The Legal business is on a journey to being much more information-led than it has ever been. Legal marketeers face three core information-related challenges: how to identify their competition in a rapidly shifting market, how to show a greater understanding of their clients’ businesses, and how to target their best opportunities for developing new business.
Eleanor Windsor, business development director for LAC Group UK and EMEA, spent 15 years working with Osborne Clarke and other law firms, so she knows the legal market and its challenges. Law firms often have the wrong ideas about who their competitors are, she says, and many use poor or insufficient information when taking themselves to clients. They also often can’t track the journey from unknown prospect to comfortable client. Put together,this means many firms are flying blind in ever stormier skies.
“The top firms use market intelligence quite well for spotting trends and opportunities with dedicated resources and formal processes for collecting and using data. But the majority have partners and fee earners visiting clients with nothing more than a Google search, perhaps not even using resources they have in-house.”
Another big problem firms have is that when choosing which firms to compare themselves against, or to watch as competition, they don’t always choose wisely. “The legal market is changing rapidly, with new competitors coming in, and firms are perhaps not looking at those quite as much as they should, nor are they doing it on a regular basis. Assessing market position every three to five years is no longer sufficient.”
Windsor says that firms need to gain intelligence on which other firms their prospects are talking to. “They can identify their clients’ top competitors and find out which firms they are using – then the competition will become fairly obvious. Another way to uncover this information is to monitor social media, which is now a big part of competitor analysis.”
Read the full article here.