Two of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. As with any field, the legal world is competitive. It’s thus important to understand how to set yourself apart from your competition. The following contributed post is thus entitled, Making Your Legal Practice More Enticing To Prospective Clients.
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Running a successful legal business requires a lot of dedication and perseverance. It’s an industry that fosters fierce competition, so you need to continuously reinvent your business plan in order to help your practice grow. Still, it can be difficult to turn heads when there are so many other firms with highly professional teams of lawyers in the market. You need to be unique in order to stand out from the crowd. What can you do to make an impact on the target market? Well, in this article, we’re going to discuss some ways in which you could make your legal practice more enticing to prospective clients.
Focus on your company culture.
It’s easy to become laser-focused on clients when you run a law firm because your reputation is important. And it’s true that your clients are important – you need to become known for delivering an exceptional legal service to clients. People and businesses choose firms to represent them based on their success rate; it’s a highly competitive industry. But you need to start by improving your legal practice behind doors. You can’t deliver an exceptional service to clients and take the industry by surprise unless you have an exceptional team of attorneys to help you out. A strong workforce is important in any company, but law practices entirely depend on the legal expertise of their employees. You can’t just hire any average candidate, and you also can’t take your members of staff for granted (even if they are exceptional). You need to treat your team well and foster a strong company culture. Not all cases will be easy to solve, so you need employees who are going to work well together.
Additionally, you need a balanced workplace. Take a look at firms such as Ogletree Deakins which have taken huge strides forwards and achieved balance in terms of gender. This isn’t just to avoid workplace discrimination; it’s about creating a more diverse and varied work environment. In the legal industry, this is essential. Creativity is involved in unpacking many legal claims and protecting individuals. You don’t want a team full of employees who are carbon copies of one another. But it’s important that your team works together. You don’t want senior attorneys who make newer and less experienced attorneys feel stupid. This might cause newer members of staff to shy away from offering the full extent of their legal advice to clients because they’re afraid they’ll get something wrong. If your team is cooperative then everyone can learn from one another. In turn, you’ll create a team that can solve any legal problem or simply offer exceptional advice to clients by pooling together their expertise and experience.
Deliver customer service that is second-to-none.
Again, this is important for any business in any industry, but it’s particularly important for legal practices. As stated above, you need an exceptional reputation if potential clients are going to trust you, and this starts with you impressing your current customer base. For example, you need to understand clients on a personal level. In other words, keep the technical legal jargon in your head and try to relate to them on a human level. Understand their problem or their concerns, depending on the type of legal representation they need. You might even be able to offer a more appropriate type of legal coverage or protection if you get to know them and their situation more thoroughly. This will give you a reputation as a business that cares about its clients. In turn, you’ll be able to make your business look more enticing to prospective clients.
Project the right message.
Branding depends on more than a pretty logo. It’s about the message that a business presents to the target market. And in the legal industry, it’s vital to craft the perfect statement. As has been discussed throughout this article, reputation is important for legal practices. Clients put a lot of money and trust in attorneys. They’re not buying some menial and unimportant product; they’re buying a service that has value to them in more than just a monetary sense, whatever the field of practice in which you operate. A good rule of thumb is to keep quiet if you’re ever in doubt. Saying the wrong thing can really damage your company’s reputation. As a law firm, you are expected to say the right thing on behalf of your clients, so you need to prove that you can say the right thing on behalf of your own brand.
