“𝘌𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘪𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘨𝘦 𝘣𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘳, 𝘺𝘰𝘶’𝘳𝘦 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴. 𝘠𝘰𝘶’𝘳𝘦 𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘤𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘴 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘶𝘴𝘦.”
– Seth Godin (Kinds of Value)
𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗰𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗯𝘂𝘆:
• Experience
• Understanding | Empathy
• Risk Mitigation & Reduction
• Responsiveness
• Decision Making
—–
Get in touch 📩 if you want to have a chat about building a sustainable 🌱 and profitable 💰 practice
Following a post I made on LinkedIn last week: ‘5 Tips to help make your next directory submission standout from the crowd‘ I was asked the following question:
With limited resources, should our firm prioritize directory or award submissions?
An excellent question.
So good, I thought I would try and answer it in this week’s BD Tips post.
When it comes to gaining brand recognition and visibility – for your law firm and its partners/principals – two leading strategies are directory and award submissions. Both have their own unique benefits, so let’s take a look at each in turn:
Legal directories are comprehensive listings of law firms and individual lawyers. They provide potential clients with information about legal service providers – including leading lawyers in practice areas and client reviews.
Legal awards recognize excellence in various aspects of legal practice. Awards can be given to individual lawyers, law firms, or specific practice areas based on criteria such as innovation, client service, and case outcomes.
The decision on whether to do a directory or award submission ultimately depends on your firm’s current brand awareness strategy and goals.
If your firm is looking to improve brand awareness, a legal directory submission might be the way to go.
On the other hand, if your firm’s primary goal is to boost your firm’s reputation and gain recognition within an industry in the short-term, legal award submission can be a much more beneficial tactic.
The fact is that both play a critical role in enabling your firm’s marketing and business development strategy by improving visibility, credibility, and client trust.
In a perfect world, you get to do both.
In an imperfect world: go awards for the short game, and directories for the long game!
Richard & GSJ
In professional services, we often talk about “standing out from the crowd“. But the truth is, more often than not, we are in the centre of the crowd! So for this week’s BD Tips Wednesday post on LinkedIn we shared what my daughters’ call the ‘3R Test’ when considering/deciding whether a differentiator really is a differentiator and helps that business truly standout from its competition.
The first test is: Is it respectful? Here, what we mean is: Is it honest/true?
More often then not, professional services firms set themselves out as being different to their competitors with motherhood statements and hyperbole. Stress test the point, and it quickly falls apart.
By way of example, how many professional services firms state that they are “client centric”? Do a Google search and I suspect you’ll get a lot of hits!
Now, leaving side the issue for one second if saying such a statement really differentiates you or makes you another in the pack, a broader question arises: ‘Are they being respectful to their clients in saying this?’
A responsible point of difference is one that actually matters to your customers – not you. By having this point of difference, are you trying to make a difference to your clients lives/business, or are you merely trying to standout from the crowd so your business can win more work?
If it is the latter, i.e. you are only trying to win more work and don’t really care about the customer, then this is NOT a responsible point of difference and therefore is not a true differentiator.
An example here would be a claim that your firm provided an ‘efficient‘ services (note, not effective, which would be different). The questions that arise here are: (a) is this actually true?, and (b) who gains from these efficiencies – you or the customer?
Because, assume your claim is actually true, if you – the service provider – are the net winner from the efficient service delivery – at the cost of the overall service delivery to the customer – then it is not a responsible differentiator, and therefore it is not a genuine point of difference!
Is the point of difference resilient? Will it stand being stress-tested – by your customers and competition? Will it survive your competition’s attempts to copy it (if it really is a point of difference)?
In short, will your point of difference stand the test of time?
Assuming your stated point of difference can pass muster on the ‘3R Test‘, you have yourself a genuine differentiator and so go forth and knock the competition into next week!
As always, get in touch if you need help with your business development strategy and activities.
Richard & GSJ
Happy New Year to all my clients, readers, and followers!
Over the past few days, weeks and months – like many in Australia – I have seen and been part of some very reasonable, emotional and though provoking conversations about the upcoming Voice Referendum.
Having sat on the sidelines during much of this conversation (typical lawyer, why voice an opinion when it might offside your clients!), I’m now of the view that this Referendum is our Brexit moment.
Frankly, it requires people to declare how they will vote.
So, leaving to one side all the emotional reasons why we must vote “yes” and give our First Nation people a Voice – and boy are there a lot, as someone who has been dedicated to the law for more than 25 years, I ask how can we possibly allow this:
Under the Australian Constitution, the Commonwealth has full legislative power, if it chooses to exercise it, over the Northern Territory, and has devolved self-government to the Territory. The Northern Territory legislature does not have the legislative independence of the Australian states but has power in all matters not in conflict with the Constitution and applicable Commonwealth laws, but subject to a Commonwealth veto.
without giving the majority of those First Nation people subject to these laws a Voice?
Simply put: we cannot.
So that’s why I’ll be voting yes on 14 October.
Photo credit to Brett Jordan
For an industry that claims to make its livelihood on the definition, use and interpretation of words, in my opinion the legal industry has become rather lax in our use of the word ‘alternative’.
Big claim. So what do I mean by this?
Well, let’s look at the word ‘alternative’:- post GFC we hear the term ‘alternative’ almost daily in respect of ‘alternative fee arrangements’ (AFAS); and, ever increasingly, we now hear ‘alternative’ in respect of ‘alternative legal service providers’.
But how often do we ask – ‘alternative to what’?
Are we talking about ‘alternative’ to what we already have and do?
Because if that’s the case then we are not being true to our esprit de corps, namely ‘words have meaning’.
i.e. there is nothing ‘alternative’ in the term ‘alternative fee arrangements’. There are merely hourly rates, fixed fees and some sort of risk sharing arrangement fee agreement. In short, fee agreements.
And, as Heather Suttie eloquently put in her post today, there are no “alternative” legal service providers. There are just legal service providers (some of which, surprise surprise, serve different clientele).
But that’s just my take – as always, would be interested in your thoughts, views, feedback.
rws_01
ps: the only thing I would add to Heather’s post is Pangea3 – 2004
Earlier today I read a wonderful post by Tom Spencer: “Is AI the Solution for the Banking Sector? (Part I: Problems)“.
In his post, completely unrelated to legal – and yet oh so legal sector related, Tom states that in response to changing client buying-cycles/decisions, banks worldwide are making large investments in digital technology and analytics in order to:
[kind of sound like the perfect CRM software!]
Two additional questions Tom then asks (with undertone inference added by me) are:
- How much value are solutions delivering to customers?
- How could new value be created?
Last week I read the following paragraph over on BTI Consulting’s The MadClientist page:
Clients’ overarching needs don’t change every day. But, they do change every 18 to 24 months—like clockwork. The law firms who really want the business will be in dialogue with their clients about their plans for the year, will have in-depth and pointed client feedback, will be planning for the next year with their clients, and hopefully have helped on-board clients’ attorneys over the last 3 years.
and it made me wonder – how many firms looking to acquire (as opposed to just retain) clients have such a forward thinking strategy?
Not many would be my guess.
Casey Sullivan of Bloomberg Law‘s Big Law Business posted an interview transcript with PayPal’s Louise Pentland overnight [Australia time]. Overall this is a pretty good interview transcript, but there was one response in particular that Pentland makes that I wanted to bring to your attention. When asked by the team at BLB:
We’ve seen the general counsel role shift into more of a chief legal officer role that interfaces more seamlessly with the business side. Can you speak to that shift?
Pentland replies:
As an in-house lawyer, the best you can get is when you’re integrated with the business team and you’re part of the team making it happen.
I think with PayPal, it was different. It was almost like a law firm inside the company. People didn’t go to the business team meetings. They weren’t on the leadership teams. It was a very strange structure in many ways. People weren’t assigned or aligned by business initiatives. It’s a team of 200 people, so it’s not a small team. I immediately aligned people with their primary responsibility, dedicated to their teams and the businesses they supported. It was so welcome; businesses were crying out for it.
It’s easy for lawyers to sit in the background and say, ‘Here’s the risk, you decide.’ Then you think about how to litigate. But that resulted in what was sometimes, in the worst case, people were lawyer-shopping because they didn’t like an answer. There was no accountability.
(my underlining for emphasis)
It’s that last paragraph in particular that really resonated with me, and one which I think private practice lawyers accustomed to providing non-commercial but legally factual advice to clients should take heed of.
If you’re anything like me, then you’re expected to attend way too many internal meetings each day/week. I don’t say this to brag, most of the time I’m not needed and I offer no value being at the meeting. In these situations my presence at the meeting is actually an “opportunity cost”;- I could be far more productive being somewhere else.
If this resonates with you, then you may like a concept I read in a blog by Michael Mankins (‘Collaboration Overload Is a Symptom of a Deeper Organizational Problem’) on Harvard Business Review yesterday called ‘setting a zero-based time budget‘.
In Mankins’ own words, this involves:
Set a zero-based time budget. One discipline that we have seen work to reduce the number of unnecessary meetings is to create a fixed meeting time bank in which all new meetings are funded out of the current bank. To start, determine the total amount of time currently dedicated to meetings by level in your organization. Then place a ceiling on that total. Now, for every new meeting an executive requests to schedule, ask (or require) him or her to remove some other meeting of equivalent (or greater) time. At the very least, this approach will highlight the total time devoted to meetings in your company. Over time, it may enable your organization to lower the ceiling and liberate countless hours of unproductive time.
Administrative nightmare and probably unworkable in a partnership structure – but I LOVE the idea!
I can but dream…
RWS_01's B[D]log 