One of the firms I work closely with has a fairly rare management quirk for a firm of its size. It provides the partners (and finance director) with lunch each day.

The effect of this is that the partnership works as a unit. Although the firm has two very separate areas of law, they all have a clear idea of what’s happening around the firm, purely by meeting regularly. It has 10 partners – I’m sure smaller partnerships (two to four partners, say) will be familiar with this level of management contact, but is it as rare as I think it is in larger firms?

What’s this got to do with marketing? Apart from making cross-selling far easier, because people know more about the business as a whole, it has direct relevance to the definition of marketing and how it should be applied in a solicitors’ firm.

My colleague David Monk, who has spent many years of working with solicitors about marketing, and I have distilled it to this: ‘If it’s not the production of legal work or accounting for that work, then it’s marketing.’

Marketing is about understanding your clients’ future needs and developing services to profitably satisfy those requirements. It is therefore part of everyone’s job at the firm to contribute towards this, a job ever more important as new legal service providers are already rushing forward with ideas. Have a look at Co-op Legal Services, Halifax Legal Solutions, Which? or MyLawyer.co.uk, to see how they present their services.

Creativity is needed to address the changing legal services market. That creativity requires communication between a firm’s management team, which allows them to come up with ideas and look for opportunities relevant to their situation. Marketing is therefore the process of co-ordinating this communication and getting the ideas implemented and presented to future clients. Advertising or promotions come at the end of this process, not the beginning.

So my conclusion has to be: have lunch with your colleagues more often, every day if you can. It’ll make running your firm a whole lot easier.