If there was one area crying out for innovation in the legal world, it was client service. Top-class legal expertise may be routinely taken for granted, but lawyers have tended to be slow to adapt to the type of service clients demand. Many surveys have revealed a lack of satisfaction with the levels and quality of service received from law firms as they stick to tried and tested practices.
But that is now changing rapidly, as the explosive growth of client relationship managers at the top firms testifies. Another sign is the high number of entries for this category of the FT report, which made it among the hardest to judge (click here for rankings).
As law firms seek to move away from the role of detached advisers to act more like commercial partners, the extra services they provide and the ways in which they can improve their existing practices become all the more important. This category threw up a range of innovative ideas and, while many firms have experimented with clever online tools, what the RSG research team were really looking for was a shift in the way firms thought about customers when providing their services.
It was for this reason that Addleshaw Goddard scored so highly. About 40 of the firm’s client relationship partners and their account managers have been trained in a suite of business analysis tools by the Cranfield School of Management. The lawyers then use that to assess the client’s business and a range of strategies.
The idea is that the findings allow Addleshaw’s lawyers to work out how the firm’s strengths can best be used in a legal strategy that ties in with the client’s business strategy, so that the firm creates commercial value for the company and helps them to be more profitable. In some cases, clients were so impressed with the results of the analyses that they asked Addleshaw to train their in-house legal teams to use the same business analysis tools.
However, the innovation is still in its early days and Addleshaw was pipped to the top spot, just, by Gleiss Lutz. The German firm’s innovation was in response to a change in the country’s labour laws that resulted in a spate of bogus discrimination claims by job applicants. Gleiss created a web-based archive to identify fraudulent claimants which allows lawyers, employers or courts to check whether a certain person has a history of filing compensation claims for alleged discrimination.
The archive works on the “eBay” principle, allowing employers to log claimants’ information so that it can be shared with others. Of course, the archive is only as good as the information supplied.
One user of the archive, from another law firm, praised it as a “very good tool” that was “highly transferable” to other jurisdictions.
Another legislative change, this time in the Netherlands, prompted a stand-out entry from De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek. Banks, investment funds and insurance companies were left struggling to grasp the implications of a wide-ranging legal shake-up. So, the firm created a website detailing the changes and explaining the consequences. It was so effective that the Dutch legislature and supervisory authorities asked if they could access it, too.
De Brauw’s site went live in late May 2006, just a month after the idea was pitched – a challenging timeframe but the urgency reflected the severe impact of the changes on the financial services industry and the need to provide as much time as possible to prepare.
The firm says: “The website is matrix-based and allows visitors to compare all apparent changes between old and new legislation on an article-by-article and even sub-article-by-sub-article basis. This covers more than 100 statutes and regulations, covering tens of thousands of articles.”
The other entries in the stand-out category represent just the kind of change in client service that the judges were after.
Free advice does not tend to feature heavily in any law firm’s range of offerings. But Birmingham-based Wragge & Co offered pro bono counsel to companies struggling to appoint and manage panels of legal advisers – groups of law firms that might well not even include Wragge itself.
The innovation came about after the firm helped a financial group that was finding it difficult to reduce the 90 firms it instructed to a manageable panel of advisers. With so many companies now relying on a panel comprised of a small number of firms to increase efficiency and maximise the value they receive from legal advisers, it was not an uncommon dilemma.
“Seeing an opportunity to offer something of immense value in an uncharted territory, we suggested that we use our experience of the panel selection process to their benefit,” Wragge explained. “In short, we became poacher turned gamekeeper.”
The “panel beating” service is aimed at helping in-house counsel decide whether a panel would benefit their business, how to set one up, how to invite the right tenders, what selection criteria to apply and how to get panel members to comply with their ground rules. Wragge said the new service had helped it to strengthen relationships with clients as it sought to move from the role of legal expert to a trusted partner.
But the shift in approach with potentially the farthest-reaching consequences for the legal industry came from Linklaters. The “magic circle” firm won the role as lead adviser for the Linde Group’s corporate work outside the US in its recent panel review. Nothing terribly surprising there, as the nature of legal panels means that advisers will change periodically. But what was surprising, especially coming from one of the world’s biggest firms, was the decision to field a pitch team only half of which comprised lawyers.
On the four-person team were a client relationship manager and an information expert, as well as two solicitors. Allowing non-fee-earners loose on a pitch for a large corporate client is a radical departure from standard industry practice, and perhaps signals a larger underlying shift in client relationships.
The client relationship manager co-ordinated the whole pitch, including chairing a meeting in Asia between Linklaters local team and Linde’s in-house staff, and Linklaters said it wanted to demonstrate the claim that the firm could anticipate rather than merely respond to clients’ needs.
The firm says: “The client relationship manager and the managing relationship partner in charge of the team were something of a double act, which was unconventional by industry standards, yet highly effective. There were some conversations which Linde needed to have with a lawyer and other conversations which were easier with a senior person outside the legal team.”
Should this become standard practice, and be taken up by other firms, it would truly be an innovation that could revolutionise the way law firms deal with their clients. It might also be part of a wider trend towards senior non-lawyers having greater power, and more exposure to clients, within law firms. And that is uncharted water for the legal world.
