In business blog

Despite not wishing to be thought a grumpy old lawyer I decided to look at the Legal Ombudsman’s recent report, The price of separation: Divorce-related legal complaints and their causes.

This report made the news as it features lots of stories about wicked lawyers. The press revel in bad stories about us. We are told that 13% of divorce clients are dissatisfied with their lawyer as against 7% of clients overall. As a glass half-full person that means to me that a very high proportion of clients are satisfied with our services.

Or perhaps I am being simplistic. My firm has, on average, a certain number of complaints per year. I am told the level is high and I always respond that our clients are vulnerable, challenging and often unwell. But I suppose that goes for all of us. We all act for clients who by their nature are often difficult.

What I wonder is how the satisfaction rate compares with other professions or services. This is not a reason for complacency even though it is obvious that divorce clients are not the easiest; litigation is often driven by high emotions and as someone once said, litigation always ends in failure for one party.

The report itself is sensible and fair. It led me to look at An ombudsman’s view of good costs service. It is a well-produced booklet, easily digestible and worth a look. Show it around the office. It makes the point that the legal market is changing. People can get divorce kits, fixed-price deals, and online advice. What does the high street lawyer offer that the online divorce-kit seller cannot? We can offer easy access and plain old-fashioned face-to-face advice.

Obviously the best way to deal with a complaint is to avoid it in the first place. The booklet goes a long way to help. I will drink to that.

David Pickup is a partner at Aylesbury-based Pickup & Scott

The subject of Facebook has cropped up quite a lot recently in enquiries I’ve had from law firms.

I don’t know why, Facebook has been running for many years so it’s hardly new. Maybe Spring is in the air and firms feel they need to do more on their marketing, especially on the social media side.

The question is: should Facebook be part of their marketing mix and how do they go about it? This is an awkward question for me because my instinctive response is to say, unless you’re really committed, don’t bother. Facebook isn’t like Twitter, or LinkedIn... or even Pinterest.

For marketing purposes, Facebook is difficult... it’s time-consuming, involves lots of work yet the rewards are very uncertain. To make matters worse, you can’t be sure that Facebook won’t cut the ground from under you just as you’re on the verge of success.

I should point out that I’m not talking about Facebook advertising... the stuff you pay for. I have my doubts about that but that isn’t the subject of this article. I’m talking about the organic social interaction side of Facebook; the kind of marketing that’s free in theory but which in practice may turn out to be very expensive.

Let me explain. The basic premise of Facebook is that you set up a page and put interesting posts about your firm and its services, legal developments, news stories... anything that will catch the attention of the public so you can build up an army of followers.

So far, so good... but there are problems.

Facebook is far from straightforward. Its system is set up so that your posts are only seen by a small proportion of your followers, currently about 10%. This means that if you have 1,000 followers, only about 100 will see any particular post.

You then hope that some of those 100 will find your post interesting enough to share with their friends or followers. This way you will reach a bigger audience. If one post goes down very well and gets lots of shares, Facebook may slightly increase the number of people who see your next post. If that gets lots of shares, you may get a virtuous circle going.

However, it can go the other way as well. If your post doesn’t create much interest you’ll be back where you started.

This means that how many people you reach on Facebook is determined by how popular your posts are and how many people share them. It’s not enough to have large numbers of followers; you also need to produce lots of interesting posts.

This presents difficulties for law firms. The law is a serious matter yet Facebook is a medium designed to allow friends to interact socially in a light-hearted way. As people put up pictures of their boozy Friday night out, how many of them are going to share your law posts?

The question of what material works best on Facebook is another concern. The most popular posts involve pictures, jokes, amusing or inspirational quotes... none of these are all that high on the law agenda.

The other problem with Facebook involves something we can’t predict: what will Facebook do next?

Its practices aren’t set in stone. For example, until early last year, Facebook used to automatically show your posts to somewhere between 20% and 30% of your followers. Then its share price fell, so it cut the figure down to something like 10% - presumably to persuade firms to pay for advertising instead of trying to reach people organically.

Who’s to say Facebook won’t reduce the percentage even further? It raises the question: who wants to put a lot of time and effort into a marketing platform they don’t control and which may change for the worse at any moment?

So, should your firm get involved in Facebook? Well, maybe... but only if you’ve already got more certain and reliable marketing strategies in place. Facebook should be one of your last marketing platforms, not one of your first. And if you are going to do it, you need to go into it wholeheartedly with a lot of resources behind you.

As we’ve seen, it’s full of challenges and is not for the faint-hearted.

As for that social media platform Twitter, well now that’s a different matter altogether. I’m much more positive about Twitter... but more about that in another post.

Nick Kehoe is a former television and newspaper journalist. He is now managing director at law marketing firm Media Coverage

My comments on complaints and the pressures of regulation seem to have hit the mark. Thank you for your responses. Strangely no one has written to say ‘let's have more regulation, audits, and KPIs’ or ‘let's make the complaints regime more onerous for us’. I don’t think that is because solicitors want to lower standards but simply because we are struggling. For years those of us on the high street have had to do better and better work for less and less money.

I have, though, thought of an idea to make money. Fine everyone £1 every time they say the words ‘pro bono’. If you think that is fanciful - my first idea was that everyone who says the words ‘pro bono’ should be boiled in their own juices and have a notice attached to them. I have no problems about large firms that can afford it having pro bono departments, and I genuinely admire people who give up time to help others. I have nothing against it in principle. All firms do work for nothing and have always done so and long may it continue.

It is the idea that it is regulated and forced on us that concerns me. Presumably we will all have to keep logs of what pro bono we have done, why, who for, the backgrounds of the recipients and provide examples, and have a written policy which is reviewed every six months. Even worse is the idea that it is the saviour. All that it really does is perpetuate the notion that we are all rich.

There, I owe myself £4 (£5 including the headline).

David Pickup is a partner at Aylesbury-based Pickup & Scott

A selection of the world’s fashion designers descending on London in order to show their latest collections may not seem to be the natural focus for the legal world, but this bi-annual event is worthy of some study. Whilst you may have little or no interest in the resurgence of the 1960s trend, or the fact that stripes are huge this season, you will no doubt have seen some coverage of London Fashion Week, even if only images of the catwalk shows or gossipy headlines.

Whilst all the glitz and glamour around fashion week courts a very different kind of publicity to the legal sector, at the heart of all the gossip is a highly oiled marketing machine that consistently gets its event onto all of the front pages – at least once a day – and is all over the internet for a five-day period. Given the carnivorous nature of the front pages of our press and the enormity of the internet that’s really no mean feat. But how do the powers that be at LFW make this happen year on year with such consistency?

Embracing technology – people like new technology and they like to use new technology and if you give them the opportunity to engage with that, whilst inadvertently promoting your brand, it’s a much more enticing offer. This year fashion week used almost every type of new media out there to engage with people, from live streaming some of its shows, to posting clips using the hottest new social networking site Vine and getting models to use ‘model cam’ to provide backstage glimpses. The result was that this content was used and reused all over the web, each time driving people back to the fashion week website.

Lesson for lawyers: consider incorporating new technology to showcase achievements, results, in-house expertise and knowledge. Create a YouTube channel and post a series of video ‘how to’ guides, live-stream lectures or client training sessions, or incorporate live coverage of breaking legal news into a website feed.

Using the power of social media – LFW is the master of the hashtag. Not only was the #LFW hashtag trending throughout the duration of the event, but on many occasions the individual designers were too. LFW uses its Twitter all year round and pitches itself as a newsy magazine during the event itself, commenting on collections and linking in the designers to ensure retweets and favouriting. It maximises the fact that it often has an inside scoop to produce tweets and status updates that are informative and frequent, as well as coveted by other users for their own Twitter pages – resulting in numerous retweets. LFW also gets creative with its own unique hashtags, using more than one to cover different elements of the event, such as the #LFWTimeline tag which was used to post updates on show times.

Lesson for lawyers: don’t neglect your social media accounts – a dormant social media account is more damaging than no social media account. Keep your content fresh, relevant, interesting and retweetable and develop a ‘voice’ that you can use to engage with followers. Create your own hashtags or make use of others trending in your sector – this is a great way to gain followers.

Thinking outside the box – LFW is really just an organisation behind a fashion show, but the way it interacts with the public makes it much more than that. During fashion week itself it staged interviews with designers via its Twitter page where Twitter users could put their questions directly and see immediate answers by using the relevant hashtag (again another way to get that hashtag trending). Its website acts almost like a fashion library, providing information on all the designers and their previous collections, as well as those just shown – and the website is updated almost immediately. The site also has a section that caters to visiting editors and fashionistas, providing something of a concierge service, with pages dedicated to the best bars and restaurants in London, where to stay in the capital, as well as where to shop.

Lesson for lawyers: how can you tie together the services that you offer? Try cross selling your services by structuring your website so that clients visiting one practice area are linked to a related one in a logical ‘next steps’ kind of way.

Try to imagine what else clients would appreciate that will set your service apart from others – anticipate queries and questions with information on the website, offer a similar Twitter interview scenario for an hour a week with experienced partners – it might take up an hour of that partner’s time but the attention that this ‘free’ legal advice gets could give your profile an enormous boost. Don’t forget the importance of keeping your web content up to date – leaving out-of-date pages up will immediately put people off, whereas a regularly updated site becomes a ‘go to’ for those in the sector.

There are many ways in which these lessons can be incorporated into the legal world, whatever the context. Social media – from Twitter and Facebook to YouTube and Instagram – are key to digital marketing across all sectors now, and will continue to be in the next few years. As is always the case in our contemporary fast-moving world (even the legal world), those who are first on the bandwagon tend to see the most benefit. Whilst you don’t have to introduce a ‘partner cam’ or go as far as to get clients to provide video testimonials, subtly looking to reach ahead of the competition can reap huge rewards.

Melissa Davis, director of MD Communications