Think about your firm and realistically assess how your services match up to those announced by CPP Group plc?CPP has teamed up with Irwin Mitchell, document assembly business Epoq Legal and others to offer consumer-centric services, including a phone line and online portal to triage enquiries.

Why should past clients and those in need of legal services in your area contact your firm or your department to get help? Think also of the number of steps it takes for a client to start to get answers to their legal problems? What if it’s 5.30pm and your office switchboard is closed?

I can hear the response ‘but that’s not our market, our clients won’t use those type of services, so we don’t care’ echoing in the ether. The problem is no one yet knows how the domestic and SME legal services market will react to new offerings of legal services. If these general ‘help’, ‘life assistance’ or business advice services offered by branded organisations attract customers they’ll channel the legal service enquiries through their systems so those enquiries are lost to local firms, or packaged through panels at low margins.

This issue is also reflected in the Selling for Solicitors research that highlights a lack of innovation in traditional firms of solicitors. Meanwhile, new approaches to delivering or providing access to legal services are popping up almost weekly.

What’s odd is that most firms are not far from offering a comparable set of services, but they fail to see them from a clients view or see them as something to be discouraged. Fee-earners and support staff often provide an element of free initial advice with a sympathetic approach, firms’ websites offer lots of helpful guides or information and, unlike the telephone helplines, firms offer a nearby office for a personal chat if required. The problem is the attitude of firms towards these ‘giveaways’ and the concern that it’s a slippery slope to unprofitable work and lower billing.

The aim of a firm through its fee-earners is to deliver to the client easy access to relevant services, talking to helpful people who understand how to help and provide access to the best solution, (profitably). What little needs to change is mostly attitude and a few small processes. A bigger problem is scale and capacity, but these issues are not insurmountable with training, fee-earner commitment and limiting the offering to a small area defined either by geographic area or types of people.

To compete in the changing legal services market need not mean huge promotional budgets and radical change. A simple effort to break down the barriers to clients connecting your solution to their legal problem, alongside a promotion of the benefits to clients of your services is all that’s needed.