Our "Custom & Advisory" column looked into the trends of how law firms and corporate law departments handled client feedback, business development, and talent retention over the past year
Over the past year, the Thomson Reuters Institute published its regular Custom & Advisory column, which suggested strategies to help law firms overcome their most pressing challenges and improve their client relationships and firms’ own performance effectiveness.
Looking over the past year, three key themes — around client feedback, talent management, and law firm business development — strongly resonated in our columns and throughout the legal industry.
Leveraging client feedback
Learning what clients are thinking by way of formal client listening programs or feedback opportunities was an especially potent manner in which law firms sought to improve their client relationships and demonstrate their value to clients over the past year.
Whether gathering feedback at the client interview stage or in post-pitch discussions, receiving feedback from clients around what the firm and its lawyers did right or wrong, how the firm’s client service could improve, and even what competitors were doing it better may lead to some uncomfortable questions, but such client insight can prove extremely valuable to the firm’s performance going forward.
Further, a two-part series of columns on client listening programs showed how valuable those can be to a law firm’s own bottom line, detailing how clients spend twice as much with those law firms that ask them for formal feedback than with those that don’t. The series also discussed the typical barriers that exist to establishing client listening programs, most significantly, of course, trying to engage firm partners in the process.
Talent & retention
Not surprisingly, finding ways to keep key legal talent was quite possibly the top concern among law firms and other professional services firms throughout 2022 — and our Custom & Advisory columns certainly reflected that.
Indeed, it became clear as the year went on that legal talent had become extremely mobile, and many lawyers, especially younger associates, were switching law firms with increasing frequency in order to find a good fit that met their needs. Interestingly, while the legal industry initially thought throwing more money at these associates would solve their retention problems, it seemed there was much more at stake in the minds of these associates.
Numerous industry surveys showed that among associates, compensation ranked lower as a reason to stay at their current firm. Much more important in their minds was the firm’s culture and leadership, according to our research.
This meant that law firms needed to look for incentives beyond compensation to retain their top legal talent, such as improving how fairly associates are treated and how much they are shown respect by their current firms — both of which ranked very high on the list of reasons why an associate would choose to leave or stay at their current firm.
In our surveys, associates also noted that they are most likely to leave a firm if they perceive a lack of opportunities for career growth. This insight was extremely valuable to those law firms that were concerned about lawyer retention because it gave them one clear area to address by offering more career development, networking, mentoring, and training opportunities. In fact, all of these factors contributed greatly to an enhanced sense of well-being among lawyers, something too that law firms would be wise to promote in order to keep top talent from leaving the firm.
Business development strategy
As the legal industry (and the rest of the world) moved past the worst of the global pandemic throughout 2022, those law firms that embraced remote and hybrid working environments were now confronted with managing clients that had done the same, dramatically changing how lawyers and clients were interacting.
For example, during the pandemic and now going forward, it became clear that videoconferencing was far superior to phone calls with clients, allowing lawyers to better establish rapport more rapidly and greatly enhance the client relationship.
Another Custom & Advisory column picked up on the theme of improved client relationships by suggesting that a business development strategy that’s lodged in how the firm’s value is demonstrated to clients can be a way for firms to differentiate themselves from the competition. Clearly, all firms lay claim to having client-centric service, but only those that make that claim come to life by demonstrating at every touch point within the client experience will truly differentiate themselves, the column noted.
Like with many strong themes that emerged through our Custom & Advisory columns, embedding the demonstration of value within the client experience was not just a good-to-have mantra of today, but rather a necessary component for law firms if they were to continue forward successfully in the current environment.
Clearly, business development doesn’t just begin and end with finding additional ways to serve current clients. Law firms should be constantly on the look-out for new practice areas or service offerings that can help them add business from current clients and attract new ones. For example, the area of environmental, social & governance (ESG) has become a potentially lucrative vein of new business in compliance, corporate work, and risk management matters for those law firms that are early adopters.
As reflected in our Custom & Advisory columns published throughout 2022, the themes of client feedback, talent management, and business development greatly influence firm leaders’ focus over the past year. Moreover, these themes — and others that will be chronicles here — are likely to continue weighing on law firms leaders’ minds into the next year and beyond.
If you’re interested in learning more about some of the research used in our monthly Custom & Advisory column, and how this data can be applied to your firm, please visit here.
