Legal 500: Toning your ABS

Legal 500: Toning your ABS

The days of the fusty legal firm with oak-panelled walls is over. When, in 2012, a law was passed to allow even supermarkets to offer legal services, law firms across the region had to sit up and take notice.

In short: they had to start thinking like businesses.

In order to increase business, firms have either increased the number of services they offer so they can become a ‘one stop shop’ for all their client needs or else stripped them back to a few niche areas so that they can be seen as experts in their fields.

Rebecca Emeleus, partner at Rothera Sharp Solicitors, says: “There is more emphasis on understanding client requirements and how they are changing, identifying opportunities to cross-sell and striving for excellence in client satisfaction.

“Today, it is much more important to hone the client relationships you have for the long-term rather that spend lots of money on marketing and simply hoping for the best. Firms are also increasingly creative in how they sell their services especially when it comes to pricing.

“There is now more demand for different pricing plans, particularly as competition is high in many areas, and clients may also want fixed fee.”

However, law firms are still catching up when it comes to Alternative Business Structures (ABS), according to one local legal recruitment specialists.

Jane Biggs, managing director of Bygott Biggs publishes a survey each year looking at how the industry is changing. She says: “With the introduction of ABS, diversification is now a real possibility but to date law firms have not sought it on the scale that accountancy practices appear to have done. It will be interesting to see if this is set to change.”

But some law firms are taken on services traditionally offered by accountancy firms, says Kate Hennig, director of theGroGroup, which provides learning and development programmes to professional services firms.

She says: “We have seen more and more areas traditionally delivered by accountants become fair game for lawyers to drive revenue. For example expanding their service offering around M&A, recovery and insolvency and onwards into self- insured loss recovery.

“Wealth planning and IHT had been seen by some as the fare of accountants, talking to families about ‘wealth planning’ and aligning themselves with future generations – advisors to a family rather than just their business.

“Accounting firms have spent the last 10 years driving revenue from alternate sources as audit regulation has torn the recurring fees away and they have sought to advise on everything from HR and Marketing to outsourcing and IT.

“Many law firms are now keen to focus on becoming ‘trusted advisors’ to their clients rather than simply lawyers and are seeking to be better informed about the way that client businesses are run and consider how they can best position themselves to resolve their problems.”

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