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5 ways you can improve your law firm’s competitiveness

Category: Blog, Build a Digital-First Culture, Case Management, Client Management, Empower Your Employees, Enhance Your Client Experience 8th November 2021

In the current digital landscape, where clients have more available options and law firms are taking advantage of the benefits of technology, it’s more important than ever to focus on how well your firm competes in the industry. Can you operate efficiently? Do you deliver the services clients expect? Are you effectively managing compliance, cashflow and profitability? And are you attracting and retaining top talent?  With so many competitors in the legal market, it’s important to have your firm stand out from the crowd and acknowledged as delivering efficient, effective, and quality service. If you’re having trouble knowing where to start, we’ve listed 5 tips to help improve your law firm’s competitiveness so you can optimise for success.

1. Implement an Anywhere Operations strategy

Anywhere Operations is about building an adaptable and resilient foundation of technology solutions, internal processes, digital tools, and the right skillsets to seamlessly run your business without a physical infrastructure, no matter the location of employees and clients. By focusing on a digital-first operation your firm can utilise technology to run a seamless and unrestricted operation that drives efficiency and enables a frictionless collaboration between clients and lawyers. The Anywhere Operations model helps to centralise data, run a hybrid-working model, serve clients digitally, improve visibility and reduces barriers.

2. Build a strong brand for your firm

The branding of your firm is extremely important, as it serves as a client’s first impression of your business and if done well, it builds trust for your firm and encourages enquiries. Branding isn’t exclusively your company name and logo, other aspects you need to consider include your choice of colours, fonts, web design, imagery and company messaging.

Your brand needs to represent your firm’s personality and highlight the values you stand by. This can be achieved by adding personality to your brand and using photographs of your staff, on your website or social media channels, is a great way to showcase the human element of your business, which helps clients identify with the people running the firm. Building a strong, clear, and consistent brand will help your firm build trust and respect in the market, helping to increase enquiries, referrals, and recommendations.

3. Improve your firm’s efficiency

Improving the efficiencies across your firm, serves as a great way to help your firm’s competitiveness because it ensures you deliver a timely, efficient and cost-effective service. The easiest way to accomplish this is by taking advantage of the benefits of technology to remove manual processes, automate repetitive tasks and make complicated processes simpler and standardised. Practice and Case Management Software (PCMS) provides the digital foundations for your firm and is the best way to implement improvements across your entire operation. Automations and efficiency-boosting features can be used for document production, time recording, billing, client service and much more, which will help to boost profitability and allow you to focus more on your clients, greatly boosting your firm’s reputation.

4. Attract top talent to work at your firm

Even with the right technology, processes and branding in place it’s your team who will have the biggest impact on the success of your firm, which is why it’s crucial to attract, and importantly retain, top talent. Key factors in attracting and retaining talent include offering a hybrid-working policy. A survey from Acritas found that 77% of senior lawyers want to retain elements of remote working moving forward because of the flexibility and work life balance it gave them during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. In addition to hybrid-working, providing the right tools, resources and culture that promote growth, improvement and honesty is key to happy team. Implementing the right technology empowers employees to focus on what they do best, not manual admin. Plus, having an inclusive and honest culture that is represented in the firm’s values, as well as enabling time for effective training and mentoring will help to foster a successful working environment. Ultimately your employees will be the ones who bring your firm’s brand to life and have the biggest impact on your client’s satisfaction and recommendations, so building the right team for your firm is crucial to your future success.

5. Having a client-focused approach

The only way a client can determine the value of your firm is through the service that you provide them, so it’s extremely important to provide a quality, frictionless service so it’s easy for clients to work with you. The best way to achieve this is by providing a seamless client experience, no matter their location. Ensure your firm can successfully connect and collaborate with clients digitally but offering digital client onboarding and access to a web portal so they have a centralised and secure place to view, store and send information. It’s also key to ensure communications is regular and a client portal, as well as automated text messaging, can help provide an easy way to keep clients informed.

A client-focused approach not only helps you retain your current clients but greatly effects your chances of securing new business. Happy clients become the important social proof you need to gain the trust of prospective clients and help you build your brand. Client testimonials, referrals, and recommendations help you tell success stories and boosts your reputation that will help to attract more business.

Utilise technology to make your firm stand out

When clients are presented with so many options, it’s more important than ever to improve your competitiveness in the legal market to ensure success for the future. A key component in ensuring your firm delivers a stand-out service is to take advantage of the technology and software solutions available to you. The digital tools, automations and efficiency-boosting features within practice and case management software help to enhance efficiencies across your case management processes, help you to attract top talent with a flexible and agile working environment, and above all, enables you to deliver modern, quality client service.

Key criteria of competitiveness is to ensure your business’s longevity and a key component of longevity is profitability. View our previous article to discover our top tips on improving your firm’s profitability to find out how technology can save you money and increase opportunities.