Business Development

LEGAL BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

Law Firms and Barristers Chambers that have embraced change and adopted a client-focused approach to business development are standing out from the crowd. Offering as much or as little support as you need, while working alongside you, we’ll take a detailed look at all areas of your legal practice. We’ll help you develop a realistic business plan and marketing strategy that takes account of your future ambitions for your legal practice.

We’ll get to know the values, principles and culture that your practice is founded upon and evaluate how much your staff and management team have bought into it. By exploring who your ideal target clients are, we’ll also uncover who your best clients currently are and which of your services and fee earners are the most profitable.

Client Surveys for Law Firms & Barristers Chambers

Build on your strengths and address weaknesses

Client feedback is critical to increasing client satisfaction, creating loyalty, and guaranteeing the long-term growth of your practice. Do you really know what your client’s value about your services? What makes you stand out from your competitors? It is impossible to be objective when you work in your practice every day.

Client surveys:

  • Establish what your clients’ expectations are and how you can meet them
  • Uncover how clients see your practice vs your competitors
  • Allow your clients to be open and honest about their views and experiences
  • Identify opportunities for cross-selling
  • Show that you care about the opinions of your most important stakeholders
  • Unlock new growth opportunities for your law firm

We know the right questions to ask and can review or implement client surveys for you. Your relationship with your clients is unique. Trust is vital in securing the long-term success of your Law Firm or Barristers Chambers.

Contact us by either completing the form below or call us on 0118 380 5980 for your free consultation.

We know the right questions to ask and can review or implement client surveys for you.

Mystery Shopping for Law Firms & Barristers Chambers

Deliver an exceptional client experience

Do your clients truly experience the high levels of service that you expect, all the time? We can find out. A trusted external perspective can help you discover and evaluate what is working well, what isn’t, and what growth opportunities are being missed.

For example:

  • How good are your staff at cross-referring work between departments and at keeping client data up-to-date?
  • Are your front-of-house staff capturing the right information to allow you to measure the return on investment from your marketing activities?
  • Do your fee earners have the confidence and required skill-set to attract and win new clients?

Our mystery shopping team will approach your Law Firm with a ‘new enquiry’ and report back to you on our experience. We will note every aspect of the service provided, including how phones or emails were answered and what was said by each of your staff during our experience. We won’t just report on what your staff say or do, we’ll report on how it makes us feel as a client. Do we trust your team? Do we feel comfortable in the environment of your office? What does your office tell us about your Legal Practice?

Once we have completed our mystery shop and delivered our report, we will work with you to identify and address any gaps. This could include providing training to increase staff confidence in key areas of:

  • Cross-selling the different legal services that you offer
  • Effective Communication Skills – particularly when communicating on the telephone and by email
  • Personal Impact and Body Language – to help put clients at ease
  • Building Relationships – to develop trust with clients in the long-term

Investing in getting your clients’ experience right will put you one step ahead of your competitors, ensuring that clients see you as their legal expert of choice, returning to you time and time again.

Contact us by either completing the form below or call us on 0118 380 5980 for your free consultation.

Our mystery shopping team will approach your Law Firm or Barristers Chambers with ‘new enquiries’ and report back to you on our experience.

Networking for Law Firms & Barristers Chambers

Learn how to create a lasting impression

Networking is a vital way of getting new and continued referrals into your Law Firm, Mediation Practice or Barristers Chambers but for many lawyers, it can be a daunting experience. However, networking is a vital skill and it can be learnt.

Networking can be done person to person at events or remotely using platforms such as Zoom or LinkedIn to initiate contact.

The key is knowing what types of contacts will be beneficial for your practice, identifying them, and nurturing that relationship by building trust and value for both parties. For your practice to succeed, you need to invest your time in creating real and lasting professional relationships, that convert into billable clients or referrers of quality work.

Rachel Tombs has won both regional and national local awards in recognition of her networking expertise. With her natural ability to confidently and effectively network, in addition to her 15 years’ experience as a practising solicitor, she is perfectly placed to deliver networking training that is focused on helping you to successfully grow your legal practice.

The time that you do invest in networking needs to deliver tangible results. That’s where our training can help. With our team’s combined 100 years’ in-house legal and business development experience, we understand the techniques and skills required to convert your online and offline contacts into clients.

In our training sessions, we will focus on the art of listening, including how to ask the right questions and give the right answers. We will show you how you can make a positive impression by email, over the phone, or using an online social media platform that leads to business opportunities. Being proactive in how you approach networking and following up with any connections that you make will produce immediate and lasting benefits for yourself and for your practice.

Contact us by either completing the form below or call us on 0118 380 5980 for your free consultation.

Rachel Tombs has won both regional and national local awards in recognition of her networking expertise.

Lead Conversion for Law Firms & Barristers Chambers

Plug the ‘leaky bucket’

It can be very easy to focus purely on lead generation and not take into account your lead conversion rate. When that happens, you can find yourself wasting the time, money, and effort spent on marketing activities to bring in more enquiries because you aren’t making the most of the opportunities you are generating. We call this ‘the leaky bucket’ syndrome.

What is the point in putting all your efforts and marketing budget into generating that call or email from a prospective client, if you fail to convert them once they have contacted you?

Lead conversion needs to be looked at from all the touchpoints across your firm as first impressions count – from how your front of house staff answer the phone, the speed of response, the form and tone of initial discussions, quotation style, and follow up.

By establishing a lead conversion strategy, to identify the strongest leads and ensure that you take every opportunity to nurture a prospect, you can earn their trust and their business. We can identify any weaknesses in your conversion process and show how you to fix them. We can also suggest easy and inexpensive ways to use technology to help build relationships with potential clients such as autoresponders (an automated sequence of follow-ups) or web chat tools which provide a great service outside of office hours.

Even if you already have a system for converting leads, it’s never a bad idea to revisit it and consider what you could do better.

Contact us by either completing the form below or call us on 0118 380 5980 for your free consultation.

We can identify any weaknesses in your conversion process and show how you to fix them.

Cross-Selling for Law Firms and Barristers Chambers

Deepen client relationships and increase revenue

It can be very easy to end up focusing on just winning new clients without looking at how you are serving the clients you already have. This is a flawed tactic as it has been proven that it’s 5-25X more expensive to acquire a new client than it is to retain and grow an existing one.

Cross-selling strategies enable you to earn more revenue and deepen relationships with existing clients. The problem is that law firms are traditionally very bad at cross-selling, as client relationships are often ‘siloed’ into singular departments or ‘owned’ by particular Partners, meaning a cross-firm view is not taken. This can leave you vulnerable as clients that only use one practice area are 35 per cent more likely to leave than those who have multiple connections with a firm.

It is the same for barrister chambers, where relationships with key solicitor firms may only be in one practice area and opportunities to grow solicitor-barrister relationships and referrals with other parts of the firm are missed.

Often clients would have been willing to use additional legal services but are not even aware they are available, again leaving you vulnerable as they may use other legal providers to fill the perceived gaps in service.

The key is not to blindly push services at clients that they do not need, but to take the time to research and predict what additional services they genuinely may require and present them so clients appreciate the value of the proposal and understand the benefit.

We can help you become more efficient by building an internal culture of cross-referrals and putting processes into place that deepen and broaden relationships with existing clients. Ways we can assist include:

  • Conducting a ‘Windows of Opportunity’ exercise using a cross-selling matrix that allows you to easily see which practice groups are not servicing particular clients and identify openings
  • Develop an internal cross-referral approach and create better cross-departmental processes
  • Establish a Key Account Management programme, ensuring the appropriate time and attention is given to clients so that the care and service they receive is proactive rather than reactive
  • Manage and focus your marketing programmes to ensure message and activities with key clients are planned and consistent
  • Build barriers to entry against other firms trying to poach your clients
  • Use your deeper knowledge of your client’s requirements to make referrals out to external professionals, thus helping your clients solve their related non-legal issues, whilst strengthening your referral network

Contact us by either completing the form below or call us on 0118 380 5980 for your free consultation.

We can help you become more efficient by building an internal culture of cross-referrals and putting processes into place that deepen and broaden relationships with existing clients.

Our Approach

Our combined 100+ years’ legal marketing and business development experience means that we understand the culture, processes, and challenges within Law Firms, Mediation Practices, and Barristers Chambers and the markets in which they operate. We know what’s realistic, what gets the best results and have a solid proven, successful track record.

Our measurable marketing methods and techniques are focused on your success. We always tailor our approach to fit our clients’ specific needs but we have found by adapting the Design Council’s framework for innovation Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver every opportunity for value is maximised for our clients.

Most professional relationships are based on the ‘know, like’ trust’ approach. Ours is no different. 

At the outset we will take the time to get to know you, your legal business, your target market and what you are trying to achieve so we can ensure we deliver the perfect solution.

You can ask us questions, see how we work, seek our opinion (we like to give it) and check that we are the right legal marketing agency to take you forward.

Once we have an agreed brief, we will cost it out so you know exactly what you are paying for and what we will be delivering. No hidden costs guaranteed. 

Once that is agreed we will commence work on your project.

We’ll make sure to keep you in the loop, letting you know how things are progressing without interfering too much in your busy working day. It’s our job to keep things on track and on budget so you don’t need to worry about it.

At the end of the project, we’ll deliver what you need and offer a handover process to make sure you are happy with everything.

Unlike some legal marketing agencies, we won’t just take the money and run.

We have ongoing relationships with most of our legal clients – supporting them in developing their marketing, growing their legal practices, and for the self-confessed technophobes assisting with website updates, posting articles and content on social media accounts.

Discover

Most professional relationships are based on the ‘know, like’ trust’ approach. Ours is no different. 

At the outset we will take the time to get to know you, your legal business, your target market and what you are trying to achieve so we can ensure we deliver the perfect solution.

You can ask us questions, see how we work, seek our opinion (we like to give it) and check that we are the right legal marketing agency to take you forward.

Define & Develop

Once we have an agreed brief, we will cost it out so you know exactly what you are paying for and what we will be delivering. No hidden costs guaranteed. 

Once that is agreed we will commence work on your project.

We’ll make sure to keep you in the loop, letting you know how things are progressing without interfering too much in your busy working day. It’s our job to keep things on track and on budget so you don’t need to worry about it.

Deliver

At the end of the project, we’ll deliver what you need and offer a handover process to make sure you are happy with everything.

Unlike some legal marketing agencies, we won’t just take the money and run.

We have ongoing relationships with most of our legal clients – supporting them in developing their marketing, growing their legal practices, and for the self-confessed technophobes assisting with website updates, posting articles and content on social media accounts.

Your relationship with your clients is unique. Trust is vital in securing the long-term success of your Law Firm, Mediation Practice or Barristers Chambers – let us help you build that in your target markets. We know the right questions to ask and can review your existing marketing activities as well as implement new initiatives.

With our keen eye for detail, we will ensure that every single image, piece of text, or marketing communication is co-ordinated to build your brand, put it front of the people who matter and ensure you are remembered for the right reasons.

Contact us by either completing the form below or call us on 0118 380 5980 for your free consultation.

The Latest Legal Marketing Insights

Read all of our latest Legal Marketing Insights here

Don’t be beige…

Winning marketing strategies for law firms – avoid the ‘cookie cutter’ approach…

.

Make an Enquiry

    What is the nature of your enquiry?

    Name:

    Email:

    Phone:

    *We take your data privacy very seriously.

    By ticking this box you agree that you have read our privacy notice. From reading our privacy notice you understand that once we receive this from you we will retain your name and e-mail address for a period of two years. After this time, in the absence of providing services to you, your details will be deleted.