With the announcement of another new legal services brand, ‘Simplify the Law’, firms are being presented with an increasing complex choice of partner organisations. Solicitors’ enquiry services can be a useful additional source of business, however firms need to correctly manage these services, choose them carefully and avoid a couple of common errors.

The approach to the consumer and SME markets varies widely, from QualitySolicitors or HighStreetLawyer.com at one end of the spectrum to rightsolicitor.co.uk and ContactLaw in one area or FreeIndex and Wigster.com off in another. Which one or what combination of these services is most cost effective for your firm? None are really exclusive of the others and all should be considered against a firm’s business objectives.

One of the common errors we see will be familiar to partners in personal injury departments. They become too reliant on one source of enquiries for a particular type of work. While it’s easy to drift into this situation it becomes increasingly hard work to extricate a department or whole firm from just one source.

The other common problem is managing those enquiries that come through external providers. PI partners are more used to this, however most firms don’t have the robust systems in place to measure the productivity of enquiry services or their profitability for the firm. This leads to partners having a ‘feeling’ of how good or not the enquiries received are but it’s often not backed-up by hard evidence.

Given that these services offer attractive benefits how should a firm judge each one on it’s merits? Client enquiries, brand development, national advertising and direct mail are some of the elements of promotions and marketing, being offered to firms through these outsourced suppliers. As partners or a marketing manager of a firm, it is becoming more difficult to gather together an overview of the market. The competition for the clients’ attention is increasing rapidly and will only continue to increase as ABS businesses start to promote their services.

We are often asked by firms which of these services is worth trying. The response is which one best fits your firm’s long-term objectives and is likely to generate profitable matters at a cost less that you would normally pay. To assist firms in choosing, Marketlaw conducted a research project to list all the available solicitor enquiry services alongside their response to a few basic questions (the report is available free from Marketlaw’s website).

The choice of which services to use is only half of the issues a firm needs to consider. In the same way as buying in any external service, it's how you use it that counts. This leads to a wider point for all solicitors firms. Given the introduction of outcomes-focused regulation that focuses on client satisfaction, all enquiries need to be handled in a way that maximises the potential of gaining a profitable matter and retaining the future work from that client. Overstretched receptionist, busy fee earners and secretaries means clients often finish contact with a firm without a satisfactory result. Whilst in the past the client may have just tried again, but now they have a plethora of alternatives being heavily promoted and your competitor are now just a call or a click away.

Handling client enquiries efficiently and effectively, whether from an external supplier or your own promotional activity is now an essential part of a successful firm. Organising your firm to profitably satisfy the needs of a client is a definition of what marketing means for a solicitors firm. It’s not just good business practice, now a requirement of your firm.