LloydLaw LLP

Regulations Create Markets

James Governor points to a Seth Godin post about change being the lever for growth - Do you have to be Anti-Change to be Pro-Business?

James' comment that "regulations create markets" probably applies as much to the legal profession as any other. Changes to laws, changes to business and changes to markets all create opportunities for solicitors. Whether it's MiFID, the new Companies Act 2006, Freedom of Information Act 2000 and the body of law that's being created, all these changes affect businesses and rather than rail against regulation as businesses are sometimes inclined to do, we should embrace it for the opportunity it provides.

Vanity Searching or What You Need to Know

Keeping track of what is being said about your business is becoming increasingly significant in a world of exloding content (blogs, message boards, social networking sites, customer review sites - to name but a few).

Matt Homan over at the [non] billable hour points to a great list of the 10 things all businesses should be monitoring:

1. Company name
2. Company URL
3. Public facing figures
4. Product names
5. Product URLs
6. The industry “hang outs”
7. Employee activity/blogs
8. Conversations
9. Brand image
10. Competitors

He even goes as far as to say that lawyers should be doing it for their clients, which is actually a very good idea.

The original article over on Pronet Advertising gives plenty of links and detail for those wanting to find out more. And David Sifry of Technorati points to his own vanity search here.

Law firms and Hairdressers

I couldn't really get my head around the story about the firm of solicitors asking hairdressers to refer clients to it for a £75 referral fee.  My initial view was that it seemed like a pretty good idea, but then the press got hold of it, making the suggestion that confidences were going to be breached and now the scheme has been withdrawn. It serves as an interesting reminder that there is no easy way to acquiring new clients, and the days of the old high-street practice serving everyones needs are long gone.

Attracting new clients to law firms is challenging. Trethowans, a firm in Southampton, decided that it would be a good idea to advertise its family law department in local businesses.

According to the firm's marketing director Bryn Hughes

Businessess (estate agents, nail bars, hair salons, chiropractors and physiotherapists) were approached to obtain permission to display freephone cards on their premises.  It was entirely at the discretion of the business owner, whether they put them on general display or chose to give a card directly to a client, if they felt it was appropriate.  The decision then lay entirely with the individual, whether or not to telephone Trethowans (using the frephone number on the card) to arrange a free initial interview to discuss their personal circumstances.

So far so good. Except that it all went wrong when the media got hold of the story and started quoting some of these business owners who felt they were being asked to divulge confidential information and Trethowans were forced into retreat. The beleaguered Mr Hughes again (on the firm's website):

Our family law referral scheme has received media attention over the past week.

Regrettably, the scheme has been completely misunderstood by some businesses, who it appears believed that we were asking them to divulge confidential information about their clients to Trethowans, and also to pass on their contact details, in order that we could telephone their clients directly to sell them family law advice. This of course was never the intention of the scheme and neither was it designed to operate in this way.

Everyone at Trethowans has been horrified by the misrepresentation of the scheme in the media. In light of the response this has generated, we have decided not to proceed with the scheme. No potential clients have used the freephone cards to contact us and no referral payments have been made.

Hunting around for more information about this I came across a comment from Alastair Moyes of  Marketlaw.co.uk who made the point:

The coverage raises the awareness of marketing and promotions as an essential part of the business of running a solicitors firm.  Referrals are acknowledged as the most common way solicitors receive new instructions and any way of encouraging those referrers will help develop new business. 

We don't do family law here at LloydLaw, so I can't see us following Trethowans' tack, although we did receive a letter the other day from another firm offering us a referral fee for any family law work we passed on.  Solicitors are no different to any other business. They need new clients all the time and paying for referrals will become increasingly standard.

Direct Marketing by Email

At LloydLaw we get a fair amount of direct marketing by email. This is invariably unsolicited and it is often distinguishable from random spam. This is the sort of email sent by a legitimate business in the UK that wants to do business with us in some form or another. From time to time, we politely ask to be removed from the mailing list, but there are always one or two businesses that think we are being grumpy and unreasonable.

The law on email marketing changed at the end of 2003 when the Privacy & Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 came into effect. These Regulations made it unlawful to send marketing emails - subject to one important exception - without having first obtained opt-in consent from the intended recipient.

In particular, Regulation 22 (2) provides that unless you have got the express consent of the recipient,  no business can send unsolicited email.

The important exception (which appears at Regulation 23 (3)) is that you can send unsolicited email if - as the sender - you obtained the email address in the course of "sale or negotiations for the sale of a product or service" and you use the email to market "similar products or services".  The sender should also ensure that an "unsubcribe" or opt out facility is included in every email sent. In other words, if we as a law firm, obtained someone's email address because they had asked us some general advice, but they had never actually become a client of the firm, we would be entitled to send them email about our legal services, provided we told them they could opt out. We couldn't send them emails about anything else.

All businesses, including lawyers,  need to be aware that sending email updates to clients and prospective clients constitutes direct marketing and is subject to these restrictions. Our practice is to always make sure that clients agree at the outset of the relationship that they are happy to receive marketing emails.

Legal Marketing Blogs

At the risk of turning this into a law firm management blog, I wanted to point to a helpful list of some the newest legal marketing and client service blogs. As an aside, there appears to be a lot of legal services people blogging to lawyers, rather than lawyers blogging to their clients and ,as in any industry client service is all important. 

Does anyone still read email newsletters?

As Penny and I ponder what sort of marketing content we are going to produce for LloydLaw over and above blog content, I see that high-profile blogger Robert Scoble, co-author of the The Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers, is predicting the end of the email newsletter. He says that "getting people to subscribe to an email newsletter is sssooo 1990s".

It's an interesting view because it bears out my own experience of receiving email newsletters, which I invariably never read. One gets a sense that the effort that goes into creating them might be disproportionate to the benefit that they provide. It's just one of those things that businesses do without really thinking about the true value to customers, clients or themselves.

The Affliction of the Diligent Lawyer

I've just come across a post on the Times Law Blog by Struan Robertson complaining that he was quoted almost £4,000 to use a piece of music in a podcast. Of course, this is the sort of thing only a lawyer would do, but it's interesting nevertheless. Most people probably don't even think about licensing music for a podcast, let along asking what it might actually cost. But Struan is a solicitor and editor of Pinsent Mason's OUT-LAW.COM and I sympathise with the law firm paranoia about potential copyright infringement.

In the comments to the post Mark Stephens, the high profile media law specialist from Finers Stephens Innocent says his firm actually commissioned new music to use in the firm's podcasts, whilst another commenter highlights the use of "pod safe" music. With the increasing popularity of podcasting, it won't be long before using unlicensed music and sound in podcasts will become an issue that rights owners will want to address.

Lawyers still living in the dark ages

At a recent talk given at the Law Society by Dr Helen Stewart expressed her frustration at dealing with firms of solicitors who had provided her, in her personal capacity,  with poor service.  She used her own experiences (and she is a solicitor) as examples in an attempt to encourage her audience of solicitors to improve their levels of client care.

It's not often I find myself on the other side of the fence, but in the last few days I have had to deal with an East Anglian firm, in my personal capacity, as the executor to an elderly relative's estate. In fact, there are three executors. Two of us are in the UK and one is in France. All of us are on email and all of us have said that we would be happy  for all correspondence to be dealt with by email.

Whilst it professes to want to  correspond by email this firm still insists on sending hard copy letters that take days to arrive. I have to confess to a sense of frustration because it seems to me that if a client wishes to correspond by email, and that client is prepared to accept there may be some slight risk, then it is up to the client not the solicitor.  There's something of the "that's the way we have always done it and we are not going to change now" attitude which on the one hand is slightly depressing, and yet on the other highlights the opportunities for those solicitors who want to work with their clients, rather than against them. I can't imagine a situation in which a client might specifically ask me to write an email and I would just send him a letter instead. Do you think that client would stay a client?

Can you ever get away from the personal?

For almost a year I have been maintaining a personal blog over at Without Prejudice. Yes, I know the name sounds legal. It is legal. But that's not how the blog turned out. So now I feel it's time to start blogging about legal issues, particularly as they affect business. Your business and my business.

LloydLaw LLP is a two partner law firm, based in central London. My partner Penny Froggatt, specialises in financial services. I specialise in internet and intellectual property law, although the scope of the work I do stretches far wider.

I started out as a litigation lawyer and over the last seven or eight years I have moved away from litigation to the extent that I now have a largely non-contentious practice. My clients are made up of IT consultancies, web-based businesses, and clients with retail and sport backgrounds. Of course, all our clients now have a presence on-line and to that extent an expertise in internet-related issues is a pre-requisite for any commercial law firm.

I intend to blog about the way in which legal issues affects businesses and their growth and to tie that in with our own business. Legal businesses are no different to any other business. All the same rules apply and they are no easier to run than any other business. It will be personal. Penny will be also blogging her insights into the law and legal issues - and hers is a very different perspective from mine. For both of us  blogging is going to be personal. We don't have any grand plan, but we both have a sense that this will be far better than any static website we have ever had.   I will continue to blog about the other things that interest me over at  Without Prejudice and we will see   how it goes......