Three Client Pressure Points and How to Relieve Them
Practicing law has always meant balancing a growing to-do list against a shrinking pool of available time. None of this is new. But a third challenge has developed: client expectations. Their demands have grown. Their needs are complex. And their patience has waned.
What previously had worked as a successful business model no longer keeps clients satisfied. Quite literally, service that used to be good enough could now be costing you clients. The path to a successful firm looks different – you must do what you’ve always done, but now you have added in a plethora of other requirements. Their expectations are numerous, but these three pressure points are common:
• They expect more for less: You must do a higher volume of work with the same high-quality effort.
• They expect quick responses: The once-acceptable turnaround time on responding to emails and phone calls is now antiquated.
• They expect you to have the answers (all of them): Their expectation is that your juris doctorate means you are a legal expert in each and every practice area.
These are just a few examples of the modern client’s needs. A greater customer-oriented focus is critical to becoming the firm that today’s clients expect.
How to relieve these pressure points
Initially it may seem like their expectations are untenable. Fortunately, there are ways to turn the seemingly unmanageable into viable prospects. By having a comprehensive understanding of their imperatives, your firm can continue to produce the ideal outcome: content clients.
Expand your practice area expertise
The right tools can build a knowledge base that holistically benefits your firm. Access to a variety of practice area resources can dramatically reduce research time so that you can answer your clients’ questions more quickly. It connects you to information so you can be the expert your clients already expect you are.
This extra competency can be something that not only allows you to meet the needs of your clients but to grow you practice. Referring clients out due to lack of expertise in an area may have made sense from an efficiency standpoint, but perhaps not to your bottom line.
Practical Law gives you that in-house expertise to serve a broader clientele by being able to take the cases they bring to you.
The proof is in the data
Clients have always come to you for guidance. Your depth of knowledge and aptitude was enough to provide the legal advice they wanted. But now, they need more than anecdotal evidence. They demand data-driven analysis – personal experience backed by proof.
When your client wants to know how long it will take the judge to render a decision, a response such as “I’ve seen that it usually takes about a month” used to be good enough. Not anymore. They need facts, figures, and findings. Procuring this type of information would be invaluable, but until recently, was too time consuming to obtain.
Now there are tools that allow you to provide both insight and validation. One example is Westlaw Edge Litigation Analytics. You can pull a report on that specific judge and show your client that it takes an average of 27 days for that judge to issue a ruling. That data proves what you already knew but it comes in the format clients now require.
The new way forward
Simultaneously trying to grow your business while meeting the needs of your current clients can feel overwhelming. By ensuring that you know what clients want and how to get it, you can manage both your business and your clients’ expectations more efficiently.
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