The hall of mirrors

As a child, one of my favourite fairground attractions was the Hall of Mirrors (for those of you too young to have found yourselves in this distorted reality, Apple's Photo Booth app is similar). Why I so enjoyed the Hall of Mirrors, and why my children like Photo Booth, is that it allows us to play with our image, to make and remake ourselves. The everyday looking glass is subverted but we remain in control. 

In our daily lives, the looking glass is how we see ourselves, and we invariably assume that what we are seeing (albeit with a mirror image) is how others see us. But, and this is sometimes a problem, our perception of who we are and what we look like may not always be the same as other people's.

The same is true of law firms.

All too often how law firms and their partners see (and therefore want to present) themselves, and how their clients, their prospects, their suppliers, their influencers, and their employees see them, are different. This disconnect in perception is a real challenge for law firms - for how can you properly engage without an understanding of those perceptions.

So where should law firms start to gain that understanding? The answer is surprisingly simple: ask the question.

My experience is that lawyers are often professionally reluctant to ask questions to which they don't know the answer (at least in part). They need to put that reluctance aside. They also, like many of us, believe they know the answer without first asking the question. They need to be open to the possibility of being wrong. As part of a rebranding, I approached an influencer to invite him to take part in a survey on perceptions. "You are very brave, " he remarked. "I don't know many law firms who are prepared to do this. What if you get the wrong answers?" My reply was that there are no wrong answers. The problem is simply failing to listen to or act on those answers, however unwelcome they may be.

So if you want to ask the question, call me to discuss the how, the what, and the where.

Where it starts

In case you may be thinking that these conversations are a little one way, and that I am somewhat critical of lawyers, this post looks at it from a somewhat different perspective.

When I was a lawyer, I always tried to understand, so far as I was able, what it was that my clients did. It wasn't necessarily that easy. In the latter part of the 1980s I had two very demanding clients. The first was a large book manufacturer. Understanding their processes and business wasn't that difficult, although I still puzzle my children when I refer to books being case bound. The other was a software house, writing bespoke programs for main frames. This was much more of a challenge. I had learnt some coding in the late 1960s (don't ask), but that had long left me and I struggled to make sense of what exactly they did. They remained a client, but not mine. 

Understanding what a client does, how their business operates, what their challenges and their opportunities are - essentially what makes them tick - is for most lawyers an integral part of acting for that client. And if it isn't, it should be.

And so it must be for marketers acting for or employed in law firms. For without that understanding, how can you market the firm and its services? 

And yet I have come across people in marketing and communications, both working inside and outside law firms, who don't have this understanding, and who remain incurious about the firm - they will learn about the service offering but leave it at that.

I don't think that that is enough. One of the reasons for starting my consultancy is to help lawyers and marketers understand each other - and the place to start from is what makes them tick.

And I couldn't resist this photo. One of my daughters is Marketing Lead at a large London hospital - and here she is, in scrubs, getting to understand what makes cardiac surgeons tick.

The rearview mirror

Why am I not surprised that lawyers prefer to stick to what they have done before? A lot of people do: it's a known quantity, it requires less time, and it costs less. Lawyers are comfortable with precedent, and that is what it is all about.

And at one level that's OK. Why reinvent the wheel?

But there is a caveat.

For all their talk of innovation (one of the most used words on law firm websites) lawyers aren't very good at "the new". For a number it simply means finding a slightly different way to bill you. And as for marketing? Lawyers shrink at the thought of anything too novel. At one of the firms I worked for, a partner told me, "The last thing we want to be is first", adding, "and anyway, why do we need to change anything? What we had was fine by me."

I left Ashfords LLP as Director of Marketing late yesterday afternoon. My P45 was in the post - the last time I had one of these was nearly 30 years ago. Today I go out on my own as George Wilkinson Consultancy.

And on what is for now, although I hope not for long, a rather clear desk, I have this quote,

We  should spend more time thinking about the future and postulating possible outcomes, rather than relying on the past.

History is important for all sorts of reasons but, as my team became very tired of hearing, the future is not going to be more of the same. That will be as true of law as it is for all the professions, and how law is sold and marketed is going to change.

All I know is that this is going to be an exciting time. 

Note: the quote is by Karl Sternberg from his review in Christ Church Matters of Jerome Booth's Emerging Markets in an Upside Down World.  

Futurology sucks?

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.