There is nothing quite like helping a prospective client see how your firm's services will help their company reach its business goals and having your firm hired as a result of your strong presentation and your ability to tie your services to their needs. Contributing to your firm's revenue builds confidence, wins accolades, and emphasizes that you are part of the team. But today, differentiating one firm's services from another is becoming increasingly difficult and a real challenge. To retain clients you've fought so hard to sell requires consistent delivery of the services and the brand that your firm promised with the sale.

This article will discuss two areas that will help today's law firm effectively compete for and retain clients in the evermore competitive legal environment: building the brand and delivering the brand.

Build the Brand

Let's examine brand within the product world of cars as an example. One could argue that, like legal services, one good car is the same as another. But effectively branding a product like a Mercedes ML350 or C-Class sedan and distinguishing it from others, by ensuring delivery of the same quality and consistency that you as a consumer expect, takes effort and careful planning and execution. What if the ML350 product was what you have come to expect from the brand and the C-Class your friend or spouse purchased was no better than a lower value brand? The brand would be compromised and you as a buyer would not be receiving what you expected.

Now switch your thoughts to legal services. Think of a firm with 16 offices across the globe. If a corporate partner in San Francisco is creating a mergers and acquisitions (M&A) document from his set of documents and a corporate partner in Chicago is creating an M&A document from her set of documents, where is the service consistency across the department and the firm's offices? Take another example—a Florida firm with three offices within the state. If the practitioners in the private client department are each delivering their respective versions of an estate plan for their various clients, there is no service consistency.

A competitive firm can beat your firm on service reliability and pricing every time. Creating a consistent brand (in this case a consistent service product) and, therefore, an expectation on the part of your firm's clients that is not only met but exceeded every time, gives your firm an advantage over the competition. So, if your firm is selling "high quality legal services," that's not enough. The high quality proof is seen in the eyes of the recipients—the clients. Making sure your high quality is experienced across the client base means making sure you align the partners' expectations with the clients' expectations and build exceptional quality and service into every part of the service delivery.

Let's look at a few ways a firm can achieve this. Start with the substantive legal product itself. Work with a small group within the firm to create a pilot project. Start with the core service offerings of the group and agree on which documents will create the library of baseline documents from which to draft. Some firms have absolutely mastered this process and use their firm's intranet site to house each department's or practice area's documents. If the firm has this reservoir of documents across offices, it has created a brand of M&A, for example, that allows it the opportunity to build a pricing strategy around their M&A product. To facilitate this process, it is useful to break down every aspect of the M&A transaction. Creating this knowledge-based repository of your firm's deliverables will be a first step in creating a consistent brand delivered by your firm.

For a closer look at what is meant by productizing a service, see Figure 1, which breaks down the intellectual property (IP) litigation process. By defining each step and the documents that coincide, the firm has a consistent approach to helping an IP client. Further, by using this approach to involve a client in the process, the firm has an opportunity to make its service somewhat tangible to the client. Another use for this process is creating consistent pricing models. Review a financial history of the various stages of the IP process, say from matter inception to motion for summary judgment, and determine the cost. This provides an opportunity to determine a strong approach to pricing the services and offering clients a budget for their planning purposes. Granted, this is a somewhat granular approach to demonstrate the point. Once the services are defined within the various practices of the firm, it's time to take a look at the bigger picture—the overall firm product or brand.

Deliver the Brand

To make your firm the Ritz Carlton of law firms means delivering on the brand (i.e., high quality) that clients have come to expect of the firm. Figure 2 depicts a broader view of the various points of intersection the firm may have with its clients. There is value in studying how the firm delivers service through these various channels and, therefore, how the product or the brand is engrained in the culture of the firm. Granted, these various client intersections are not what we come to think of generally as the legal product. However, if the core of the service is the lawyer and his or her specific substantive legal services, then the wrapper around the core is the rest of the firm and the various ways in which the client experiences the firm. Tightening the broader range of services and ensuring there is quality and consistency across practices, and in many firms across offices, provide clients with an inherent guarantee of quality.

Think of Disney World or other famous brands on whose services you have come to rely. Your expectations are always met and often exceeded regardless of which corner of the Magic Kingdom you are experiencing. The same holds true for private clubs, high-end hotels, etc. A law firm is the same. The brand must hold true no matter which partner, associate, support team member, or area of the firm the client is experiencing.

Review the firm from the clients' eyes and work to align the firm's strong legal services with the other various ways in which the clients experience the firm.

In summary, we hear a lot about productizing a law firm's services. Review the various practice areas and seek ways to standardize the substantive legal work. Then view the rest of the firm and its service areas from conference rooms and reception areas to telephones, e-mails, and voice mails to make sure the product the firm is delivering is consistent across the firm, its practices, and its offices.

Exceed client expectations and clients will continue to be loyal to the firm.

This article originally appeared in the January 2009 issue of Practice Innovations.

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