There is now no doubt whatsoever that Alternative Business Structures are here, and here to stay. Cooperative Legal Services will be one of the first ones to be authorised to conduct reserved legal activities later this year, and they are already a multi-million pound legal business doing non-reserved work. They are going to be a formidable opponent in the legal market place. They are not alone….
Unlike other competitors who have come and gone and been shrugged off by the traditional law firms, this set will be able to market into your client base directly. The reason? They already have those same Clients as their own customers for other products and services and so they are perfectly at liberty to market to them and boast about their ‘new’ legal services. It is a racing certainty that they will be 100 times better at marketing than those traditional law firms, and will start to chip away at their client base.
The answer is to start marketing to existing client bases like there is no tomorrow. If nothing else is done with marketing budgets in 2012, it is vital that a reliable database is constructed of all existing clients and they need to be regularly contacted, with innovative information, offers, news, etc. Most law firms rely for the majority of their work on existing Clients and recommendations from existing clients. It must make very good sense indeed to be contacting those existing clients and finding ways of making sure the new entrants cannot get their claws into them.