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Building and maintaining client relationships

A law firm’s competitive advantage will also depend on its ability to build strong relationships with clients and adapt to meet their needs. After all, law is fundamentally a “people” (i.e. “client-facing”) business, so don’t underestimate the value of professional relationships. People inherently want to work with people who they get along with, especially in circumstances that might involve long hours and intense pressure at times. 

Lawyers must be personable and professional 

For these reasons, firms should ensure their lawyers are always friendly, courteous, professional, legally astute, pragmatic, commercial, flexible and responsive (which can mean willing to hit tight deadlines!). Lawyers should also take time to fully understand what different clients want from their legal advisers, and adapt their approach to better meet those clients’ needs. 

Ben Staveley adds that it’s toxic for a client if a lawyer ever comes across as defensive, or more concerned with the law firm’s position than the client’s business. To maintain a solid relationship with clients, lawyers should always aim to identify completely with those clients’ concerns and objectives.

Lawyers must adapt to clients' working preferences

Some firms keep meticulous records of client expectations and preferred ways of working, which can help. Others provide secondees to clients and ask them to regularly report back on how each client likes to operate. After all, if lawyers demonstrate the personal and professional attributes that clients want to see, this will go some way to helping those lawyers build both personal and professional relationships with their clients. Firms could even offer their lawyers specialist training on how to interact with clients and network effectively.

Lawyers must network effectively

On the networking point, it’s important to remember that senior lawyers often secure work through their own contacts. These may be contacts who have progressed through the ranks at client businesses as the lawyers have progressed through the legal hierarchy. Perhaps they first established positive working relationships as juniors a decade earlier, then continued to build those relationships as both became key decision makers. Or maybe they worked together at the same firm for a few years, before one of them jumped ship to work in-house at a client business. 

On that note, both Ben Staveley and Laura Brunnen stress that partners must treat everybody who works for them well, as some of those employees will become decision makers at clients some day! 

Work might also come from people lawyers meet at networking or industry events. With this in mind, a law firm that focuses on advising start-ups might want its lawyers to seek out opportunities to support very early stage businesses, perhaps on a pro bono basis (e.g. by volunteering to mentor start-ups that are part of university incubators), whilst a law firm with an established global energy practice might want its lawyers to attend events such as the nuclear industry awards. Firms could also invite clients to social and networking events to try to strengthen those personal bonds. This could involve, for example, inviting clients to sports matches, concerts, and dinners to celebrate the signing of deals, subject of course to the firm’s ethics policies and the law relating to bribery.

So how could a law firm maintain a competitive advantage in this context? Well, firms could encourage junior lawyers to network from the very earliest stages of their careers (some firms actually allocate business development budgets to junior lawyers for this purpose), whilst ensuring that lawyers of all levels are incentivised to participate in networking or industry events (perhaps by including business development hours as part of the firm’s bonus targets). 

After all, as explained by Laura Brunnen: you grow up with your peers (Laura was encouraged to actively cultivate and nurture her network as an associate at Kirkland & Ellis, and was even given a budget to help with this).

Ben Staveley adds that most firms are said to generate 80% of their revenue from 20% of their clients (in other words, the majority of a firm’s income will often come from a minority of its clients). Where this is the case, it makes much more sense for firms to concentrate on delivering an unimpeachable service to existing clients, rather than focusing too much on acquiring new clients (with which it takes time to develop a rapport). Laura Brunnen agrees, reflecting that it’s generally easier to hang on to good clients than to generate new clients to take their place.

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