Law Firm Client Relationships

Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms

Increasing Client Requirements: Securing Law Firms for the 21st Century

Debra Gray

Clients expect sophisticated and secure systems to keep their information safe. This obviously makes your IT professional’s job much harder. Additionally, attorneys expect instant performance and near 100% up time. Achieving the delicate balance between accessibility and security is a challenge.

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Marketing The Law Firm

Professional Development: Proactive Marketing for the Win

Meg Pritchard

I Tend to Think of Marketing and Business Development Efforts In Four Buckets: Passive Marketing, Active Marketing, Reactive Marketing and Proactive Marketing

The view of (most) law firm leadership has evolved, but there is a long expanse of ground between viewing the marketing function as a cost center and recognizing — and capitalizing on — its potential to drive revenue and profits.

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Cybersecurity Law & Strategy

Effectively Managing Increasing Client Security Requirements

Christopher Perrotta

Gone are the days of naively assuming our confidential data is secure. Increasingly, clients, stakeholders, regulators and others are demanding proof that firms are actively protecting the PII to which they have access, and this evidence is being demanded both before and after security incidents. It is imperative law firms have the positions and processes in place to handle security incidents with urgency, accuracy and completeness.

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Marketing The Law Firm

Professional Development: Reimagining Business Development Training and Coaching

Debra Baker

Six Pillars of a Successful Bus-Dev Program

For firms wanting to thrive through the next economic downturn and beyond, mastery of business development fundamentals is as essential as mastering legal skills. Yet training and coaching — whether done internally or through outside consultants — requires an investment in time and resources.

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Marketing The Law Firm

Competitive Intelligence: Assumptions and CI Don’t Mix

Patricia Ellard

Sometimes I assume my clients know what I can do for them and what they should ask for. You all have heard the old adage about what happens when you assume. I still laugh when I think of my elementary teacher saying it, but It’s such a basic idea, and applies in so many situations. Here are just a few of which I’ve been reminded.

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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms

Resolving Fee Disputes: It’s in Your Best Interest, Too

Patricia King 

Lawyers should know that they ignore clients with questions at their peril. The first thing to remember is the client is entitled to an accounting of the fee and costs. No matter how exasperating the client, or how stupid the question appears to be, client questions need to be resolved.

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Cybersecurity Law & Strategy

Increasing Client Requirements: Securing Law Firms for the 21st Century

Debra Gray

Gone are the days of “basic security.” What used to be optional is now standard: two factor authentication, complex passwords, clean desk policies, data encryption at rest and in transit, mobile device management and up-to-the-minute patching. Clients expect these items to already be in place and are further expanding their expectations.

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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms

Producing Breakthroughs in Client Development

Arnold Keiser

It is easy to understand why many lawyers feel that only certain special individuals are blessed with the qualities necessary to be rainmakers. But almost anyone willing to develop the qualities necessary can become a rainmaker.

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Marketing The Law Firm

When Being a Star Rainmaker is Not Enough: Why EQ Leads to Even Better Business Results

Marla Grant and Yuliya LaRoe

Why EQ Leads to Even Better Business Results

It is not uncommon for law firms to face negative business outcomes caused by the behavior of a star rainmaker who is unaware of the impact that they have on others. And that’s what emotional intelligence (EQ) is about and why it’s so important to lead to better business results. What can law firms do to help their star partners increase their emotional intelligence to avoid potentially disastrous business outcomes for themselves and their firms?

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Marketing The Law Firm

Maximize the Impact of Firm Sponsorships with Social Media

Spencer X Smith

Pro bono work on an individual level is often not publicized, but the work you do in the community as a firm should be. Here’s how to ensure both you and the charities, nonprofits, etc. you’re supporting gain the maximum amount of exposure and awareness for their causes.

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Marketing The Law Firm

15 Free Things to Do for Clients That Will Make Them Love You More

Stacy West Clark

There is a huge bonus to doing free things for clients at their place of business: You can bring as many lawyers from your firm with you as you like.

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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms

When Being a Star Rainmaker Is Not Enough

Marla Grant and Yuliya LaRoe

Why EQ Leads to Even Better Business Results

It is not uncommon for law firms to face negative business outcomes caused by the behavior of a star rainmaker who is unaware of the impact that they have on others. And that’s what emotional intelligence (EQ) is about and why it’s so important to lead to better business results. What can law firms do to help their star partners increase their emotional intelligence to avoid potentially disastrous business outcomes for themselves and their firms?

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Delaware Supreme Court Theater Ruling Addresses Party’s Deposition Demeanor

Jenna Greene

There are difficult depositions. Unproductive depositions. Ones where people cry or are rude or angry. And then, as the Delaware Supreme Court noted, there’s Carole Shorenstein Hays. The 70-year-old Tony award-winning theater producer’s behavior during her deposition prompted the Delaware Supreme Court to issue a 20-page addendum blasting her.

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Marketing The Law Firm

Voice of the Client: 9 Ways You Could Be Hindering New Business Efforts

Mike Mellor

Nine ways you may be hindering your efforts to win new legal business, and a few ideas on how subtle improvements can maximize both success and overall win rates for firms and attorneys.

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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms

9 Ways You Could Be Hindering New Business Efforts

Mike Mellor

Nine ways you may be hindering your efforts to win new legal business, and a few ideas on how subtle improvements can maximize both success and overall win rates for firms and attorneys.

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Marketing The Law Firm

Sales Speak: Relationship Building: Systemizing Prospect Engagement

Jennifer Bettencourt

Building rapport with prospective or existing clients and referral sources requires intentional ongoing communication and patience. When relationships fail to progress, it is most often due to a lack of follow-up.

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Marketing The Law Firm

Voice of the Client: Hearing the Client Through the Noise

Jennifer Simpson Carr and Amy Knapp

At the end of the day, a lot of noise is created in the effort to hear the voice of the client. We propose that while these efficiencies and innovations in law are valuable, the clients keep asking for something different: a lawyer who deeply understands their business and their specific issue — at the time they need it.

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Marketing The Law Firm

Competitive Intelligence: How Client Intelligent Is Your Firm?

Stacy Rowe

Ready, Set, Benchmark! 

Underlying great client service is a strong understanding of the client’s business and goals. There are many barriers to success when it comes to helping lawyers develop a strategic client mindset. So, how do you break down these barriers to create a Client Intelligent Law Firm?

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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms

Best Ways To Expand Key Client Relationships from the Lawyer and Firm Perspectives

Julie Savarino

Part Two of a Two-Part Article

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Marketing The Law Firm

In a VUCA Environment, Empower Your CMO to Collaborate and Lead

Tammy Mangan

VUCA is an acronym we don’t often hear in the legal industry. It stands for volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, and was coined by the U.S. Army to describe the post-Cold War world. Buyers of legal services are more sophisticated than ever and are redefining the meaning of value, some are involving procurement professionals in the buying process.

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Marketing The Law Firm

Best Ways to Expand Key Client Relationships

Julie Savarino

Part Two of a Two-Part Article

This two-part article defines the specific and best actions lawyers and law firms can take to expand client relationships. This second part covers what law firms as institutions can do to help the firm’s departments, practice groups, teams and lawyers expand client relationships.

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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms

Best Ways to Expand Key Client Relationships from the Lawyers’ and Firms’ Perspectives

Julie Savarino

Part One of a Two-Part Article

For a variety of reasons, many law firms and lawyers struggle to effectively cross-sell or cross-service. This article defines the specific and best actions lawyers and law firms can take to expand client relationships.

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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms

Lawyers: Being Paid Shouldn’t Be Like Pulling Teeth!

Peter A. Johnson

What Lawyers Can Learn From Dentists

Nobody enjoys visiting the dentist, but everybody knows you still must pay him or her on the day of service. Attorneys, however, have historically let the client lead the payment dance. Lawyers do the work and hope/expect to be paid without waiting too long or discounting the invoice too steeply. What can we do differently?

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Marketing The Law Firm

Best Ways to Expand Key Client Relationships from the Lawyers’ and Firms’ Perspectives

Julie Savarino

Part One of a Two-Part Article

This article defines the specific and best actions lawyers and law firms can take to expand client relationships. This first part includes specific actions individual lawyers can take to expand client relationships.

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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms

Clients Drive Information Governance: Business Benefits Flow to Firm

Stephen Cole

Information governance and the protection of corporate data are top concerns for law firms. To ensure standards are met, some clients are now tying payment to compliance with Outside Counsel Guidelines (OCG). OCG have moved from guidelines to actual contracts that provide for indemnification of the client for cyber breach and violation of privacy laws.

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Marketing The Law Firm

Voice of the Client: So Important, It Comes First

Catherine Alman MacDonagh

It is vital to have effective marketing and communications, but if legal and business professionals don’t listen for — and hear — the Voice of the Client, we risk missing the mark in our strategy, messaging and positioning.

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Marketing The Law Firm

Professional Development: 10 Performance Tips for Your Presentation

Sharon Abrahams

Finally, it has happened. You have reached the stage in your career that others want to hear from you and learn what you know in your area of expertise. You have been invited to speak at a conference. What now?

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Marketing The Law Firm

Competitive Intelligence: The Wolf of Law Firms — Sell Me This [Insert Legal Service Here]

Stacy Rowe

While we can’t always create the need; we can work to identfy a need. Clients buy because they have a need or want, and successful salespeople do their homework to uncover this intelligence.

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Marketing The Law Firm

Media & Communications: Advising a Client on Crisis Communications — The Three Rs and Three Fs

Janet Falk

If you have not already encouraged your partners to advise their clients of the need to develop a crisis communication plan in advance, and provided some guidance on best practices, do so immediately. As a complement to a well-developed plan, here are two mnemonic approaches to managing communications in a crisis: the three Rs and the three Fs.

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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms

Big Law’s Trojan Horse: Are the Big Four Preparing an Invasion?

Dan Packel

Law Firms Partner With the Big Four to Serve Their Clients, But the Accountants Pose an Existential Threat. What Will Happen If — or When — They Turn Competitive?

For law firm leaders, rank-and-file partners and everyone else in the law firm ecosystem, the Big Four shouldn’t be a laughing matter. They are serious about selling legal services, and clients are listening.

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Marketing The Law Firm

A Chief Client Service Officer in Action

Kimberly Rice

Marketing the Law Firm recently interviewed Jennifer Papantonio, Chief Client Service Officer of Peckar & Abramson about her significant role, which includes the successes she and the firm have achieved in recent years, how she works collaboratively with firm leadership to create innovative solutions, and her recommendations to law firms which may be considering engaging a Chief Client Officer.

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Marketing The Law Firm

Voice of the Client: Put Your Best Foot Forward in the New Year — Revaluating Content Strategy

Jen Betterncourt

While reputation goes a long way in attracting new clients, having a solid content strategy is a critical component of the legal sales cycle at all turns, including retaining the clients you have.

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Marketing The Law Firm

Competitive Intelligence: Become More Relevant – Meet Your Clients’ Needs Every Time

Patricia Ellard

Becoming and staying relevant is a process. It is not static but always evolving. Your clients change, their needs and requests change, you change, and, throughout these experiences, you learn steps to implement and how to implement them in given situations.

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Marketing The Law Firm

Active Listening Wins Clients

Kimberly Rice

All too often, we read studies, which report clients’ pet peeve with their services providers whom do not listening to them. Or, cited another way, clients…

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Cybersecurity Law & Strategy

Meritas’ New Cybersecurity Standard Requirement Assures Legal Clients

Victoria Hudgins

Meritas, a nonprofit association of law firms, now requires its law firm members to follow a new cybersecurity standard. The reason for this new standard? Law firms’ clients.

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Marketing The Law Firm

Sales Speak: Grow Your Clients: MLF’s Challenge

Beth Cuzzone

As you approach your clients during the upcoming holidays and new year, think creatively. This Q&A with Aon COO Audrey Rubin provides more than a dozen examples of ways to add value and build stronger relationships with our clients. The MLF team challenges you to undertake one or two of these in your next go-to-market strategies.

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Marketing The Law Firm

Voice of the Client: Chief Client Service, Experience and Value Officers in Law Firms

Julie Savarino

Roles, Results & Roadblocks

An increasing number of the world’s largest law firms are conducting business at such a scale that having a dedicated, full-time client service or experience officer adds significant value to the firms and their clients.

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Marketing The Law Firm

Marketing Tech: How CMOs Can Use Retargeting to Attract New Business

Larry Bodine

Retargeting combines two of the most important aspects of digital marketing: automation and personalization. Marketers use retargeting to stay in front of the consumer across devices and to ultimately try to reach them at the right time — the moment of purchase intent.

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Marketing The Law Firm

Do Your Lawyers Think as Business Owners or Employees?

Kimberly Rice

There are two types of lawyers — those who have their own business and those who work for those who do. How do your lawyers size up?

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Business Crimes Bulletin

Protecting Privilege Before and After a Cyber Breach

Robert W. Anderson and Eric B. Levine

Critical to any counsel working to prevent a cyber attack or respond to a successful cyber intrusion is an understanding of why and how to properly utilize both attorney-client and work-product privilege.

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The Bankruptcy Strategist

State Attorney-Client Privilege Rule Incorporated into Federal Law

Robert J. Stearn, Jr., Cory D. Kandestin and Christopher M. De Lillo

Delaware Bankruptcy Court Protects Communications with Financial Professionals Originating In Delaware

Because state law applies at the time the transaction is negotiated, the parties might assume — reasonably so — that state privilege law will govern communications with their attorneys and financial professionals. But what happens if, years later, a fraudulent transfer plaintiff files suit in federal court and brings claims under federal law? Does state privilege law still apply?

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Business Crimes Bulletin

The Seizure of Attorney-Client Communications: Fighting Back

Ronald H. Levine

The government’s seizure of attorney-client communications, a headline event when it involves the President’s lawyer Michael Cohen, actually is a recurrent problem in white collar criminal investigations due to the convergence of several trends.

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Marketing The Law Firm

'Professional Development:' Those Were the Days: Lessons from Silicon Valley’s Marketing Culture

David McCann

There were elements of the corporate culture in the early Dot-com years that helped shape my perspective on the critical role marketing could (and should) play in driving tangible and bottom-line business results. Those shaping influences, when applied to law firms, can help us legal marketers realize even greater returns for our internal and external clients.

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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms

Cash Flow Drought: How to Identify and Deal with It

Bill Sansone

Cash flow management can be particularly challenging. You need to account for the time lag between cash going out and cash coming in. This requires financial and management discipline, strong internal policies and procedures for billing and collection policies, planning and attention to detail.

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Marketing The Law Firm

Listening to the Client: Where Do We Stand?

Jim Durham

If you listen to the marketplace, you will know what to do in connection with client growth and client retention. Are firms listening to this advice?

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Marketing The Law Firm

Breakthrough Thinking: How to Discover and Drive Motivation in Business Development and Lead Attorneys to Greater Prosperity

Kimberly Rice

Despite all the strategic planning CMOs may devote to individual attorney coaching and training, it is often not enough to support the lawyer client in connecting the dots of relationship building, reputation enhancing and contact management over the course of a career to make a remarkable difference.

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Marketing The Law Firm

'Professional Development:' Owning Your Business: Using Financial Metrics to Drive Business Development

Joe Maguire and Anne Marcotty

Growing the top line requires a systematic approach that maximizes your available time and focuses you on the best opportunities.

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Marketing The Law Firm

Focusing on Client Retention May Mean Restructuring the Firm

Kathryn B. Whitaker 

Law Firms Should Double Down on Their Existing Clients By Focusing on Client Satisfaction and Retention Rates Rather Than Billable Hours and Origination Credits

New client acquisition can cost 15 times more than retaining an existing client, and yet most lawyers spend their limited and valuable time chasing new clients.

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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms

11 Factors to Collecting Attorney Fees on a Timely Basis

Peter Oliva

Most of the time, delayed payments are a result of actions by the law firms themselves. Let’s take a look at 11 factors impacting the collection of attorney fees on a timely basis and how to avoid these mistakes.

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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms

Adding Value with a Client Visit Initiative

Brook W. Redmond and Ali C. Ferro

The increasing competition in the legal industry highlights the importance of differentiation and adding value beyond the work product. Face-to-face interactions with clients are a critical component in differentiation because they provide the opportunity to understand better the nuances of clients’ businesses, develop deeper relationships, and drive productive collaboration.

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