The legal market's paradox of choice

‘O’ wad some Power the giftie gie us ?To see oursels as others see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us, An’ foolish notion.’

Burns’s immortal quotation demonstrates how perceptions differ. So often in business the ‘message sent’ is not the ‘message received’. Modern communication requires us to take responsibility for the latter if we are to be effective.

So, what does this mean to a modern contemporary law practice? In the age of the ‘client as customer’, perhaps a different relational dynamic exists between legal practices and the clients they serve. Since before Burns’s time, the law has been regarded as a ‘status’ profession, one that society looks to in order to maintain both social stability and individual rights. Equally, however, for a great period of time, the law was the bastion of the rich and many more now access it.

Chris Grayling in his time at the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) contended that the legal profession was overpopulated and with excess capacity. Irrespective of whether we are dealing with a person needing a simple will, or a large corporate seeking complex support over an impending merger and acquisition, it is a truism that the relationship between solicitor and client is now very much more a dynamic of solicitor and customer, where the customer has real power.

It follows that organisations need to adopt more ‘customer centric’ approaches. How does one do that? Generations of legal professionals have simply assumed their high social status, so much so that, with the relaxation of marketing rules, many companies still have little clue as to how to market, other than by traditional word-of-mouth approaches.

Customers often experience what American psychologist Barry Schwartz calls the ‘paradox of choice’, where too many options actually suppress active choice and simpler choices are likely to take place based on crude criteria. This can lead to conservative choices, often sticking with ‘the known’. This can work well for long-term client populations, but complacency over client retention must be avoided by proactive strategies.

The paradox of choice also makes for two key areas we need to consider. First, by ensuring ?any offer made is tangible, transparent, and simply coded in the mind of the client, who must assemble and manage numerous variables in order to make a purchasing choice. Second, multiple offerings must be limited to allow simple sifting of options. Remember a time you were in a restaurant confronted with a vast menu. Most find it difficult to choose in these circumstances, deferring ordering, garnering more time, only to rush their choice as the waiter eventually re-approaches. Options that are presented simply and clearly can overcome multiple choice inertia.

?New demographics?People want to be involved and active in their choices but need to be enabled to make decisions. Allow the client processing time in order to make clear decisions, ensuring appropriate follow-up. For many clients, empowerment as a customer equates to value. We also now have the millennials, for whom lifestyle involves interaction and participation rather than normative authority in a particular role, such as that of a lawyer. This latter demographic seeks to work with someone as an equal with different skills in a partnership that is interactive and evolving.

In a modern world, lifestyles often emulate those of the rich of past generations, and access to legal services increasingly supports lifestyle choice. Hitherto, access to law for most would be in cases of extreme need. Nowadays, this access facilitates the acquisition of property, business growth, the protection of intellectual property, and a whole range of other activities that make the law less reactive to life circumstances and more reflective of lifestyles. Within this, any law practice missing out the language of empowerment and the powerful patterns of communication that can go with clients in literature, social media, promotional events, and so on, really do miss a trick.

The world has moved on. Clients will always be clients at an ideological level, but at the transactional level they are customers with the power to take their business elsewhere. Notions of traditional client retention rarely exist now and ‘brand switching’ most frequently occurs when the client has become dissatisfied and disempowered.

Customer care, therefore, recognises clients as customers who make educated, empowered choices about the services they need. Marketing needs to be sensitive to local need, demographics, and cultures. Lawyers need to learn to listen to client aspirations as legal services interact with their life choices.

Such customer centrism is crucial if one’s business is to flourish, grow, and compete in what are now the most competitive times ever.

It all comes back to Burns and seeing services through the customer’s eyes. SJ

David Cliff is managing director of Gedanken and chairman of the Institute of Directors’ Northern Sector Group @David_Cliff www.gedanken.co.uk