The Client Partnership Model
Last year I posted a series on ToB about law firm – vendor relationships. After looking at some of the pain-points in that relationship, and examining vendors who were hitting the mark in the way they interact with their customers, I proposed a vendor partnership model that could serve as a yardstick for firms seeking to deepen their relationships with key vendors. I suggested that the core values firms should look for in prospective vendors include:
Good people – not just one or two, but across the board;
User-centric – a vendor who actively strives to listen to the firms with which they work;
Broad outlook - an interest in, and understanding of the broader market, not a myopic view of their own sales and tech;
Innovative with a forward-thinking mentality – vendors who initiate engagement, involve you in their development, who run things differently, whose business models show they can adapt; and
Creative marketing – marketing channels that indicate by their very nature a willingness to collaborate and engage.
These values stand above and beyond the obvious, which is excellence in the substance and delivery of the technology itself. This, of course, is the sine qua non – without outstanding technology, the vendor in question would not be under review for inclusion in your stable.
I want to propose that if we look at the key values set out above, they are equally relevant to the way that clients now seek to elect their panel firms.
We are at a critical juncture in the history of legal services. Every client-side lawyer I’ve heard speak, or have engaged with at conferences over the past two years, has expressed frustration regarding the typical large law model of service delivery. Organizations like CLOC have gained enormous traction remarkably quickly, with Connie Brenton and others speaking publicly about how law firms are failing. GCs are speaking out on social media about what they look for in their law firms, challenging the status quo and demanding more. Just this past Friday I heard a GC say that the entire client service delivery model in law is flawed.
In Brazil, where client-side legal and legal ops organized into an association several years before CLOC was born, the billable hour is effectively gone and clients now dictate fee structures, requiring efficient work practices and innovative service models. This activity south of the border is likely illustrative of what is inevitable in the U.S and elsewhere. Already, clients regularly demand in RFPs that firms demonstrate a willingness to adapt their service model to more specifically meet their needs, by employing technology in the interest of efficiency, and collaborating with their legal ops teams on solutions to client-side process and practice pain-points.
Similar to the role of technology in the vendor-firm context, law alone is no longer enough – it is an assumed baseline. Where once the high standard of legal work and close personal relationships between one or two key client-side and firm-side players were enough to guarantee a seat on a panel, the quality and nature of the service delivery model that is employed by a firm is now equally important.
The increasing number of client requests for improved and, in some cases, profoundly different service delivery is indicative of significant approaching change. Urgency around this issue will only build as recession approaches. Law firms that want to succeed must be thinking now about how to address client concerns around efficiency, communication, and collaboration before those concerns evolve into up-or-out ultimatums.
But exactly what does this change look like in substance, and how do law firms go about addressing it? What new activities and qualities should law firms develop to ensure they stay ahead of the curve?
This week, Tower of Babel will run a series of daily posts building on the values from the vendor partnership model and discussing how firms can use these as a framework upon which to build a new, transformative model of client service delivery.
