#BizDev

Does your firm use data as a profitability management tool?

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I’ve just finished reading the latest Altman Weil ‘Law Firms in Transition 2020‘ report.

With all things COVID the Report (as it has done in any event for the past decade) makes for interesting reading.

But, the response(s) to one of the questions in this year’s Report  I found particularly concerning.

When asked:

“Which of the following statements describes your firm’s use of profitability data as a management tool?”*

16.2% of respondents replied:

“We don’t want to use the data because it is potentially controversial or divisive.”

16.2% of respondents believe sharing and using data in 2020 can be ‘potentially controversial or divisive.’

I find that rather sad.

And don’t even get me started on how it is possible that over 13% of respondents don’t even know how to use the data!

As always, the above just represent my own thoughts and always interested to hear the views of others.

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* see page 50 of the Report

[This post first appeared on my LinkedIn feed Thursday 2 July 2020]

Survey: Top 5 Reasons Clients Switch Firms

If you’ve recently lost a client to a competitor and have been wondering how that happened, wonder no longer. The recently published ‘2020 Future Ready Lawyer Survey: Performance Drivers‘ by Wolters Kluner has the answer.

Surveying 700 in-house and private practice lawyers across the US and EU in January 2020, this is probably the most comprehensive survey post COVID (although most of us were not entirely sure what this meant in January so I look forward to a survey report that has been conducted post March this year).

The Top 5 reasons cited as to why a client might leave your firm are:

  1. The client no longer trusts your firm can meet their needs,
  2. Your firm doesn’t specialise in the area of law needed by the client,
  3. Your firm failed to communicate its value proposition properly,
  4. Your firm did not demonstrate efficiency and productivity, and
  5. Your firm’s leverage was/is all wrong.

And three of these are essentially because you messed up on sourcing, communicating and delivering on your pricing promise.

Take-away top tip: want to make sure you keep clients and keep them happy – make sure you (and your team):

  • understand(s) your value proposition and are able to communicate this,
  • get your team’s leverage right [hint: don’t hoard work at the top end just so you can meet budget this year!], and
  • understand the scope of what you are being asked to do and project manage both the scope and the client expectations (especially if out of scope creep occurs).

Manage this well, and you’ll be three-fifths of the way to keeping your client happy!

Demonstrate Efficiency

As a bonus, think about how you demonstrate efficiency to your client.

  • Is this by saying you have the relevant expertise/experience so that you can do this faster than others,
  • Is this by saying you have the appropriate IT systems that allow you to get the job done faster, or
  • Does efficiency even really matter – should the conversation not be about being an effective lawyer?

As always, these just represent my thoughts and always interested to hear your views.

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What will the business of law look like in a post COVID-19 world?

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‘uncertainty’:

The state of not being definitely known or perfectly clear; doubtfulness or vagueness.

Oxford English Dictionary

As we start to talk about the path/way out of COVID-19 lockdown, a number of pre-eminent thinkers in legal consulting have begun discussing what shape and form this might look like for our industry.

Notable among these have included:

  • Richard Susskind + Mark Cohen debating the future of the legal industry as excellently reported by Ron Friedmann on his Prism Legal blog
  • Patrick Lamb discussing ‘The Next Normal: Is There a Roadmap That Gets Us There?’
  • The team on the LawVision Insights Blog giving their views on ‘The Legal Profession in a “Post-COVID” World’, and
  • the excellent and very comprehensive series of blogs by Jordan Furlong under the themed title of ‘Pandemic’.

Then again, as Patrick Dransfield said in Asia Law Portal (‘Who knows what the future will hold?’) – nobody really knows what the future holds.

But isn’t that why we, as business developers, are hired? To try and give some insights to our partners on how the industry might look?

With that in in mind, for what it is worth , here are my two cents on some of things we may look forward to over the next 18 months:

  • The industry will remain fundamentally the same – as it was pre COVID-19 pandemic days unless there are structural changes to the business model. And, as I understand it, the trust partnership business model that is currently used in most common law jurisdictions makes the talk of change easier than the reality of change (in that nobody today would likely start a new law firm under a partnership trust structure).
  • Technology and working from home will play role – it goes without saying that both technology and working from home will play a part in the future, but how big that role will be in an industry built on presentism still remains to be seen.
  • Uncertainty will feature heavily –  we are flying blind here and most of us have no experience to drawn on. Even those of us who have been through this several times have now come to accept this time is different.
  • Consolidation will likely feature prominently – with The Law Society Gazette (England and Wales) reporting in the past week that ‘71% of high street firms face collapse‘ I would foresee a similar scenario playing out here in Australia. Only I doubt it will apply to high street firms, who should do well out of the expected growth in wills & estates and family law matters, as much as it will likely apply to the middle market where there still remain far too many firms representing far too few clients.
  • There will be an increase in lateral hiring – for the reasons above.
  • Cashflow/credit facilities will help – Warren Buffet is reported to have said that “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” Well, the tide has never been lower and we will see in the coming days who still has the ear of their banker. Arguably those with big trust accounts and/or on the panel of one or more Big4 bank panels will benefit.
  • How much office space do law firms really need? – it will be interesting to see if rent footprint decreases. Rental space – and whether to remove parts of the business to less expensive rental footprints (see Herbert Smith Freehills to Macquarie Park and McCabe Curwoods to Chatswood for example) – has been an issue for some time and one of the big take outs from this may well be a lot more Hot-desking!
  • The Big4 see opportunity – as EY reported this week, the Big4 are not going away. If anything, as this chart shows, they’ll be upscaling their charge

Screen Shot 2020-05-03 at 8.37.41 pm

  • A need to be even more client and sector focusses – with the team at Adam Smith, Esq looking at the following areas of need:
    • Insolvency, restructuring and distressed assets
    • Private equity (I’m not 100% sold on PE in Oz)
    • Regulatory investigations and dispute resolution a/k/a litigation
    • M&A
    • Tech and all the ancillary practices it spawns, including IP

From an Australian law perspective I would add Insurance law (going to be more claims made) and all forms of Government (Government will be spending big on Infrastructure, Health, Education and others).

But all of the above are my views and so to finish this post I’m going to turn to one of the great take-outs of this week for me – a post by Trish Carroll who interviewed 12 final year law students to find out how they were feeling in the middle of Covid – ‘Is Covid-19 the mother of all disruptors for the legal profession?‘ – and this is about as close as we will get to how the future of law will look.

As always though, interested in your thoughts/views/feedback.

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Survey: Is the perception of value geographic?

Page 7 of April’s Briefing Magazine has a couple of interesting charts on how:

2019 was a mixed bag of business for US firms operating in the UK, with headcount growth hitting utilisation and billing rates requiring attention

As someone who is fascinated in the ‘pricing’ (not costing) of professional services, it was the “billing rates requiring attention” part that caught my attention.

billing realisation rates

The chart above, as titled, is billing realisation rates for US law firms in both the US and the UK.

So: why do two different offices of the same firm have such different realisation rates just because of the Atlantic Ocean?

After all, you would assume the clients are largely the same. You’d also assume the work types are largely the same. You’d probably be okay thinking the leveraging is largely the same. You may even reasonable expect the person reviewing the bill in Finance is the same. And, you may reasonably expect the hourly rate in London to be lower than that in New York for all said lawyers.

So why is it that realisation rates are roughly 5% higher in the US than in the UK? Especially when you’d think it would be the other way round.

And what does this mean more globally? Where would Asia, Africa, and South America fit on this scale?

More importantly, does this say that the perception of value is geographic?

I have my thoughts/views, but as always interested in yours.

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How to spot a bad client and knowing when you should fire them

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I’ve long been a fan of Ron Baker’s ‘Baker’s Law: Bad Customers Drive Out Good Customers’. His comment that:

By viewing your firm as an airplane with a fixed amount of seats, you will begin to adapt your capacity to those customers who appreciate—and are willing to pay for—your value proposition.

is spot on.

But it really wasn’t until last week, when I read an article in smallbiztrends.com, that I’d come across a comprehensive checklist of ways to identify those bad customers from the good ones.

The article –  ‘How to Spot Bad Customers – and How to Deal with Them’ – sets out ’10 Ways to Identify a Bad Customer’. They’re great and should be pinned on every lawyers homepage:

  1. They Don’t Pay On-Time (Or Ever)
  2. They Don’t Pay Enough (Or Don’t Want To Pay)
  3. They Have Unclear or Changing Demands
  4. They Want ALL the Attention
  5. They Aren’t Available
  6. They Aren’t Honest
  7. They are Abusive or Threaten Your Staff
  8. They Make Unreasonable Demands
  9. They Complain to Anyone Who Will Listen
  10. They Don’t Listen to You

How many of us can identify with most, if not all of these!?!?

It’s a great post. As is Baker’s. Read them (while noting that there is a 13 year gap between the two posts and not a lot has changed!)!

As always though, interested in your thoughts/views/feedback.

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How much do you love your client?

I read an article last week in which Jeffrey Cashdan, a partner at King & Spalding, who represents Coca-Cola, is quoted as saying he had banned all [Coca-Cola] competitor drinks from his home.

Think about that for a second…

…banned all competitor drinks from his home!

That’s a hell of a range. And a hell of a commitment, especially if you have children under the age of 20 running around!

So I started to think:- how many of the products in my home belong to my clients?

And I was pleasantly surprised by the answer – a fair few.

But I was also surprised how many competitor brands were in the house.

So I got to thinking, if we expect loyalty from our clients (whether that’s expertise or brand), how many of us out there are willing to go as far as Jeffrey Cashdan, who would appear to walk the walk when he says:

“I’m all-in for my client,”

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Pitching: ‘Show me don’t tell me’ – is video tendering the future?

Happy New Year to all and welcome to 2018!

One of the more interesting articles I read over the holiday period profiled a Dutch company called Pitchsome.

Heard of them?

Maybe, but I doubt many have.

But they may just end up being a catalyst for of one of the biggest changes to the legal industry in 2018 – namely, how we tender for work in the future.

Under the tagline, “Show, Don’t Tell,” Pitchsome’s business model is a simple one: Show me how your product works in a video and don’t write reams and reams of marketing bluff and expect me to read it in order for me find out what you can do for me/help me fix my problem.

Supporting this business model, the article states that:

Cisco’s Visual Networking Index says video will account for 80 percent of all consumer internet traffic by 2019.

And that got me thinking:

80% of all consumer internet traffic by 2019 will be Visual Networking + pretty much 100% of Government and 70+% of ASX Top100 companies have legal panels in place

so, how long will it be before these government departments/agencies and companies decide to replace the long and tedious word/excel document tender responses with video tenders that ask law firms to:

  • profile key team members,
  • white-board how the law firm can assist the client,
  • evidence how Legal Project Management can be used,
  • visually explain the steps in the pricing,
  • have client referee testimonials,
  • have video of the pro-bono and community activities the firm is involved in, and
  • have other examples of how the value adds being offered are being implemented by other clients in the tender’s industry sector?

Will never happen I’m hearing many in Australia reading this say. “It’s not professional”. “It’s nothing short an advert”, etc., etc.

But I’m left feeling: what, just what, would have happen to the industry if those of us who started down this path in 2008 (and those of you who were involved know exactly what I’m talking about) continued the journey?

It very well may have been disruptive. And that word is a real catchphrase at the moment.

So maybe, just maybe, we will be seeing video tendering by the end of 2019 – and that leaves me asking: what are you doing now to make sure you can met this need?

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