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The Two Faces of The Law - Part II

(Continued...)

By Chrissie Lightfoot 

Chrissie Lightfoot is CEO of EntrepreneurLawyer Limited where she advises professional service firms (and their individual people) globally on marketing, personal branding, sales, social media, social networking and innovation. The (London) Times newspaper recently reported Chrissie as one of the Top Ten Best Legal Tweeters. She is a non-practising solicitor, an entrepreneur, international keynote speaker and author, best noted for her groundbreaking book The Naked Lawyer: RIP to XXX – How to Market, Brand and Sell YOU!   

The new legal marketplace 

Clearly, the transformation and arguably the re-invention of legal service provision,  is well and truly underway. As legal commentator Jordan Furlong puts it, "we’ve begun crossing over from the old legal marketplace to the new one."

In reading Jordan’s thought provoking ‘Goodbye to all that’  blog post, there were three statements that really struck me:

"The new providers and new technologies are not going to replace lawyers... but they are going to marginalize us and render law firms mostly irrelevant".

"Lawyers still have outstanding value to offer in certain quarters, but we need to concentrate our market offerings around that value, and we need better platforms for our services than traditional law firms provide."

"Lawyers are smart, knowledgeable, creative and trustworthy professionals who, unfortunately, suffer from poor business acumen, terrible management skills, wildly disproportionate aversion to risk, outsized revenue expectations, and a business model about 25 years out of date. The market won’t abandon them — they have unique and sometimes extraordinarily valuable skills and characteristics — but it will find the best use for them: expert specialists with limited influence over the larger process."

I agree.  As we lawyers become marginalized, our role and value - both Face to Face and at the Interface - will be in extolling our expert niche specialism with exceptional emotional intelligence whilst delivering extraordinary customer service (humanisation – naked – something AI and computers will never be... or will they?).

Partners Club becomes UK's leading networking group for top legal professionals

220 Partners Club Members, one great venue, the crème de la crème of UK solicitors and TotallyLegal, the UK's top job site for legal professionals. That pretty much sums up the success the first Partners Club event that took place on 15th September at the Holborn Bars in London. TotallyLegal sponsored the premier networking event which was attended by leading Law Firms, Barristers’ Chambers and Corporates. We are thrilled to have been part of it and are hoping to see the popularity of the Partners Club continue to grow among the country's leading legal professionals.

A Lawyer's Three Worlds

By Nico Jansen 

Nico A. Jansen graduated in private law at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands and has a Masters of Business Administration (MBA) from Edinburgh Business School/ Heriot Watt University in Scotland. He holds the professional qualifications in marketing (A and B) of  the Dutch Institute of Marketing (NIMA) and the Diploma in Marketing of the British Chartered Institute of Marketing of which he is a Member and admitted as a Chartered Marketer. In his capacity as managing consultant of www.legalmarketing.nl he operates as an interim lawyer and marketer and holds a lecturing position in (European) Business Law at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration of the VU University in Amsterdam. In 2011 he published ‘Law & Self-Regulation. A legal and business perspective’.

Law, business and economics are three different academic disciplines, each with a specific object of study and theoretically developed concepts. Legal science focuses on structuring society by regulating behaviour in the interest of justice which is the fair recognition of relevant interests. Business studies on the other hand, tends to focus on value creation and strategies while economics studies how the forces of supply and demand allocate scarce resources.

 

"You can’t market Private Client Law", Or can you?

By  Douglas McPherson, 

Douglas is Director at Size 10 ½ Boots, a business development agency that works solely with professional service firms.Tenandahalf help their clients grow by winning more new clients and by generating higher fees from their existing clients. Due to their innovative methods, the marketing of private client services is now an area in which Tenandahalf lead the market.

“You can’t market private client law!” Does that sound familiar? At Size 10 1/2 Boots, we’ve spent the last 7 years helping law firms with business development and we tend to hear it a lot. In fact, it’s a statement we hear almost as much as it’s one we disagree with. 

While private client law can’t be marketed in the same way as commercial or more specialist lines, it can still be marketed. In fact, it can actually be marketed more effectively and in more innovative ways than its corporate counterpart.

The legal landscape is changing; this is no longer news but fact. Competition between firms – most notably on a regional basis – is increasing daily and commercial entities from outside the sector are threatening to encroach on a variety of the more transactional service lines. Firms will now need to adopt a more progressive approach to marketing services, especially since individuals are now finding it increasingly difficult to recognise their need for these services and distinguish between different providers.

The Two Faces of The Law - Part I

By Chrissie Lightfoot 

Chrissie Lightfoot is CEO of EntrepreneurLawyer Limited where she advises professional service firms (and their individual people) globally on marketing, personal branding, sales, social media, social networking and innovation. The (London) Times newspaper recently reported Chrissie as one of the Top Ten Best Legal Tweeters. She is a non-practising solicitor, an entrepreneur, international keynote speaker and author, best noted for her groundbreaking book The Naked Lawyer: RIP to XXX – How to Market, Brand and Sell YOU!   

First published in Legal Futures on 1st September, 2011

With the plethora of reports and blog posts about online legal document and service providers, legal innovation, the law firm business model and the future of the legal profession, whizzing around cyberland of late it seems to me that we’re transitioning toward ‘two faces of the law’. The two dominant umbrella business models now at the fore, that allude who, what, where, why, when and how we serve our clients, are: Face to Face and Interface.

At a time of great change, it is the 'humanisation' of lawyers that I believe will be the key differentiator in the success of these models and their adopters. As we journey ahead into the future and Artificial Intelligence (AI) within legal provision and service becomes more advanced, and Singularity edges closer, 'humanisation', (that is, our ability to simply be human) will become even more important and valuable.