Observations from a marketing consultant

During a presentation before the Los Angeles chapter of the Legal Marketing Association, Sally Schmidt, a marketing consultant, made the following observations:

•    Clients want to know who their team is. Larger firms are better at communicating this information to clients than smaller firms.
•    Building personal relationships up and down the client company is essential to assure continuity of the client-law firm relationship after the attorney retires or management changes.
•    Create a client plan in writing! Set out how and when you will interact with the client management. The more people in your office know the client’s people, the more solid will be your firm’s relationship with the client … and the less vulnerable to change.
•    Client service in today’s workplace is taking the form of both industry focus (rather than practice area focus) and value billing (rather than hourly billing). While these changes are not here now, and not likely to be implemented on a wide scale in the very near term, these changes are on the horizon.

Sally, thanks for these observations and I trust my paraphrasing does justice to her commentary.

Categorized in: Marketing