Recognizing the need to approach client problems and needs with broader and deeper substantive disciplines than just legal expertise, law firms have evolved their service offerings to include formal, integrated teams of lawyers, consultants and other professional experts. As early as the 1980s, law firms began to form separate subsidiaries affiliations and joint ventures to…
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In an effort to offer existing and new clients fuller capabilities and solutions, many law firms have developed wholly-owned subsidiaries often comprised of experts in an industry or service specialty who are not lawyers. As we reviewed in our last post, Law Firm MDPs and New Delivery Models Part 1 – A Primer, clients today…
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In our post Who Do Law Firms Compete with and Why? we described the fierce competition that law firms face today, noting that much of that competition is increasingly coming from non-law firm legal services providers, consulting firms and the Big 4, which have some of the largest law firms in the world outside the…
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Ask the most successful rainmakers what their secret is to their success and most will tell you that they work on it constantly and relentlessly. It has become integral to their client work and practice and they do it every day. Given the pressure lawyers feel to record billable hours, it may seem almost impossible…
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[Note: This post is co-authored by RainMaking Oasis and Jonathan Hollenberg of HawkPartners, a marketing strategy and research firm for Fortune 500 companies.] In our prior two posts Customer Experience (CX) Part 1 – Is It Different than Customer Service and Customer Experience (CX) Part 2 – Mapping the Client Journey, we discussed the difference…
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[Note: This post is co-authored by RainMaking Oasis and Jonathan Hollenberg of HawkPartners, a marketing strategy and research firm for Fortune 500 companies.] As discussed in our first post Customer Experience (CX) Part 1 – Is It Different than Customer Service, customer satisfaction often focuses on narrow and discrete touch points that clients are exposed…
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Providing exceptional and consistent client service is critical to your firm’s success, but to be a real winner, you will have to deliver an exceptional client experience (CX). With clients now in the driver’s seat and law firms aggressively competing to hold on to clients or take work away from others, we know that excellent…
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Collaboration in the workplace is widely recognized as an important success factor in the most effective organizations. It is necessary in order to build and share knowledge, accelerate innovation, break down silos and facilitate connectivity. A recent Harvard study found that managers and employees now spend 50% or more time in collaborative activities than they…
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Despite all the talk about clients not being loyal anymore and only being interested in pushing matters to the least expensive “bidder,” many things about relationships still matter to most clients. In our last blog post Sales and Service: The Loyal Client Lifecycle, we touched upon some of the ways to nurture and advance client relationships….
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Law firms continue to compete aggressively for new clients and new work from existing clients. We know from recent surveys by Citi and Altman Weil that client demand for outside lawyers remained flat in 2016 and is expected to do so again in 2017. With the same or less work to go around, this means…
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This article was written by Tory Ruttenberg, who is a RainMaking Oasis Affiliate Consultant and President of Ruttenberg Consulting, LLC and was originally published in PD Quarterly magazine. It is reprinted here with permission from both. Due to the unique nature of law firms, succession planning can be more difficult for them than for other…
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Our last blog post, “Law Firm Partnership Part 1: Do True Partnerships Still Exist?” explored the changes that have occurred in the partnership model in recent decades and the core aspects to healthy partnerships. In this post, we will examine the qualities needed to advance to equity partner status and what it takes to be…
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What’s the difference between a client and a customer? Lawyers, like other professional service providers, consider the term client to be more prestigious and most eschew any reference to clients as customers. But it may just be time to reconsider. First, clients are beginning to act more like custmers and second, law firms could benefit…
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“Value” is one of the most commonly used buzzwords of the first part of this century. Everyone is talking about it, promoting it, writing about it, offering it, demanding it, trying to measure it and bragging about it. First, let’s start with the Merriam-Webster definition of value: 1: a fair return or equivalent in goods,…
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In our last blog post In 2013, Will More Firms Finally Understand that Client Feedback = Better Revenue and Profitability?, we discussed why it is critical to seek feedback from clients and to ensure that they are not only satisfied but extremely satisfied. Extremely satisfied clients lead to truly loyal clients who are much more profitable to…
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