Law marketing-europe.com

Question by David Schwaninger, lawyer of BLUM Attorneys at Law (Zurich, Switzerland)

 

What distinguishes an excellent lawyer from the rest? His image in the marketplace. Talent alone is not enough. Perception decides. It attracts new clients to you or drives them away. You probably know cases of qualified lawyers who do not have access to specific business, even their own clients’… Seek the motive in the client’s perception of you.

If you want to leverage opportunities, manage your personal brand, your image in the marketplace, with care.

Keys to successful personal brand

1. Be specialized. Increasingly more clients are seeking specialists. Specialisation will be a way for you to be more efficient, gain calm and be likelier to be the reference in your target market. Focus on knowing what clients consider is valuable. Make sure they realize that you understand and worry about their problem. It is the best way to gain their confidence. Choose your clients and find out how to attract them. If you wait for them to come to your office, you will let your clients define your professional life. You will lose opportunities.

2. Know yourself. Be honest: define your identity on the basis of what you are, not on what you believe clients expect of you. Know and take advantage of your virtues. Identify your main values. They will carry you to success if they are compatible with those of your clients and office partners. Be flexible and creative with them. Brands communicate and sell values, personalities that clients can relate to. Harmonize your brand with your values. Do not be afraid to find out what image your partners have of you. Ask them for feedback on your work (virtues and aspects to improve). Ask them to describe you in two words. Define yourself in two words also. You will know the best selling points of your brand. Then work on them and they will make you stand out in the crowd.

3. Improve. Gain self-esteem. Be aware that you are the best option for your clients. Give and you will eventually receive. Make promises that you can keep. Ask the key question: “What do I want?� This question will guide you to obtain results. Find answers to other questions as well, such as: “What do I do better than other lawyers? “How do I stand out?�, “Do clients value it?�, “Why should clients hire me rather than other lawyers?� Take care of details with clients. They are essential. In my case, for example, I see or call each client at least once a week.

4. Strategy. Plan an easy, but systematic and consistent, personal brand strategy. Know what direction you want for your professional life and define positive objectives to reach it.

5. Projects. Get focussed on projects. Delegate or outsource tasks as much as you can. Make the most of your time: concentrate on two or three exciting projects per year. You will gain knowledge and market value. A project could be a legal practice from a small city that also specialises and stands out from all the other practices that do not specialise. Another project could be the opening of a permanent office in a foreign country.

6. Visibility. Carry out very selective activities in order to promote your credibility and prestige. It is a type of activity you can do regardless of the geographical location or the size of your law firm. For example:

— Publish a brief book with a prestigious publisher for potential clients. For example, I got a book published for a client who had the smallest office, a solo lawyer who knows how to work with alliances. It is an innovative book, published with one of the most prestigious publishing houses in his country, targeting potential clients of the lawyer. At first, the client doubted that a prestigious publishing house could publish a book by him, an individual office. This is why he had never published books or articles with a major publishing house.

— Chat on prestigious forums, if possible without sharing space (competence) with other professionals.

— Take an important position with communication potential in an organization where you can further develop your communication skills.

— Establish effective alliances with other professionals or law offices.

— Take advantage of contacts. There is an evident difference between client cards that merely occupy space in a card case and client cards that actually create business opportunities.

7. Communicate well. When communicating, try to concentrate on a single idea. Explain yourself concisely: five seconds will suffice to tell the client the benefits he can receive from you. My brand promise, for example, is “competitiveness for professional services”. Support your brand promise with different arguments.

8. Coherence. Make sure that your objectives, strategy, actions and conduct are consistent with each other and with your own values.

9. Persistence. To obtain a powerful personal brand you will need to have clear ideas, determination and perseverance.

10. Act. Move from thought to action.

 

© 2006, Francesc Dominguez, Marketing Consultant, co-Author of the book El marketing jurídico [Law Marketing}. www.francescdominguez.com. Advice page published in Economist & Jurist (December 2006-January 2007).

Question by Mr. Suman J. Khaitan, lawyer, managing partner of Suman Khaitan & Partners (New Delhi, India)

 

If you understand how your potential client thinks and makes decisions, you will be on the way to obtaining his preference. I am not speaking about what he thinks, but rather about how he thinks.

Let us talk about how to sell better, and with integrity. Effective selling means creating and continuing a relationship with clients. Selling means influencing and allowing yourself to be influenced. In order to sell, we should know ourselves and overcome our common fears and limitations instead of trying to change others.

The client is in charge. No matter how good your services are. Selling should be centred on the client’s needs. Clients buy profits, not services. Discover what your client or prospect values, how he wants to be treated.

Establish a friendly relationship with the client. Friendliness is the first step in gaining his confidence. Look at the client without prejudices. Do not label him for his appearance. Your prospect will realise this and you could lose an opportunity to advise him. If you can, choose a suitable time and place to meet or talk to your potential client. The right moment is when you are in a positive state of mind.

Be careful with your language. Sometimes we speak ambiguously, in a roundabout way or using technical terms that make it difficult for others to understand what we are trying to convey. The fact that we understand ourselves does not mean that other people will understand us. Be aware of the differences between male and female verbal and body language. If a man, for example, says “yes…right�, it means that he is merely following your conversation. If a woman says that, it means that she actually agrees with you!

People want to do business or be advised by professionals who understand them and treat them with respect. For this reason we should respect the client’s values, even when we do not necessarily share them. Professional relationships based on mutual respect really work. A lawyer should make an effort to make the relationship work. He should establish a friendly relationship. If there is friendliness between you and your prospect, there will be mutual trust, which is the first step towards cooperation. Smile. As someone said, a smile is the shortest distance between people. It lays the foundations for a good relationship. Only those who can smile naturally and show a sincere interest in people can sell well.

In order to create a friendly relationship with your speaker, adjust your behaviour to his. Imitate the tone and the rhythm of his voice, position and movements slightly. This will create a more propitious situation for a harmonious relationship. If, for example, your prospect speaks in short, sharp bursts, adapt to his way of speaking. If he gesticulates with his hands, imitate him discreetly. We feel better with people who are like us. It is unconscious.

When you speak to someone for the first time, let him set the interpersonal distance. Observe if during the interaction he approaches you or moves away. This will help you to understand his communication channel.

Regarding communicative channels, people can be visual, auditory or kinesthetic. Each person has a dominant channel. Around 50% of the business population is visual, 25% auditory and the other 25% kinesthetic. Discover your dominant channel. If, for example, you are visual and speak with an auditory person, you will probably not speak the same language. An auditory person will listen to what you say, but possibly he might not understand what you mean. Learn to adapt to your speaker’s channel.

Visual people remember and think through images. For them, seeing is essential. They keep a prudent distance from the speaker and usually speak rapidly and in a high tone. When they imagine, they look up and to their right; when they recall, they look up and toward their left. As they think in images, they can blink “more than normal”. They show impatience if interrupted. When speaking, they use words and expressions referring to vision, such as “observe”, “look at”, “see”, “show me”, “let’s have a look”.

I was intrigued by a client. He looked up very frequently when he was thinking during conversations and blinked more than normal. I advised him to look more into the speaker’s eyes in order to show confidence and interest. However, I thought that there was some reason that would explain my client’s conduct. Now we both know that he is a very visual person.

Auditory people perceive reality through sounds. At times they think aloud. They are good conversationalists. They will thank people for asking them questions. They speak more slowly than visual people and are usually sensitive to intonation. They appreciate speakers who share the pace of their speech and who speak tersely. When they imagine, they look horizontally and towards their right; when they recall they look left. When they think about what they are going to communicate, they look down and to their left. They use monitoring expressions (”ah”, “umm”, “yes, yes”) and words referring to speech and sounds: “Do I explain myself?”, “listen”, “hear”, “it sounds to me”, “I understand”, etc.

For kinesthetic people, sensations and emotions are very important. They often ask “How are you?â€? They communicate by means of sensations. Very slow speakers, they tend to accompany their speech with movements. They need proximity with the speaker. They are used to taking people’s hands, patting their shoulder or even caressing the other’s face, which comes as a surprise to someone who uses another channel. It is important to avoid hurting their feelings. They use expressions such as “I feel good”, “it seems OK to me”, “This smells funny “, “I like this”.

Knowing ourselves better, and showing interest in understanding others, with tact and respect, will allow us to influence more and be influenced. In short, we will sell better.

 

© 2006, Francesc Dominguez, marketing consultant, co-author of the book El marketing jurídico [Law Marketing]. www.francescdominguez.com. Advice page published in Economist & Jurist (November 2006).

Question by Mr. Miguel Montoro, lawyer, managing director of Samon (Yokohama, Japan)

 

We are what we study. Because of this, it is fundamental that you clearly know what to invest your time in and how to feed your mind.

Know a little about multiple topics and above all have your own opinion. Being too specialised can be a limitation in the long term.

Apart from continuing to learn Law, in my opinion knowing about finances and marketing (communication and sales) is essential. Talent in Law is not enough. The aforementioned paralegal skills and each one’s character make the difference.

Finances: The key is to know how to manage money, how money works. Therefore “working a lot to earn money” is wrong. The appropriate thing is “to have ideas to make money work for you”. Study financial planning and think. Those who think find opportunities.

Marketing (communication and sales): A lawyer should improve his skills in order to understand the marketplace and detect business opportunities. Communicate efficiently to get your clients and prospects to perceive your capacity and to regard your firm as being able to give them efficient solutions. Besides, understanding human behaviour will lead people to hire your services. Learn how to sell better, without putting pressure on your potential client.

Wrong beliefs and prejudices make us lose opportunities. Open your mind. Avoid fear, prejudices and mental laziness. Ask the right questions and get answers.

Incorporate new ideas on a base of good values. Refresh your intelligence. Enjoy yourself by working and training.

Think big and question things. Have your own opinion. Make firm decisions and act.

 

© 2006, Francesc Dominguez, marketing consultant, co-author of the book El marketing jurídico [Law Marketing]. www.francescdominguez.com. Advice page published in Economist & Jurist (October 2006).

 

You may have sometimes wondered why, while an extremely prestigious client hires yours firm’s services, he only does so for minor cases, and commissions other more profitable cases to other legal practices. Your law firm may very probably be prepared to render the services that clients commission to other firms, but the clients do not consider your firm for these cases.

This is a problem of positioning, which is significant for potential clients. Clients do not recruit your services for these cases because they perceive that there are other more suitable firms to commission them to.

As someone once said, in life, and this also goes for professional activity, “the most essential thing is that which is intangible�. Friendship, prestige, reputation, credibility, confidence, etc. are all intangibles. This essential thing cannot be bought with money. You must know how to manage it throughout your professional life.

Good management of perception leads legal practices to have the type of clients and cases they want to have, the most profitable ones, avoiding price competition, or in other words the lack of appreciation of professional services. By the way, do you manage your firm’s perception? If so, congratulations. However, are you sure that you are managing it properly? Have you created a concept of a unique firm and are you transmitting this concept to (potential) clients with the right messages, consistently and coherently, and at the right time?

From the marketing, i.e. client, point of view, legal markets in the world are undifferentiated. There is a great deal of competition in every speciality (for example in advice to small and medium-sized companies, urban development and real estate law, in penal and civil law derived from traffic and occupational accidents), although no firm, or practically no firm, is a reference, or even the reference company, in its category, be it at regional and national level, and in many cases even at local level.

Although they do not normally know this, most firms, including networks of law firms, have a problem of positioning, perception, meaning in the market. Thus, for example, there are lawyers who say that their firms belong to prestigious networks, groups or alliances. In most cases, potential clients (companies, basically) have never even heard of networks of lawyers, to say nothing of specific names. With these foreseeable precedents, what meaning can the network in question have to potential clients? Will the network be in a position to compete for client preferences?

There is a need to create concepts of networks that allow their members to compete at national or international level with a chance of being successful. As the potential clients do not perceive significant differences, in perceived value, among the legal practices or their networks, they use price to apply pressure. This behaviour is only to be expected.

As a result of the general lack of dedication and imagination to create distinctive and recognised concepts of firms or networks, imitating the large ones is common practice. By doing so we are doing a huge favour to the big legal advice concerns, and they logically take advantage of this. As we have commented before, the main competitive edge of large firms is the lack of branded strategy of the small- and medium-sized ones. If there is something that small and medium-sized law firms should leverage, it is precisely promoting their brands, their main assets, together with their professionals. Paradoxically, the brand is an intangible thing, a perception.

The point of departure to create a recognised brand are the legal quality of the firm’s professionals. A brand cannot be consolidated without legal quality. Having a brand does not depend on the size of the firm or its geographical location. And a brand is “simply� a name with a meaning, a meaning which clients attach value to in their mind, which is where the hiring of lawyers is decided.

Small- or medium-sized firms, when they grow, tend to launch a whole ensemble of multidisciplinary services, imitating the large firm models and gradually losing what could make them a point of reference in their market category. By imitating the medium-sized offices they will always be behind the large ones, those that set the rules of the game. It is not necessary to master strategic art to understand it, but we must reflect upon the consequences of our acts.

Most offices “sell� services; very few are positioned, recognized, as (the) reference point in one or some specialties. By way of example: many offices accept a case of compensation for traffic accidents if it comes up due to the substantial fees which they may expect to charge. However, from the client’s point of view, which offices are the reference point in this discipline? If the potential clients or those who may impact their decisions do not know this then they are hardly likely to choose you.

In a market flooded by supply, one of the keys consists of winning the battle through client preferences. This can be obtained by means of specialisation, quality in law, the creation of a brand, the partners’ ability to secure the commitment of associates and collaborators, the capacity to create brand loyalty in clients and via the messages the brand transmits, which should translate into associations to which potential clients attach great value.

Have no fear: being successful in markets requires selection. Your firm can continue to render services in multiple specialities. However, the client must perceive what your firm’s speciality or specialities are. Choose the most profitable ones, those which have a potentially good future, and above choose the specialities your firm is best prepared to address. The fewer specialities the better. The client needs references to decide who to hire. Help him.

Until your firm really knows what the client’s thought process is when deciding to hire a legal practice, your brand will be underperforming. On one occasion, a lawyer whose office is small and is located in a provincial capital of 160,000 inhabitants, told us: “in our city law practices are generally speaking unspecialised. We take all cases�. The lawyer wondered what he would have to do to begin to be a cut above his competitors.

We want you to be very clear about what you should do in similar and very frequent cases. Knowing how to do it is a different matter altogether.

 

© Francesc Dominguez, marketing consultant, www.francescdominguez.com.

 

Strategic planning is a process through which a legal practice, regardless of its size, thinks about: a) where do we come from? b) where are we? c) where do we want to go? d) how can we achieve this? and e) when?

By way of comparison, and just as a building must be built on solid foundations, even before a law practice is created its managers should lead the process of explicitly defining the following aspects:

1. The firm’s mission or reason why.
2. The vision of law practice.
3. The firm’s values and philosophy or culture.
4. Information systems.
5. The strategy of its competitors.
6. Strategies of segmentation and positioning.
7. Corporate objectives.

There are law practices that do not really know what their mission or reason why is. Try this: ask the rest of your partners/collaborators to think individually about what the basic purpose of the law practice is (the “mission�, in terms of management). The answers will be very different, and in some cases even dissenting. If this is the case you have an issue.

The mission entails thinking deeply about law practice, why we are in the legal market. The office should define its specialities, its business, or in other words its target market, and the benefits for clients, its own human resources and the company. In turn, the law practice should also define corporate objectives in the short, medium and long term, as steps to achieve its goals. All major objectives can be accomplished by splitting them into small objectives over time.

Vision means knowing clearly what the firm is and what it wants to be. Where it wants to go and where it does not. This vision must be shared by all the members of the legal practice.

Managers should instil values to differentiate the firm and facilitate strategy. Values should drive behaviour, action. A strong consensus-based system of values, compatible with the personal values of the members of the firm, is indispensable. The firm management must spearhead a permanent policy of promotion of values via a consistent discourse and action. Closely related to values, the success of a law firm is based on the existence of a culture (“how we do things here�) focused on quality of service to clients, creativity and participation.

Every legal practice should manage its information resources through a practical information system that makes it possible to pick up on opportunities and act. Contrary to popular belief, information is not power. Power lies in the use that is made of information.

The legal practice should choose what type of clients and cases it wants. In other words, it should opt for a specific segmentation strategy. Segmenting means selecting, on the basis of specific variables, which segments or parts of the market the practice will target. These segments must be identifiable, measurable and above all accessible. We must choose segments in which the firm has a competitive edge.

A law practice must have answers to the really important questions, critical in securing a good positioning, or in other words, the right perception of the firm, its professionals and specialities among current and potential clients: what is the firm, or does it mean? How is the firm perceived (its image in the market)? How do we want to be perceived (strategic positioning)? What are the priorities required to obtain the desired positioning? What is the most effective way of obtaining the clients we want? Which specialities will we develop? What can we do better than our competitors? Positioning, which should be supported by the firm’s strong points, drives the marketing plan and determines the communication strategy of a legal practice.

You need to know who your competitors are, their strong points, and above all their weak points, what are they doing and how. There are law practices that fall into the temptation of imitating, benchmarking. In the best of cases such practice means adapting to the way competitors, normally leaders or winners, do things. If your law firm bases its strategic performance on such an approach, then you are not doing marketing. Those who imitate competitors are not doing marketing. You should promote the things that distinguish you, and innovate.

Finally, it is of paramount importance that you have a good answer to the following question, or in other words, an answer from the client’s standpoint: Why should potential clients choose us and not our competitors? Answers such as “because we are the best� do not work. The important thing is what you and your law firm mean to the client.

 

© Francesc Domínguez, marketing consultant. www.francescdominguez.com

 

There is a key question in strategy, in marketing: “Why should potential clients hire the services of our law practice instead of our competitors’? If you have a good answer to this question — in other words, a “client logic�-based answer— then congratulations. Otherwise your strategy needs to be redefined.

It is not a case of what you think makes your firm different, but rather of what your clients think and value as being specific to you and your firm. However, you can rest assured that if your law practice continues to do what it has been doing until now, in terms of management, then it will continue to get the same results. The legal world, and our clients’ reality, has changed. Something that worked in the past is no longer a guarantee of success in the present, and even less so in the future.

My purpose as a consultant is to help law practices, particularly the medium and small-sized ones, to be more competitive. “Helping them to be more competitive� means helping them, to quote one lawyer, “to reflect on questions that we have kept to ourselves for years, latent, unvoiced�.

What do I mean by “more competitive�. Since competitiveness is a broad-ranging concept, and, to a lesser extent, subjective, when I set up a marketing consultancy in a law practice we ask our clients what they expect of me.

Law firms ask their marketing consultant the following things: “We want (in the words of two associates) you to help us to know ourselves, to define our identity, to know what distinguishes us in the market, what elements of our identity the market could be more sensitive to. Finally, we want you to help us to select the best media to convey these elements or messages. We believe that our potential is being underutilised.�

“We need (this comment comes from a partner, a CEO) to establish a system of internal communication to help us to improve our client service; to analyze the techniques we should use to knit our team together; to define our short-, medium- and long-term objectives in order to achieve our target positioning and secure a very professional and stable corporate structure.�

The application of marketing as I understand it entails several phases: analyses and diagnosis strategic of the brand and marketing plans in the short-, medium and medium-long term.

Analyses and strategic diagnoses are basic, and their quality is directly related to the type of questions that a consultant can ask his client in areas such as strategic planning, corporate objectives in the short-, medium- and long-term; strategy of marketing and communication, human resource policies, etc. Some examples of questions, to name but some, are: what distinguishes my law practice, what makes it unique?; do clients value these differential aspects?, what perception of my law practice do collaborators and clients have?, what type of firm do I want (vision)?, what makes me special in the market?, etc.

From me experience in consultancy, I confirm that many firms do not really know what differentiates them from the rest.

Marketing is a continuous process, a process to attract, to win over, to satisfy and create loyalty in the type of clients (and cases) the law practice aspires to. Marketing does not end with the implementation of a marketing plan, but rather begins there. For this reason, when I set up a consultancy, I tell the client that it is a good idea to continue with the service relationship for a certain time, in order to integrate the marketing into the firm’s work dynamics.

Any law firm that is not managed with business criteria will find it difficult to survive in the future, and this is even more true of medium- and small-sized concerns. Managing with business criteria is perfectly compatible with doing so within an ethical framework and with the code of conduct of the legal profession, and with the dignity of the legal profession.

 

© 2003-2005, Francesc Domínguez, marketing consultant. This article was first published in the monographic “La imagen de la Justiciaâ€? [”The image of Justice”] (Diario de Noticias, La Ley Publishing House).

 

The practice of law has changed. The profession is overcrowded. The legal profession is in the throes of internationalization. New competitors from other professions have emerged. New technologies have accelerated processes of management in legal practices. There is also an increasing number of mergers and alliances between law firms, etc.

In a highly competitive legal market, with new challenges, the lawyer needs to have a better knowledge and make use of management techniques, including the key discipline, marketing, as in any business of professional services. And there can be no doubt that for clients –whose perception is what really counts– a legal practice is a services firm, albeit with certain specific characteristics where the relationship of confidence between lawyer and client is basic.

Naturally, a lawyer can make use of marketing techniques which are respectful of professional ethics and code of conduct, with the dignity of the profession of the lawyer.

In general, the lack of marketing techniques used by the legal profession is due to the fact that they have tended to confuse marketing with advertising or sales, and the output of the legal service with its marketing. The confusion among these concepts is such that many lawyers believe that if a lawyer is a good lawyer he does not need marketing.

The basic purpose of marketing is to create and offer value. Law marketing, specifically, is the link between the lawyer and the market. It helps a law firm to orient its resources and efforts better, and makes it possible for its differential qualities to be recognized. Marketing is a process of setting up markets and positions, not just promotion or advertisement. It enables a lawyer to make himself known, be positively differentiated from competitors and to strengthen his image. The application of marketing should have always be based on the lawyer’s technical excellence in law. Unlike other sectors of the professional world, advertising, as a promotional activity, does not play a main role in law marketing.

In short, the basic purpose of legal marketing is to win clients and create loyalty in the current client portfolio, to differentiate the firm from its competitors and to build brands, of both lawyer and the legal practice. A law firm with personality and character, with a brand, is, to the majority of potential clients, a guarantee of quality and a reduction in the time taken to choose a lawyer or legal practice. Having a powerful brand avoids price-based competition and the erosion of margins. It ensures that the client’s main decision criterion in hiring legal services will not be, apart from the recommendation, logically, price. All this is what is globally understood by the concept of law marketing.

 

© 2001-2004, Francesc Domínguez, marketing consultant. www.francescdominguez.com