To which the answer is yes and no. (And to ensure you don't waste your time, this post is NOT about the Manic Street Preachers).
But you can be sure that the future is not going to be more of the same. Which seems to have escaped a lot of law firm leaders.
I had already started this post when I read, a little late, Reena Sen Gupta's article A self-deceiving return to business as usual in June's Legal Business. She argues that "an improving economic climate is leading top law firms to wrongly assume the ‘new’ normal is the same as the old one." This is very much what I have heard when talking with UK lawyers - and it is having an impact on the approach law firms are (or aren't) taking to marketing and business development.
The discussion goes as follows,
"We've always done it (whatever "it" is; marketing, business development, client relationship) like this. Why do we now need to change? It's always worked before."
And my reply?
"You may not need to change immediately, but you will need to, sooner rather than later, so wouldn't it be sensible to at least look at how you might?"
For along with the certainty of change happening, is that change doesn't wait for anyone to catch up.
And perhaps one of the most important changes is in the dynamic between law firms and their clients. Once upon a time it was the lawyer who decided how legal services were to be delivered. No longer. Now it is the client who decides whether, how, and what legal services to buy. And who from (and the 'who' may not be a traditional supplier). There are any number of reasons for this: increased competition, new entrants into the legal services market, technological change, changing attitudes to lawyers. But the reasons, interesting as they may be, are not really important. It is happening and there is nothing that law firms can do to reverse this: Clementi, Moore's Law, and the impact of the recession let the genie out.
Instead what is important is how your firm will survive, and prosper, in this buyers' market.
For in terms of their expertise, law firms and lawyers are, by and large, all very much the same. So what is going to make your law firm different? How do you get noticed? And is it going to be enough?
More of the same is not a strategy that should recommend itself to anyone but it appears to be the default position for a lot of law firms. Change for change's sake is also not a strategy - but in a crowded and increasingly competitive legal services market place, there are going to be winners and losers. George Bull writes in Baker Tilly's most recent PPG briefing, Are you going to be one of the fifty survivors? that "of the 200 or so mid-tier law firms, only 50 or so may survive in the short-medium term". And whereas the briefing focuses on those necessary practical steps that law firm leaders should be taking to be in the successful 50 (and the pitfalls they need avoid) - in George Bull's summary, financial fitness, a clear strategy, and real differentiators - I would add getting your marketing and business development right, aligning it properly with that strategy, and ensuring that you communicate the message effectively.
