I had a truly amazing conversation with a litigation lawyer I know last night.
He's done work for us, and he's now on the verge of starting his own practice.
We spent more than an hour… he was probing me about the process of the litigation from our point of view…what we liked about it (not a lot, but he was brilliant at keeping us in the loop and being strong at advice…we liked that particularly, because we don't pay serious money per hour to be given a lot of choices, we pay it to be told what to do by an expert), what we didn't (stress, strong negative cash flow until we had the settlement) and so on. He asked a lot about the emotions of the process also.
It was a total revelation – light years away from the anodyne 'what was it like for you' questionnaires most firms give you and far more impressive. Not only was it first class marketing to try to understand the emotional side of the clients, but also it was really flattering to think that here was a firm (to be) that really valued client feedback to the point that it was building its service delivery to meet both the emotional and practical needs of its client base.
In particular, he mentioned that client after client had mentioned how stressful and disruptive the process was for them, yet no-one in any of the firms he had ever worked in (mainly classy city firms) had ever talked about how the firm should act to minimise that stress.
When he told me about some of the unique software he is building to make the process better for the clients, I swooned (nearly).
When we were done, I thought about this. This must be the face of future success. A firm that doesn't start with preconceptions, but starts by asking their clients what service they want to buy and building the firm to deliver it.
Wow!
The image on their new website is also utterly compelling.
I look forward to their launch and if they want investors…..
And the picture? The sun will soon be setting for firms who don't get this message.
Joe Reevy MSc FCA is the managing director of Words4Business and LegalRSS (www.words4business.com, www.legalrss.uk) which specialise in law firm content provision and marketing automation respectively.
joe@bestpracticeonline.com 07990593190