigger loyalty. Throughout the field of law firm marketing, however, fungibility is rampant. Newsletters are mailed to the client base, but few clients remember receiving them. Expensive brochures trumpet "significant experience in complex commercial litigation matters" and "attorneys from prestigious law schools." Seminars, structured around material the firm believes clients need to hear about, rather than around issues clients say they need to learn about, often do not produce enough new matters to satisfy a cost-benefit analysis.
Such generalized marketing tools, which tend to make one firm look like most others, are hardly the most effective means of attracting clients. The marketing process that will attract and retain good clients begins with a quest for information about their individual requirements. When lawyers speak about their work in a manner that enables potential clients to picture themselves as beneficiaries of the work being described, such lawyers build rapport and invite further inquiry. Too often, lawyers fail to make specific inquiries about prospective clients and their businesses. Such inquiries strike a chord with the audience and hold the lawyer out as a unique service provider. As a general proposition, law firms should seek out what they do not know about their existing clients. Such investigation may well uncover new business opportunities.

A small New England firm finished a collection matter for a large corporation and discovered through research and inquiry that the underlying cause of the collection problem was the company's sales commission plan, which paid the sales personnel before the customers paid, particularly when new sales employees were added or tenured ones departed.

By the time they approached in-house counsel, the firm's lawyers were armed with business research information they had obtained through Lexis-Nexis. Their approach to counsel was: "We would like to help you improve your accounts receivable and stabilize the costs of employee turnover. We noted from our research that every time you have churned sales staff, your collection problems have increased."

The firm was rewarded with the job of restructuring both the commission plan and the employment contracts and handbooks. On reflection, the firm's lawyers realized that they had any number of other clients who had experienced the same difficulties. With research in hand about these clients, the attorneys approached them and secured more business. Later that year, they conducted a client conference on employment issues, inviting all clients who fit the appropriate profile and asking each of them to bring along a colleague or friend, to increase the total number of prospects.  

Out of the Box

Every firm has clients, be they individuals or institutions, that share common issues or interests. In the crunch of billable hours, however, the focus of the firm's efforts narrows to a "box" of legal issues. To escape the box, research -- conducted both in person and online -- is critical. Lawyers need to ask questions face to face, rather than rely on presupposition, to obtain a comprehensive understanding of which services clients need, and must structure marketing tactics to address matters that clients deem important. With regard to corporate clients, lawyers should inquire as to the clients' business objectives for the coming year, their most critical business and industry issues, the competitive pressures they face and the business associations in which they are active. With regard to individual clients, areas for investigation include their personal goals, the ways in which they are involved in their communities, their interests outside work and the difficulties they face.

The information a law firm gathers about how it potentially can help its clients be more successful will form the basis of a nontraditional marketing strategy. Computer-based research can quickly yield a portfolio of information and opportunities, particularly when it comes to business clients. Law firms should maintain and update a portfolio on each business client. They should examine industry direction, the client's finances and those of the client's principal competitors, litigation in which the client and its competitors have been involved, the client's marketing strategies and business development plans, press releases describing the company and its competitors, and analysts' opinions.

Firms can ferret through the data for changes and trends that may serve as bases for marketing opportunities. Then they can develop services tailored to the particular needs of individual clients and approach them with customized suggestions for improvement.

For example, in reporting back to a business executive on a litigation matter, one attorney, having inquired about the client's business objectives and noted from research that large technology investments were demanded of competitors in the industry, discovered that the client's company was behind schedule in confronting its year-2000 software problems. The client's future success could be jeopardized by its failure to address this problem.

The attorney knew relatively little about the "millennium bug" issue but was aware that another client had found a consulting company to fix its year-2000 problems. He introduced the two clients and reaped the reward of additional legal work.

For many managing partners and law firm marketing directors, reshaping marketing initiatives from fungible, low-return business development tactics into nontraditional services and more business is difficult. Small changes in marketing behavior, however, can lead to substantial increases in revenues and profitability. A firm might consider a number of strategies.

Several Strategies

First, given that the largest potential revenue and profit gains are to be made from the existing client base, each attorney could be directed to find out the percentage, or "account share," of each top client's legal business the firm has. This statistic is obtained by researching a client and setting up a "client review" -- a meeting convened specifically to discuss the client's evaluation of the firm's work, the client's objectives and the ways in which the firm can help the client in the future. This type of meeting uncovers issues and client needs prospectively -- the very opportunities for nontraditional services that lead to more revenues.

The client review, for example, may indicate that a firm at present gets 25 percent of a client's legal work, but the review also may provide a basis for recommending nontraditional services as a pathway to more matters and a greater account share. At least one client review should be conducted each quarter, and the client account share should be tracked because it is the most valid indicator of marketing and financial success.

Second, based on the results of the client review, firms should structure nontraditional services for the reviewed client and then look to generalize those services for other clients who have comparable needs. The target clients might include second-tier clients of the practice group or top clients in another area of specialization. Whatever means are selected to "pitch" these nontraditional services -- executive briefing, newsletter, or meeting to broach and sell the services directly -- the return will be high because the pitch will be based on research and inquiry.

Third, firms must evaluate compensation issues as they relate to marketing. If, for example, one litigation partner brings in transactional work as a result of a client review, origination credit should be split equitably. In many law firms, avid associates bring in new matters from existing clients, and they should be compensated for their efforts as well.

Driving Costs Down

Even though much of the initiative for structuring nontraditional services rests in the hands of individual attorneys, there are two ways to expand the process to improve firmwide business development and to drive down the cost of this labor-intensive process. For one, firms can generalize the application of nontraditional services to other clients who may fit the particular profile for those services. Then, appropriate clients can be approached one at a time or in a broader forum, such as an executive briefing, a round-table discussion or a letter outlining the issue.

The potential target market can be broadened still further. Almost every business client is a member of a business association whose members might benefit from hearing attorneys speak about an important issue or from reading such remarks in an article in their trade publication. The most expedient method of securing speaking and writing engagements is by having a client put forward the attorney as a potential contributor to these forums.

The second method by which to to generalize the scope of nontraditional services is to direct all attorneys or practice groups in the firm to consider whether they have clients who might benefit from a creative, nontraditional service initiative. For example, in the case of the year-2000 problem, trusts-and-estates lawyers and members of the transactional group probably deal with clients who own or manage businesses that could be impaired by millennium-related software problems.

For either method of broadening the scope of nontraditional services, the cost of the initial research is justified by the greater potential return of a larger audience and from replicating, rather than re-creating, the marketing wheel. Researching industries, markets, companies and their competitors is a front-loaded, labor-intensive process.

Lessons from the world of product sales teach the value of connecting additional services to a product, to distinguish it from those of competitors and thereby to develop customer loyalty. Commercial companies have struggled mightily with the fungibility problem for the past 20 years, and during the most recent recession, they finally came to grips with the fact that all products and services, standing alone, are fungible.

Consumers hold no loyalty to run-of-the-mill products and behave no differently toward undistinguishable services. To address the problem of client defections and their enormous cost, businesses began heavily promoting "value adds" -- marketing jargon for additional services that have little, if anything, to do with the product but that are critical to a customer's success. Most companies offered these add-on services to their largest customers under the rubric of a "key" or "strategic" account marketing program.

Those commercial companies that were most adept at identifying and addressing their clients' individual needs have enjoyed enormous growth and reaped profit increases as a result of client loyalty. Every law firm client that offers goods or services to its own customers has been exposed to these marketing initiatives -- vendor selection, value-added marketing and strategic accounts sales programs -- which have made them aware that vendors who go the extra mile deserve the business. Increasingly, their loyalty to their lawyers will depend on whether they feel they are receiving more than merely fungible legal services. Companies discovered also that additional services have a shelf life of about nine months and that, consequently, sales teams should continually research and discover new opportunities. Law firms need to recognize this fact as well, and continually renew their inquiries of clients to uncover nontraditional service opportunities.

© Copyright 2001, The Success Group

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