Sales in Law Firm

Remember, when people buy drills, they actually they buy holes. So when people come to lawyer they need a solution, not product features. Of course it’s important to show your ability to solve any legal problem, but keep focusing on client needs and offering right solutions instead of talking how big your law firm is, how many offices you have, which law school you attended or what are your practice areas.

There are several strategies that could help to achieve better results on sales and they are pretty simple if you use them.

1. Up-Selling
2. Cross- Selling
3. Re-selling
4. Making law product that could be sold more than once.

Moving from transactional client to constant client

Another issue is that usually clients have 1 problem and then seeks who could solve it. After things are done client moves away because nobody from the law firm takes responsibility to develop relationship, ask for more work and cross selling opportunities. It’s also because of the attitude that clients usually comes from referrals rather than active sales. When a lawyer is done with client’s case, he knows that there will be another new client, so he focuses on serving new client.

Also if your positioning is based on some niche expertise it might be not clear for your client that you still have more people with different specializations in your law office. So after completing the assignment don’t miss a chance to introduce other lawyers to the client and try to seek more cross selling opportunities. Don’t wait to long, because the client will your competitor to solve his another problem if he is not familiar of other law practices you do.

Small and medium size law firms usually do not use modern client relationship management (CRM) software, so they have difficulties tracking the progress in client relationship and see when the last activity was carried for the client. It’s worth to think about simple function – look at your recent cases for 6 month period and if there are any clients with no activity at least for 2 or 3 months you should contact them and remind about yourself immediately. The best way to do this is to call and offer a meeting, or just make a phone call, but keep in mind that less effective is e-mail communication (but of course it’s better than nothing).

Client can be satisfied during the process of buying legal services, but today it is very important what client experience after the purchase is made and legal services already rendered, so called Post-purchase experience. If we forget to contact the client after the transaction, it’s possible that he will not think about us too much. If we take a moment to ask how things are going, we can build good sense of client care and extend client’s positive experience. And it’s one of the most important factors choosing re-purchase or recommendations to others. 

1-2-4 rule in legal sales

It is four times harder, and takes four times as much effort to get a totally new client, than to develop and get work from an existing client. It is two times harder to get work from an ex or “orphaned” client, even if you only worked with them some years ago. The easiest is to get work from your current clients through up-selling, cross-selling and referrals.

Generally law firms do their business development the wrong way round. They spend their time, energy, nerves and budget trying to get totally new clients (via networking, cold pitches etc), while neglecting current and ex-clients. This is a tragedy. They could make their life easier by first focusing on whom they know now, then whom they used to know, and then on the new people.

Who should do the sales?

By default partners are the source of the clients in law firm. Sometimes senior lawyers over the years of working with firm’s clients get their trust and they start to refer their peers directly to senior lawyers, not partners. But these are very rare cases. On the other hand more and more modern law firms have specialized non-lawyers sales professionals, so called professional business developers (PBDs).  

Julie Savarino, Managing Director at Business Development Inc. say that PBDs are beneficial because they save billable time; conserve opportunity costs; identify, respond to and generate major new matters; coordinate firm-wide client contacts; and create efficiencies in the business development process. She also claims one interesting thing that most effective PBDs are lawyers, but not necessarily lawyers who are practicing law. Or we can add, that most successful are those, who are not practicing anymore.

“What I've learned along the way—most successful salespeople are lawyers who don't practice anymore,” says John Hurley, former Chief Business Development Officer at DLA Piper[1].  According to Mr. Hurley these people can build instant credibility and trust and they can talk with clients in a very educated way. They understand who to bring in to make something happen.

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[1] Why law firms are turning to non-lawyers for sales help by STEVEN R. STRAHLER