Five ways to get your law firm out of the doldrums

Is your firm in the doldrums? Here are five tried and tested ways to get your firm out of trouble and help secure its success:

1. Avoid silos at all costs

Cross-selling is absolutely key in any quality professional firm and sometimes professional services firms can work in silos. That can be very disruptive, it can be very insular, it can mean that people really aren’t looking at their clients in a holistic way – they’re only thinking about one specific transaction, which usually means that they don’t get a real understanding of the client.

Fundamental to any client relationship is knowing what the client does, what they think and what they like. Once you have that information, it should be shared with the other people in your firm and then leveraged. So if that client happens to enjoy going to concerts or theatres, you would find a partner that maybe liked concerts or theatres too, and that would be part of the process of engaging. It’s caring about the people rather than just the transaction.

2. Be the ‘go-to’ person for your clients

Regardless of your professional qualifications, if you don’t care about your clients, you will never be a ‘go-to’ person for them. I want people to think about us, first and foremost, if they have an issue. If I was a lawyer, I would think in exactly the same way; I want to be right at the top of the tree when someone wakes up on a Monday morning after sleepless nights over the weekend thinking ‘I’m going to phone Ross because he’ll know the answer to this, or if he doesn’t, he’ll find out’. Strong personal relationships are one of the best ways to set your firm apart.

Unfortunately some firms are in the doldrums because they just don’t get the people bit – they’re very good at what they do, technically brilliant, but aren’t good at translating that into a relationship.

3. Your firm is a business – Spend time on it

It’s important to run the firm as if it’s a business – it is a business, not just a group of fee earners. The best firms are spending time on their business, not just in it. Whether it’s people from within the organisation or the board, they are bringing this group together for a strategy day* once or perhaps twice a year.

4. Don’t underestimate the value of non-chargeable time

One of the big failings of many firms is that they look at chargeable time as the only time that is of value to the business. Nothing could be further from the truth. You hear it all too often: What is the value of marketing? What is the value of business development? What is the value of client entertaining? All the things that you can’t charge to the client have every bit as much value as the fee-earning bit, in fact, in many cases they have greater value.

5. Create a culture of ‘We’ not ‘I’

One of the issues in many firms is a lack of clarity around roles and responsibilities. You need to create a culture of ‘we’ not ‘I’. When times get tough, as they do, (I’ve been through four periods of recession in my business life) our firm has powered through them all because we created a ‘we’ not ‘I’ culture.

Unfortunately professionals are programmed right from their training to think it’s only about earning fees. Coming back to an earlier point, the best firms run their firms like a business. A business doesn’t just run itself in terms of its top line turnover, it runs itself based on what profit we’re creating as a team and how we’re using that money and surplus to make our business a better business. That way you get everybody working in the same direction rather than the mavericks that keep all their clients to themselves when things get tough, and don’t bring on new members to the team or have a mentoring program or ‘buddying’ system. These things all take time – they’re a long-term investment – but more than anything it takes a commitment and an ethos.

We all know Strategy is important, but are you spending enough time on it?