Marketing for Lawyers Manchester

For most of the busy lawyers reading this lens it can be difficult to see the wood from the trees when it comes to developing more business. There are never enough hours in the day to do the legal work and manage the people; never mind finding the time and the frame of mind to take a step back and take a fresh look at the core of everything we do - the clients.

Clients take the legal work you do for granted. However complex it is, they assume you can deal with it if they have already chosen you. So, yes, make sure you and your colleagues get it right.

But most clients would say "So what? That's what lawyers are paid to do." Get it wrong and you're in trouble. Get a client out of a real hole and they may well love you forever, but you can't build a business around these occasional triumphs. Letting clients experience service that makes them feel good about your firm has to be built in as a matter or routine now to develop a loyal client base and a stable business.

So assuming all the decent lawyers in your area get the legal work reasonably right, what would make someone choose one from the other? Recommendations? Yes, but what makes clients, accountants and your dentist (now there's a captive audience!) enthusiastic enough about your practice to want to tell their friends and clients about you? Maybe because you are a specialist in some area, but usually there is more than one specialist in any area and just how specialised are most lawyers? Perhaps some genuine specialists can still afford to be a bit arrogant about their expertise?

Otherwise, the biggest difference recognised by clients and other members of the public are "look, feel and touch". People want empathy with their lawyers, so they feel comfortable, respected, understood and valued. Of course virtually all lawyers care about their clients - not just about earning fees - but does the client's experience always make if feel this way? If there is no empathy between lawyers and clients, taking legal advice is a pretty horrid experience. In conveyancing for example, when lawyers, paralegals or secretaries pick up the phone to deal
with a request for a "quote", we find that few are thinking much about who the person on the other end of the telephone is; how the move might impact on them and how they can help address some of their concerns.

Most are still thinking more about how to work out the fees than they are about what kind of person they are talking to. Not much chance then of selling the service on much more than (cheapest) price in this situation. Believe me, we have made hundreds of calls and run many training sessions on this over the past 10 years and generally, not much has changed.

Even at the end of a conveyancing job, which can be 3 months down the line, few conveyancers would know where their recently acquired client works or how many children they have, unles there has been some legal issue to address which requires this information to be disclosed. If there is not some empathy, then next time around the client will willingly accept the estate agent's recommendation to go to the firm they prefer.