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Marketing Chambers - More Than Another Drinks Party.
Many Chambers do not formally gather information on client needs, few research or ask structured questions about how services could be improved and on-going satisfaction feedback is rarely requested. Only when a complaint is received or a client lost is there any real attention paid to these issues. This is worrying since Barristers are operating in an increasingly commercial environment.

By Stephen Bedford, Managing Director of the specialist law consultancy firm Conical


Professional services firms of all types are actively marketing themselves. Law firms are becoming increasingly sophisticated in how they market themselves. Barristers er unique management structure of Chambers has restricted the uptake of professional marketing practices. Central to the future marketing activities of all Chambers is a balancing act that needs to be achieved between marketing Chambers as a whole and marketing individual Barristers. In all organisations marketing time and budget is competed for but, with the highly decentralised organisational structure of Chambers, setting marketing objectives and priorities can be a sensitive matter. However, before discussing the detail of how a Chambers should be marketed it is worth spending a little time defining marketing.

 

A Definition of Marketing
The Chartered Institute of Marketing is the world’s largest professional marketing body. (1) The CIM has provided a very useful definition of marketing that helps focus the thoughts of those tasked with, or interested in, marketing.

“Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably.”

There are many thoughts that spring to mind when considering this definition. However, it is worth asking the following questions: How do we currently identify client needs? Do we anticipate and react to changing client needs? Do we satisfy client needs?

Many Chambers do not formally gather information on client needs, few research or ask st real attention paid to these issues. This is worrying since Barristers are operating in an increasingly commercial environment and the search for instructions is highly competitive. Indeed it would be possible to challenge the CIM definition of marketing on the grounds that satisfaction is now rather passive and the real competitive battle is about delighting the customer. For Chambers to actively aim at delighting clients they will have to adopt an innovative and information driven approach to marketing with client delight being the defining logic behind literally everything a Chambers does.

Managing Marketing
Evidence obtained from the recent Conical survey into marketing practices employed by Chambers (2) suggests that marketing management structures have been put in place by Chambers with the typical decision making structure being a marketing committee. Nearly half the Chambers questioned in the survey suggested that such a committee was the source of marketing decision making wing training for Members and Clerks. Unfortunately there is little evidence of this. As such it is likely that mistakes are being made and resources wasted on ineffective initiatives or opportunities being lost as a result of inactivity.

Effective Action
The start point for marketing activity is a review of existing structures and initiatives. This should be performed by someone with experience of professional services marketing who could come from within the Chambers organisation or from the outside.

Having compiled that review, suggestions for future activity should be grouped together in a formal marketing plan that covers all elements of the marketing tool kit, with clearly defined timescales, responsibilities and budgets. This plan can then be formally adopted by a management committee and decision making responsibility allocated. Without this devolved responsibility progress will likely be woefully slow as issues are endlessly debated at committee level with little practical action taking place.
At some stage there will have to be a decision made about how Chambers is promoted and how individual Barristers are promoted. There need not be excessive conflict here but there will no doubt be some discussions held as to who has a relationship with a client, individual Barristers or the Chambers as a whole. Given careful handling most people can see the benefits of sharing contacts for the benefit of Chambers as a whole and once this is accepted Chambers can embark upon a campaign of on-going communications with existing clients, lapsed clients, referral bodies and target clients. Experience shows that just reviewing the historical client base of a Chambers reveals all sorts of trends in terms of client billings and lapsed clients.

What Works?
Marketing a Chambers is not like marketing peas to the general public. The target market for Barristers can be easily profiled and the total number of potential clients is relatively small compared to consumer marketing. There are very real opportunities to pursue highly targeted low cost initiatives to increase awareness of Chambers and individual Barristers. This can be achieved through a mixture of information supply, events, hospitality as well as through targeted PR and electronic communications. It is also suggested that there is a real possibility of learning from other business to business sectors by adopting a ‘key client management’ approach whereby a relationship with an instructing firm is allocated to an individual for nurturing and further penetration. This need not conflict with the traditional work of Clerks but should be seen as supplementary to it. As with other professional services sectors it is always easier to win more work from existing clients than it is to win new, so this type of relationship nurturing can have good short-term returns. It would not be unusual to find that most clients are not aware of the full range of capability a Chambers has.

For the general promotion of Chambers and individual Barristers some well structured PR and advertising output can prove to be useful. It is worth noting that whilst awareness initiatives do undoubtedly have a role to play they are unlikely to result in immediate new instructions unless they are promoting specialist capability.


Stephen Bedford is Managing Director of the specialist law consultancy firm Conical. He is a Course Director for the CIM. He can be contacted by at Conical on 01727 844000 or via e-mail sjb@conical.co.uk

 

Conical Marketing

The CIM can be reached via the web at www.cim.co.uk
Conical report entitled ‘Marketing the Bar’ 2003
   
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