Law firms who want to continually build upon their client satisfaction must broaden their channels of communication so that both sides can have frank and recurring conversations with each other.

For example, Altman Weil was recently hired by an East Coast law firm to conduct interviews with senior and mid-level management of one of the firm’s most important clients, a large and well-respected financial institution.  From those interviews, the law firm learned that while the bank conducted an annual review of their performance in the previous year and needs for the coming year, none of its outside counsel had reciprocated or shown any signs of doing so.  By learning about and responding to a client expectation, the outside counsel gained a significant competitive advantage and is likely to increase client satisfaction as well as market share, all on the basis of opening communication, listening and acting.

To maintain and build upon clients’ level of satisfaction, we recommend that you:

• Conduct an annual summit meeting among your key clients.  At this meeting, the client would lay out its legal needs and expectations for the coming year.  In turn, your law firm would share its best ideas for enhancing the relationship.
• Appoint an ombudsman on your staff for ongoing communication with clients.  This person would act as an independent, impartial resource who would be free and expected to identify problems and solutions to issues as they occur.
• Schedule joint strategic planning and budgeting sessions, annually if possible and required, to assure that your firm and its clients are in harmony.
• Conduct two-way evaluations, in which your firm evaluates the relationship with clients as well as vice versa.  These should be reviewed and action steps assigned during the annual summit meeting.

David Maister once said that marketing is a conversation.  These are good ways of opening and continuing the dialogue.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 11:56 am and is filed under Communications, Client service. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.