In this sequence, we talk to Laura Boyle,
head of EU Marketing and Business
Development. Laura gives us an
understanding of
how a new market insight system can be used to
develop a consistent offering across
different international markets.
Withers started out as a London-based
firm, a few centuries ago and it's been
through a period of really
exciting growth over the last decade, so
the firm's management set out a decade ago
to sort of track or predict the future
movements of global wealth and private
capital and set out really to be quite
different from our competitors in
this space in these space of law firms so
focused on individuals and families and
their associated wealth and businesses.
So we sought out where do we think we
need to be to match the needs of our
clients? So that process of growth
started with a merger with a law firm in
the States and since then, we've added a
new office every year, pretty much every
year for ten years and in the last six
months, it's been even faster growth
so we've now got 18 offices across the
United States, Europe, Asia and the
Caribbean, so it's been really exciting
time for us.
We've been helping a major international,
very well known brand, a business that's
backed by a family, so a family owned
business and we've been helping the family
members with thinking about their tax
and their wealth planning and thinking
about their succession planning for the
future and who's going to help take over
the business when they might want to
exit and we've also been helping them
think about the commercial elements of
the business and its expansion overseas,
so that's involved thinking about some
merger activity in Asia and also some
associated disputes, so nobody wants to
get into litigation but of course it
crops up sometimes and we've been able
to help that.
We are the largest law firm in the world
that focused on the needs of private
individuals, families and their companies
and their associated charitable or
philanthropic interests, so that's a
really interesting place for us to be in
the market because we've we can build on
the hundreds of years of experience of
acting for this client base but we can
now do it internationally, so we think
that gives us a really in-depth
understanding of how that sort of
private capital led business, private
capital led charity, how those sorts of
organizations operate and with that kind
of sectoral in-depth knowledge of the clients,
we can provide a really
different service. So the thing that we
really think makes us different and
makes us sound out in the market is the
international coverage that we've
achieved, so lots of other law firms
operating in this space tend to do so in
their local markets. We've set out to
achieve this international coverage so
we've got 18 offices internationally
and that means that we offer a really
consistent service, so we've thought
about the ways that we want all of our
Withers lawyers to operate and if you
go and take some advice from our Tokyo
office, it will be exactly the same as
the advice you'd get from our California
office and that's really different, that
really helps us stand out. And by
extension, the additional benefit to the
client there is that that efficiency
brings better cost savings, better cost
efficiency, so that's a direct benefit
for the client.
That’s really interesting because we actually think that variability is a
positive for us and that might be
different from other businesses, I'm not
sure. So for us, we're able to offer a
much better service to our clients if we
can offer them different levels of
lawyers and different prices, so going
into any pitch situation with a client,
the first thing we'll do is try and
understand exactly what their objectives
are, so are they be going into a big piece of
litigation where they need all holds barred, you know, high level partner advice and,
you know, it's a critical thing for their
business, they need to make a big impact
and they might want to throw all
resources at the problem, or is it a
lighter touch approach that's needed,
bearing in mind their commercial
outcomes? So that's the key bit, sitting
down and understanding what does the client
really want and then how can we deliver
it cost effectively and that often might
mean bringing in teams of paralegals,
junior associates, trainees, all
supervised by partners with really
in-depth experience of the matter in
hand and that blend of services
gives clients hopefully exactly what
they need and so that variability is
actually a really good good thing for us.
So in terms of the, the problem that we’d outlined, following our international
expansion, we really wanted to understand
what our clients think about us? We
suddenly have this whole new set of
clients globally, that our 18 offices
are servicing, so historically, we'd
always relied on face to face, one to one
client feedback and that's been
fantastic, it's very much based on the
trusted advisor relationship and that's
how we approach everything we do as a
business, that our lawyers will operate
based on a really
close, in-depth understanding of clients,
but the problem that left us with
centrally was that we didn't have really
clear empirical idea of what our clients
think about us, so we decided to add to
that client lawyer relationship with
something a bit more formal. So we put in
place and a program of monthly surveys
that go out to clients on a
matter closed, so whenever a piece of
work finishes and that's given as a set
of data that we're able to use to
achieve consistency in our service
internationally and that can really
support our growth and marketing
strategy. Another element of the problem
that we've had to face is thinking about
how you seek feedback from clients in a
partnership environment. So one of the
key parts of a partnership is that
closest of relationship between a lawyer
and their client and we've had to do a
loss of work internally, talking to our
lawyers about how the client insight
program can enhance their relationships
rather than threaten them.
As we've been going through this period
of international expansion, we realized
that we needed to formalize our
standardize the way that we seek
feedback from clients. We've relied for a
long time on one to one or personalized
face-to-face feedback which has been
great but with the size that we're now at,
we needed to find a better way to check
in on whether we're delivering on that
central promise to our client about the
fact that we could offer consistent
services across our offices. So we’ve thought about a number of ways that we
can do this better and we're still
working on it. We've we've put in place a
client insights system, so one aspect of
that is a monthly survey that goes out
to clients whenever they finish a
particular matter or piece of work with
us. All the data that comes in from that
survey internationally is fed into a
dashboard system that any member of our
client services or legal teams can access
at any point, which is fantastic because
it means that they can deal immediately
with any issues or problems that arise in a
matter but also that data can be fed
into wider trends centrally at the firm, so
we can work closely with different
offices to ensure that we're delivering
on that promise, that we offer the same
service. So one trend that we've
seen, and it's been really interesting, is
that lots of clients have said they know
that we're the international law firm
for individuals and families but they
didn't realize we were operating in
certain locations around the globe so
we've been able to use that to shift our
marketing strategy and to work out that
actually we could be a bit more
confident in talking to our clients and
saying "Yes, we do now have operations
in Asia" and so that's really helped
us drive and help us think about the
communications we make externally. In
addition to surveys, we also seek
feedback at different points of the
touch points in the relationship with
clients, so for example, whenever we go
through any pitch situation to try and
win a new piece of work or new piece of
business, we'll always spend time with
the client afterwards understanding why
we won or lost that particular
opportunity.
So it's fantastic now we've got 18
months of data available to us and
that's helping us in two main ways, so
firstly it's helping us think about an
internal client development program to
help us think about how we're working
with our clients internationally and how
we're delivering on that central promise
to be consistent across our locations and
secondly, it is helping drive marketing
decisions so we're starting to see data
that's helping us identify gaps in
our services and gaps in our locations,
which allows us to quickly
recalibrate and address those. So for
example, we might have a client
suggesting that they feel they need
advice in a certain area we haven't yet got
and we're quickly able to to hire a team
in that area and to deliver that service.
So it's a work in progress, we're still
looking, you know, still looking at the
data as we go but we think we're being
able to make
real changes to the way we run our
business.
So for the future, we want to think about
how this data can really continue
helping us drive consistency across our
service, so it's we've started a great
pilot in one of our teams in London,
thinking about how they might all engage
with the client services charter so that a
list of activities or ways of behaving
with our clients, that they'll all
commit to and that's going really well
so far but we, you know, keep working on
that and working out how we can roll that
out to other teams. The second element of plans for the future is around pricing
so we want to start drawing out trends
in the data, to think how we can drive
our competitive pricing strategy. Thirdly,
we need to think carefully about how we
can use the data better to benchmark
ourselves externally, so far we've been
thinking a lot about consistency of our
international offering, but how can we
use this to track what we're doing
against our competitors? And finally, a
priority for me is going to be working
really hard on keeping up the internal
engagement with the program, so making
sure that all the lawyers
internationally understand the value it
can add and as we add new teams or new
locations internationally, that all of
those new lawyers really understand what
we're trying to do.
