The ongoing debate about complaints and dissatisfied clients raises the issue of bad publicity and how to deal with it. Given that there are a number of websites that collect complaints and achieve Google rankings, is there anything a firm can do?

From the point of view of marketing management and websites, the answer is: not much. Trying to get the offending material removed will cost money and often amounts to a pyrrhic victory – if it can be achieved at all.

Taken in a wider context, the internet is only providing a convenient place for people’s grievances to be aired. Those people who are dissatisfied, whether they voice their feelings online or not, will tell others anyway and there’s no way to stop word of mouth. Or is there? Isn’t that what PR is for?

While considering the implications of complaint websites and the wider PR issue of how to deal with bad news affecting a firm, I called a friend who is a public relations specialist in brand protection and media, Rob Shimmin.

Several ideas emerged from our discussion. If your firm is suddenly the focus of high-profile media attention, get professional help immediately. Crisis PR, like legal work, is worth every penny if you get help early.

In a less pressing situation that nevertheless demands a response, think through what your firm actually stands for, the benefits of the services it provides and (where possible) two or three examples of satisfied clients. Work towards having more positive messages about your firm than negative ones.

Also bear in mind that information also needs to be disseminated within the firm when such issues arise. It’s worth providing an internal memo that informs everyone of the position and the firm’s response. That way everyone knows what to say if they’re asked.

If you find your firm listed on a complaints website, it’s only a disaster if that’s the only message out there about your firm.

As a non-lawyer (I refuse to use the terms fee-earner and non fee-earner, or 'fee-burner' as I heard it called recently), I find it frustrating that many lawyers lack commercial awareness, that is the ability and desire to really talk to clients, find out what they want, what they will do with it, how much they expect to pay and then deliver it that way.

Having worked in many other industries before venturing into law, it was a shock to the system to find that many of my new colleagues had never worked in any other firm, let alone in any other type of business, and those questions were rarely even considered.

The problem is this: the world is changing, fast, and if law firms want to keep up they have to change fast, too. This, as I have discovered from conversations with many firms, is a big ask. The English law firm is almost an institution, things have remained the same for decades: clients come to you, their children come to you, their children’s children come to you. It is this way because that’s the way it has always been. So it is understandable to a degree that the 'it’s worked for a hundred years, why change it now?' attitude exists. The problem is that the rest of the world has moved on.

At my firm we thought we’d found the perfect solution. If we want to educate our lawyers as to the importance of marketing (putting the client at the centre of everything we do), to make them more aware of the need to compete in an increasingly competitive market and give them the tools to do so, we have to catch them young and help them start off on the right track before they develop the 'ivory tower' mentality. So we had the bright idea of having each of our trainees do a seat in Business Development (much like the Gazette's Masked IT Man's suggestion to put trainees in IT for a week). Perfect… except that it's not permitted by the Law Society because it's not legal training, so it cannot constitute part of the legal training contract.

So I would like to start a revolution: let’s get it included in the LPC, and let’s equip these youngsters with the knowledge and skills to understand the competitive market they are entering. Let’s train them to put the client at the heart of everything they do, to be effective networkers – after all, people buy from people. You can technically be the best in your field, but if you can’t look someone in the eye when you speak to them, or you hide behind emails and shy away from people, you’ll never gain their trust. And who wants a solicitor they don’t feel they can trust?

The other reason this would be a good move is that lawyers tend to look backwards, not forwards. Many legal relationships are based on transactional matters, where lawyers perform a necessary task and then may not be needed again for months (or even years, in the case of private individuals). This means that lawyers look at clients in terms of the transaction at hand instead of the lifetime value of the client, and developing a strong and lasting relationship, which will ultimately prove to be more profitable.

So let’s start giving tomorrow’s partners the knowledge and skills to be more commercial and to look at the business of servicing clients – not just practising law.

Lisa Pearson is business development manager for Manchester firm George Davies Solicitors

Are law firms more like publishing businesses than they think, and what might that mean?

This sounds like an odd question, probably, if you're a lawyer and/or you run a law firm, but bear with me for a few hundred words more than we normally allow on the blogs. I'm conducting this gedankenexperiment because I've always thought that legal and publishing are ‘similar’ in that they can both, in large part, to my mind be described thus: transactional content production businesses based around information gathering and transformation. That means that they may face similar challenges (or ‘problems’ in old money) and may even be able to face up to those challenges having learned from each other’s approaches. I could be wrong, but it’s worth discussing, which our LinkedIn group has been doing.

James Dunning of management consultancy Geotrupes posted a discussion asking whether law firms might experience the same problems faced by media businesses as the internet burned through their revenue models. The responses were fascinating – mainly because, as usual, they showed how disparate the views are on this issue within the profession and its service industry.

‘Confusion over strategy; lack of focus on customer service; antiquated pricing systems, and lack of professional management – that sounds like the old newspaper industry to me. The next year should be very interesting,’ said Peter Blair of Mar-aon Consulting.

John Harman, director of multimedia at The College of Law, said: ‘Law firm discussions about the way forward with technology and internet etc is certainly reminiscent of the music industry circa 1999 – you have to change the framework, not just the picture in the frame. Ironically, social networking for instance is much more attuned to old school legal practice than many give credit to.’ I think that’s perceptive and accurate (the music industry has also faced very similar problems to the newspaper businesses and it is, of course, ‘media’), and it’s why we created the Gazette’s social media channels.

Marianne Barber, knowledge services deputy director at The College of Law, also backed that point: ‘It’s not about the technology but recognising that these tools can mimic face-to-face skills to create the necessary relationships, thus enabling a business to spread far wider than its traditional market [my emphasis]. This applies equally to law, I would have thought, as to any other client-based enterprise.’ I emphasise those words because to me diversification is key to building revenue for media businesses and may well be key to legal’s future too.

Stephen Kuncewicz, an IP, media & entertainment lawyer with Ralli in Manchester, was unequivocal: ‘This issue is one of if not the biggest facing our profession… [and] I can’t fail to see how the answer is anything but an unqualified “yes”. Not only that, but “it’s happening already”.

‘The unavoidable fact remains that the world, our playing field and our clients are changing around us at an exponential rate and we’re struggling to keep pace, let alone catch up. The profession faces a number or fundamental challenges which find a great many parallels in the media industries, with the most obvious being that our business model is out of date and becoming rapidly unfit for purpose.’

Business law specialist Spencer Laymond at Palmers Solicitors in London seems to agree. ‘If you stick your head in the stand, yes your bottom is probably going to get bitten. Those that don’t embrace change are at risk. But if you are complacent at anything, you are not going to survive and that’s no truer for the legal market than a universal principle of life.

‘Those firms that take the initiative and modernise their practice will be fine. I don’t believe there will be as much confusion and crisis as the hype [says], though. A fundamental key to the success of a firm is not the internet, but the client relationship and source of referral work.’

But of course the internet will change forever the choice of mode for the client relationship, and the way referrals function. Now, I’m not saying that the public will suddenly turn in droves to infomediaries like Moneysupermarket or their ilk for lawyers tomorrow. But I do think that the internet will push the creation of more technologies that allow law firms to do more than they have traditionally done, do what they do more cheaply, and diversify their revenue streams, and those firms that don’t do that will lose out.

This is exactly what the media businesses are trying to do. They used to be businesses filled with capable, expensive specialists, with two streams of revenue – advertising and sales. Sales have fallen off a cliff (and have been doing so for years) and advertising revenue, especially in recruitment, has been winging its way online for years.

This isn’t about making people pay for news content – not even Murdoch would say that's the way to make money from publishing, even if he is doing it. Right now, cash is coming from non-content sources. For example, British newspapers are selling white-labelled legal and all kinds of other ‘products’; they’re littered with ‘reader offers’ and suchlike, all passing some money to the business; certain newspapers make millions from online gambling. I’m obviously not saying law firms should do this. But something like this, perhaps, is inevitable.

To be clear, I’m saying that Susskind and many before him speaking to other sectors are likely right about commoditisation because they’re being proved right in media right now - in other words, it wasn't new - and it's down to this: what you always did that made money may not be your (primary) revenue stream of the future; but that doesn’t mean you can’t make money if you can see that you ‘own’ relationships, and use those to create new revenue streams.

So, how will you do that?

This year will see a significant change in the supply of legal services to domestic and SME business. I’ll make a prediction here that I’ll review this time in 2011. There will emerge two types of solicitors firms by the end of the year: those that have fully adopted IT systems for service delivery and those that have not.

This is not a new idea – the precursors have been around for some years. What I’m saying is that 2010 will be the year that solicitors see the implementation of this approach in a way that changes how clients access legal services. There’s going to be a lot of time, effort and money put into a promotional surge in an attempt to gain a return on the investment from adopting this approach. So the profession will see the change first.

But there may be a problem on the demand side of the market equation (that old balance of supply and demand). Is the domestic and SME market ready to embrace new supply, really new ways of delivering legal services? The potential market for legal services is often pegged at approximately £10bn, but this market may be confused or reluctant to use or trust a new approach to accessing legal services.

I’m now thinking specifically of a new offering I hear is in the offing that is a major departure from the consumer’s general perception of solicitors, that being: office-based and charging by the hour. We know this view can and is changing further – I suggest 2010 will see that shift in perception accelerate.

If the consumers do adopt this new approach, then what of those firms that have not adopted the IT delivery systems? I would suggest they will have a tough fight to retain their clients.

What to do? Not surprisingly I would suggest that marketing management can provide the answers. Whichever side of the IT divide you find your firm on, you must develop a clear set of benefits that clients understand and can easily access. Whether you use IT and web delivery, or just telephone, email and the post is not so important. These are all tools for capturing clients’ needs. What does matter is that the clients you choose to serve know how easy it is to contact you and get a solution to their problem.

While this year the profession may be troubled by another IT debate, it will be the focus on servicing clients’ needs that will be the mark of success in 2010. Here’s to an exciting new decade.