Be like Arkwright: know your customers well

Gathering accurate client information is vital if firms are to survive in the face of increasing competition, argue Alastair Moyes and David Monk.

Legal services and solicitors’ firms are entering a new era as the domestic conveyancing market all but stops and the commercial world prepares for recession. Where domestic and commercial legal services will be in two to three years’ time largely depends on where tomorrow’s clients choose to buy their legal advice. Understanding clients’ needs is therefore essential to helping them choose your firm.

Collecting information that allows you to understand clients is also essential. New legal service providers such as Halifax Legal Solutions and Which? already have databases full of customer information, giving them the ability relentlessly to remind customers of the legal services they offer. To compete effectively, solicitors need to actively manage their client information by developing their own databases.

To capture client information effectively it is essential that everyone in the firm understands that marketing is a part of their work. These are some of the essential ancillary duties attached to the production of legal work that must be completed if firms want to survive in the face of increasing competition.

Understanding clients and being able to anticipate their legal needs requires you to know something about them. This need not be on the scale of Tesco’s loyalty card, where details of all customer purchases are kept, but simple data such as marital status, employment details and email address for domestic clients, and turnover, employee numbers and directors’ details for business clients. Understanding your client should be part of providing excellent legal services.

Information gatherers

Gathering this type of information in a systematic, reliable and usable format continues to present a management challenge to firms. The solution may be seen as simple and many firms will have tried something similar in the past. Often, however, the missing element is that it requires a change in attitude from both fee-earners and management.

As outlined in recent articles, the future value of a law firm will be measured in the size and quality of its database, and how much work and profit can be expected from it in the future. This alone should make gathering accurate client information a top priority for all firms.

At the end of each matter the fee-earner needs to take a minute to deal with two questions. First, are all the details of this client correctly on the database? Second, what does this client need next? Where details need to be added or changed it should be done then or shortly afterwards. This takes no more than ten minutes.

This may be a simple development of your firm’s matter closing procedure, but it places marketing at the centre of the firm. From that position, your firm can develop a database that is a significant asset and a local rival for any loyalty card.

With simple ideas the details are all-important. You can’t just impose a different matter closing form and expect the data to flow in. Fee-earners and particularly partners need to be committed to gathering information, so monitoring the process is important. Different departments will need different data, which may require changes to the IT system.

To deal with this as a management task, each department in the firm needs to define what constitutes a complete client record and therefore what each fee-earner is required to review. In addition to the contact details, this can be anything that helps you understand the future legal requirements of your clients.

All the approved legal IT systems have the ability to hold this type of information and give partners a way to monitor the database. If fee-earners want the revenue from a matter credited to their billing targets, they must first complete the marketing review. The IT systems can generate a report that highlights which fee-earners are not keeping the client records up to date. This can lead to setting targets for the quality of client information for each fee-earner or department. Making a system like this work and continue to work requires a firm to make it part of what fee-earners do and are measured upon.

What next?

The second and equally important question is: what does this client need from us next? One answer is ‘nothing’, and this needs to be noted on the database to avoid wasting resources. Any other answer will require the fee-earner to mark the record as either an immediate prospect, such as a will after conveyancing work, or a future prospect, as in a company acquisition needing employment advice six months down the line.

Selecting a date and a person responsible for following up the clients is as necessary as recording the information. For example, use pre-prepared letters that a secretary can customise easily and ask them to monitor the diary. Implementing this one-minute marketing solution gives each department the opportunity to gain access to satisfied clients around the firm, and capture low-cost work by internal referral. We have yet to find a firm that cannot do this.

Implementing a simple marketing matter closing process and monitoring it using the established legal management lines and IT system can deliver significant benefits to firm and client, such as allowing the firm to proactively promote services to specific groups. For example, following the government’s budget statement, a firm can send out individually addressed letters as a mailout, detailing the announced changes and with a suggestion to contact the firm for advice, sent to identifiable groups – say, private client or company directors – and all because the fee-earners have taken one minute to get that information.

The new legal service competitors have these databases, which are already full of information they use to target potential clients. To compete in your local area for clients you need to organise your firm to capture every enquiry possible. If a fee-earner takes just one minute to think about it, you are almost there.

Alastair Moyes runs Marketlaw with David Monk. Moyes and Monk are co-authors of Marketing and Legal Services, published by Law Society Publishing (0870 850 1422)