Clients first: Why you need to improve your client service standards

How does law firm training need to change to keep up with the pressures of alternative business structures (ABSs) in the UK? This is a reasonable question to ask in current times, one would think. But, actually, it’s the wrong question or, rather, one based on the wrong premise.

What is happening in the market shouldn’t dictate what your firm does in terms of training: your business plan should decide this. So, what your firm does need to consider in terms of ABSs, alternative fee arrangements, heightened competition from competitors and the like, is to ask whether ABSs are in fact creating competition for your firm in the type of work it does or clients it attracts, and determine just how you should be adjusting your business plan and business model to adapt and compete effectively.

Not doing that analysis but expecting additional training to keep away the spectre of new competition is no better than putting your head in the sand or, worse, clutching on to a knob of garlic and a wooden stake to drive into the heart of those pesky ABSs so that you can preserve what you see as your firm’s divine right to its traditional market share.

If you have considered what is happening in the legal services market – the new entrants, the types of new entrants, who your actual competitors are now, and where the threats are to your traditional client base and service model, just for starters – then you will have decided what business model you need for your firm, what services you are going to deliver and how you are going to deliver them. Then, and only then, can you start asking whether you need to change, augment or improve the training you provide in your firm.

At the risk of sounding like a perennial broken record: your investment in training must underpin your business plan and facilitate your business objectives. There is no training for training’s sake in a well-run business. Rather, training is what enables a business to better deploy its human resources so as to enhance firm profitability and raise service levels. So, let’s consider what you need to do in terms of training based on your business model, the types of services you offer and the ways in which you deliver them.

Business models

The first thing we need to do is to dispel a myth about ABSs.

Many people hear ‘ABS’ and picture a monster or an alien. This is wrong, not to mention silly. Let’s be clear about this: an ABS is just another vehicle for delivering legal services. The factors that make an organisation an ABS can be many and varied: ?

• it may have someone who is not a solicitor as a manager (‘partner’ in non-Legal Services Act speak);

• it may be owned externally or have external investment; or

• it may provide non-legal as well as legal services. ?

Yes, some ABSs may be new corporate entrants into legal services (read ?‘Co-op law’ for ‘Tesco law’) but, ?equally, some ABSs are simply firms, ?in the traditional sense, which either ?want to have non-solicitors as partners ?or want to use external investment to develop their business.

So, if the business model you have decided on is an ABS, you need to be clear about what it is that makes you ?an ABS. If it is simply that you want to make your finance director (who is a qualified accountant) a partner, then ?there is little impact in terms of training ?in the firm, apart from making sure he is up to speed with the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s Handbook.

If, however, you are moving to an ABS model because you have a new non-lawyer owner, are taking in external investment, or are bringing in other non-lawyer professionals at manager level to provide both legal and non-legal services, then how you run the business to meet the commercial expectations of the new owner/investors/partners is going to be very important. That will mean ensuring that everyone in the firm understands the commercial imperatives that a change in ownership, investors or partners will bring.

Law firms for a long time have toyed with the issue of training lawyers to have business expertise as well as legal expertise. Some have done more than others (the trend for customised MBAs springs to mind). However, we still have a culture in many firms of senior and managing partners being appointed or elected without reference to their management or business skills.

All too often, it is only when people move into these leadership positions that they start searching round for management training or business education – which is why Harvard Business School’s one-week Leading Professional Service Firms programme has made so much money out of law firm partners in the UK.

Rather than waiting for your next senior partner or managing partner to be appointed, you start doing something about this now. It is too late when they are appointed to have them start acquiring the business management skills, knowledge and expertise that they will need for the role.

Start early. Learn from what successful corporations do. They have management programmes that start at a junior level, they have succession planning, and they use promotion and appointments to develop an individual’s management ability and to test it. You don’t see the managing director of a multinational corporation being appointed just because he is popular with his fellow directors; he is appointed because he can demonstrate a track record to do the job.

Equally, if the partners at your firm are not able to demonstrate the appropriate level of business expertise and acumen and a professional approach to run the firm as a business (such as through proper succession planning and talent development at an early stage), then they may not find that external investment they need. Or, if they do, they may find that they are sidelined in the running of the business and end up as the backroom boys doing the legal donkey work – rowing the ship rather than steering its course.

Service delivery

Even before ABSs came to the UK, service delivery in law firms was rarely on a par with corporate enterprises – those in the retail sector and service industries immediately spring to mind. Lawyers have a strong sense of self and of their individual worth to the firm, which is completely understandable when you consider the remuneration models that have traditionally been used in law firms.

However, if the legal services a firm offers are going to be compared to the legal services offered by exactly those sorts of corporate enterprises, the firm would do well to take a long, hard look at whether it is in fact delivering consistency in the quality of its legal services.

There have always been new entrants coming into the legal services market. Before the advent of ABSs, they tended to be new firms, international firms setting up in the UK, or merging firms. Now we also have corporate enterprises with no track record in law but which are successful businesses with established reputations for delivering goods or services. These businesses, which are becoming licensed as ABSs, are adding legal services onto a range of already established services being provided.

Client choice, inevitably, is influenced by price; we would be fooling ourselves ?to pretend it isn’t. However, price is not the only factor – quality of service can be just as important, if not more important. What you therefore need to do is to ensure your firm can compete head-to-head with your corporate competitors in terms of service delivery.

If you are worried about ABSs making inroads into your firm’s traditional client base, then maintaining and fortifying client relationships is vital. Client relationship management has been on law firms’ training programmes for many years, but this will not be enough. Let’s be realistic: you have to get the client through the door first and keep him there to have a client relationship to manage.

So, your firm will need to move the focus from client management to basic customer care. Customer care is about consistency in the standard of service delivery, rather than bespoke nurturing of particularly important clients. It needs to be practised by everyone in the firm who comes into contact in any way with an actual or prospective client.

A lot of firms have gone in for Excel or other quality marks. That is heading in the right direction, but nowhere near far enough to achieve high service standards. The cult of the individual in law firms needs to make way for a corporate culture. This culture must prevail throughout the firm, in everything from how the phone is answered, to consistent approaches to types of work, to the use of ‘house’ documentation and house styles. That is what these new guys do. It’s time to push your firm’s service standards up to the highest denominator, rather than expecting your corporate competitors to pull theirs down to the lowest.

Types of service

In order to compete effectively, your firm may decide that it needs to extend its services beyond traditional one-to-one legal advice and legal representation and to offer something more 21st century, such as a 24/7 phone line or a DIY drafting facility via your website. If your firm does goes down this route, however, the same issue will arise of matching the service standards of your corporate competitors, who have been doing this for a lot longer.

Let’s take the telephone hotline by way of example: these lines need to be manned, not necessarily by lawyers, but by people who are able to do the necessary triage. That means recruitment and training of those who carry out the triage. When a call is directed to a lawyer, however, the lawyer needs to have the communication and interpersonal skills to elicit the information he needs and provide the necessary advice.

You may say that this is what lawyers do anyway. Well, yes, they do. However, generally, they do it with clients whom they have identified in advance. Telephone hotlines, on the other hand, are anonymous, at least in terms of knowing who the person is, their credentials, their veracity and their intellectual acuity. That can be difficult. So, consider what companies do by way of training for their call centres.

If all of this talk of call centres and customer services sounds distasteful to you, then just make sure that the business model and strategy you have decided on is such that you will never have to worry about erosion of your client base or market share. And, check that you don’t have any sand in your ears. ?

Melissa Hardee is a consultant and author of Legal Education and Training – A Practical Guide for Law Firms (hardeeconsulting.com)