In this sequence, we talk to Laura Boyle, head of EU Marketing and Business
Development. Laura gives us an understanding of
how a new market insight system can be used to develop a consistent offering across
different international markets.
Withers started out as a London-based firm, a few centuries ago and it's been
through a period of really exciting growth over the last decade, so
the firm's management set out a decade ago to sort of track or predict the future
movements of global wealth and private capital and set out really to be quite
different from our competitors in this space in these space of law firms so
focused on individuals and families and their associated wealth and businesses.
So we sought out where do we think we need to be to match the needs of our
clients? So that process of growth started with a merger with a law firm in
the States and since then, we've added a new office every year, pretty much every
year for ten years and in the last six months, it's been even faster growth
so we've now got 18 offices across the United States, Europe, Asia and the
Caribbean, so it's been really exciting time for us.
We've been helping a major international, very well known brand, a business that's
backed by a family, so a family owned business and we've been helping the family
members with thinking about their tax and their wealth planning and thinking
about their succession planning for the future and who's going to help take over
the business when they might want to exit and we've also been helping them
think about the commercial elements of the business and its expansion overseas,
so that's involved thinking about some merger activity in Asia and also some
associated disputes, so nobody wants to get into litigation but of course it
crops up sometimes and we've been able to help that.
We are the largest law firm in the world that focused on the needs of private
individuals, families and their companies and their associated charitable or
philanthropic interests, so that's a really interesting place for us to be in
the market because we've we can build on the hundreds of years of experience of
acting for this client base but we can now do it internationally, so we think
that gives us a really in-depth understanding of how that sort of
private capital led business, private capital led charity, how those sorts of
organizations operate and with that kind of sectoral in-depth knowledge of the clients,
we can provide a really different service. So the thing that we
really think makes us different and makes us sound out in the market is the
international coverage that we've achieved, so lots of other law firms
operating in this space tend to do so in their local markets. We've set out to
achieve this international coverage so we've got 18 offices internationally
and that means that we offer a really consistent service, so we've thought
about the ways that we want all of our Withers lawyers to operate and if you
go and take some advice from our Tokyo office, it will be exactly the same as
the advice you'd get from our California office and that's really different, that
really helps us stand out. And by extension, the additional benefit to the
client there is that that efficiency brings better cost savings, better cost
efficiency, so that's a direct benefit for the client.
That’s really interesting because we actually think that variability is a
positive for us and that might be different from other businesses, I'm not
sure. So for us, we're able to offer a much better service to our clients if we
can offer them different levels of lawyers and different prices, so going
into any pitch situation with a client, the first thing we'll do is try and
understand exactly what their objectives are, so are they be going into a big piece of
litigation where they need all holds barred, you know, high level partner advice and,
you know, it's a critical thing for their business, they need to make a big impact
and they might want to throw all resources at the problem, or is it a
lighter touch approach that's needed, bearing in mind their commercial
outcomes? So that's the key bit, sitting down and understanding what does the client
really want and then how can we deliver it cost effectively and that often might
mean bringing in teams of paralegals, junior associates, trainees, all
supervised by partners with really in-depth experience of the matter in
hand and that blend of services gives clients hopefully exactly what
they need and so that variability is actually a really good good thing for us.
So in terms of the, the problem that we’d outlined, following our international
expansion, we really wanted to understand what our clients think about us? We
suddenly have this whole new set of clients globally, that our 18 offices
are servicing, so historically, we'd always relied on face to face, one to one
client feedback and that's been fantastic, it's very much based on the
trusted advisor relationship and that's how we approach everything we do as a
business, that our lawyers will operate based on a really
close, in-depth understanding of clients, but the problem that left us with
centrally was that we didn't have really clear empirical idea of what our clients
think about us, so we decided to add to that client lawyer relationship with
something a bit more formal. So we put in place and a program of monthly surveys
that go out to clients on a matter closed, so whenever a piece of
work finishes and that's given as a set of data that we're able to use to
achieve consistency in our service internationally and that can really
support our growth and marketing strategy. Another element of the problem
that we've had to face is thinking about how you seek feedback from clients in a
partnership environment. So one of the key parts of a partnership is that
closest of relationship between a lawyer and their client and we've had to do a
loss of work internally, talking to our lawyers about how the client insight
program can enhance their relationships rather than threaten them.
As we've been going through this period of international expansion, we realized
that we needed to formalize our standardize the way that we seek
feedback from clients. We've relied for a long time on one to one or personalized
face-to-face feedback which has been great but with the size that we're now at,
we needed to find a better way to check in on whether we're delivering on that
central promise to our client about the fact that we could offer consistent
services across our offices. So we’ve thought about a number of ways that we
can do this better and we're still working on it. We've we've put in place a
client insights system, so one aspect of that is a monthly survey that goes out
to clients whenever they finish a particular matter or piece of work with
us. All the data that comes in from that survey internationally is fed into a
dashboard system that any member of our client services or legal teams can access
at any point, which is fantastic because it means that they can deal immediately
with any issues or problems that arise in a matter but also that data can be fed
into wider trends centrally at the firm, so we can work closely with different
offices to ensure that we're delivering on that promise, that we offer the same
service. So one trend that we've seen, and it's been really interesting, is
that lots of clients have said they know that we're the international law firm
for individuals and families but they didn't realize we were operating in
certain locations around the globe so we've been able to use that to shift our
marketing strategy and to work out that actually we could be a bit more
confident in talking to our clients and saying "Yes, we do now have operations
in Asia" and so that's really helped us drive and help us think about the
communications we make externally. In addition to surveys, we also seek
feedback at different points of the touch points in the relationship with
clients, so for example, whenever we go through any pitch situation to try and
win a new piece of work or new piece of business, we'll always spend time with
the client afterwards understanding why we won or lost that particular
opportunity.
So it's fantastic now we've got 18 months of data available to us and
that's helping us in two main ways, so firstly it's helping us think about an
internal client development program to help us think about how we're working
with our clients internationally and how we're delivering on that central promise
to be consistent across our locations and secondly, it is helping drive marketing
decisions so we're starting to see data that's helping us identify gaps in
our services and gaps in our locations, which allows us to quickly
recalibrate and address those. So for example, we might have a client
suggesting that they feel they need advice in a certain area we haven't yet got
and we're quickly able to to hire a team in that area and to deliver that service.
So it's a work in progress, we're still looking, you know, still looking at the
data as we go but we think we're being able to make
real changes to the way we run our business.
So for the future, we want to think about how this data can really continue
helping us drive consistency across our service, so it's we've started a great
pilot in one of our teams in London, thinking about how they might all engage
with the client services charter so that a list of activities or ways of behaving
with our clients, that they'll all commit to and that's going really well
so far but we, you know, keep working on that and working out how we can roll that
out to other teams. The second element of plans for the future is around pricing
so we want to start drawing out trends in the data, to think how we can drive
our competitive pricing strategy. Thirdly, we need to think carefully about how we
can use the data better to benchmark ourselves externally, so far we've been
thinking a lot about consistency of our international offering, but how can we
use this to track what we're doing against our competitors? And finally, a
priority for me is going to be working really hard on keeping up the internal
engagement with the program, so making sure that all the lawyers
internationally understand the value it can add and as we add new teams or new
locations internationally, that all of those new lawyers really understand what
we're trying to do.