Two-thirds of law firms actively target international growth

Over half of law firms across geographic regions are optimistic about growth in 2016, but pricing and competition pose the two biggest challenges to success, new research states.

A new survey of over 100 marketing and business development (BD) professionals in law firms across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia-Pacific regions has found that the legal industry is continuing to shake off the effects of the last global downturn.

The research from LexisNexis found that 62 per cent of respondents claim to be proactively targeting international growth.

With high expectations of success, alongside the pricing and competitive challenges, some 88 per cent of respondents said they are shifting their marketing and BD strategies to win new business.

Measuring return on investment (ROI) from business growth-related activities continues to challenge legal professionals, however, mainly due to lack of data.

Almost two-thirds of respondents did not believe their firm had quantifiable data to measure ROI on marketing and BD initiatives.

The metrics used to track ROI most frequently are: a win/loss ratio; goals by practice area or group; individual lawyer goals; and the effect of nurturing across the opportunity lifecycle.

When asked what the most valuable thing a firm could do for marketing or business development - common responses involved increasing budgets, great investment in people, and changing the mind set of lawyers towards BD.

The research also found that technology tools, such as customer relationship management (CRM) or marketing automation is the top area firms plan to significantly increase investment in this year.

'As professionals make the business case for increased investment in technology to their firms, they must first strategically determine what they want to do with the system and what problems they want to solve,' said Guy Phillips, sales director at LexisNexis Enterprise Solutions.

Only then will they be able to derive tangible ROI from their functional efforts.'