Way back in 2014, my good friend John Grimley, off the back of some comments I made in his book ‘A Comprehensive Guide to the Asia-Pacific Legal Markets‘ asked the question: ‘Is Australia the world’s most competitive legal market?‘.

Many of us in Business Development who work in this market day-in, day-out believe that it is.

Evidence we often provide to back this claim up includes:

• The sheer number of panel appointments: both at Government (Commonwealth, State and Local Council) and private sector (nearly every ASX100 company is now panelled), means we are tendering year round.
• If we are not tendering for panels, then we are tendering for projects and sub-panels. Most major law firms in Australia will be doing 250+ tenders a year!
• Client fluidity. Tenders are one part of this, but client movement among firms is increasing. The stickiness we used to see is no longer there and, frankly, it is getting harder and harder to keep clients in this market. We need to be on top of our game, ALL THE TIME!
• Law firm consolidation: we have seen a fair amount of this in the past 10 years. Anyone remember HDY, Herbert Geer, Dibbs Barker, Kemp Strang? These days, when it rains, I can play a game of “spot the law firm umbrella that has outlasted the law firm“!
• But perhaps one of the biggest signs of how competitive the market is here is the sheer number of partner lateral movement we see each year. I’m sure other markets, such as the US, have higher numbers of actual lateral partner movement; but, I suspect pro rata number of partners, Australia would be in the top 2 or 3 in this field.

So those of us who live and work in Business Development in Oz can put our hands up and say: “We live and work in one of the world’s most competitive markets”, where brand differentiation is difficult, and almost everyone relies on innovation and technology to set themselves apart from the pack.

If all above is true: What can we do about it?

Well, not a lot actually.

But, and here is the good news, over the weekend I read a blog post by Seth Godin which gave me hope that, actually, it doesn’t really matter.

In ‘Too much competition‘ Seth states something so profoundly obvious I have to wonder why I have cared about how competitive our market is for so long.

So what is that Seth said?

Focus on the customer

Here you go:

Focus on the customers who care enough about your idiosyncratic and particular offerings that they’ll not only happily walk away from the lesser alternatives, but they’ll tell the others.

Simple really!

Only it’s not. So if you need some help with how to successfully differentiate your firm in tenders, feel free to reach out to me for a chat.

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