Combining a general brand and specialisms

The rapidly changing legal landscape has left many high street law firms wondering what the future holds and, more importantly, which direction to take in order to survive.

It is no longer enough to simply offer a general practice service and expect clients to keep walking through your door. Successful general practice firms will be those that offer a package of specialisms, and which successfully market those specialist departments to the appropriate niche market in addition to any multipurpose, firm-wide marketing message. But how can this be done?

When our firm launched '¨30 years ago, our aim was to provide a broad spectrum of services to both private and commercial clients. We gradually departmentalised our lawyers and they became specialists who concentrated on one or two areas of law, rather than being general practitioners. Over the past three decades, we have moved further in this direction, and in general it has worked extremely well.

The challenge for firms today is to reconcile their general brand with the need to deliver a much more specific message for each niche area they specialise in. Some firms may choose to have different brands for each specialism, but our approach has been to establish the Palmers brand in all our specialist areas.
You need to be able to make clear to anyone looking for employment law services, for example, that the firm has specialists in this area, every bit as good as any so-called niche firms. This means you need to look carefully at your marketing strategy and ensure that the specialist and overall brand promises do not conflict with each other.

General practice firms also have huge opportunities to cross-sell their services, and only a very few do this really well. In addition to some specific incentives, our firm has introduced a fun, competitive element to encourage greater cross-selling across our departments.

SME law firms also have an advantage in the fact they have a local reputation, a visible presence and local networks - which is why their lawyers should be taking every opportunity to go out, meet people and promote the firm. '¨If you can combine that with making clients and prospects aware of all the specialist services you offer, it will give '¨you an even greater advantage over bigger firms.

There are still great benefits to reap for mixed-practice firms who can do this well, but those who don't will be little more than a collection of small, separate practice areas without any real brand definition. General, 'vanilla' marketing messages will no longer bring clients through the door in the face of more specialist practices and online service offerings. SJ