Client-Focused Innovation: A Four Step Program

When we talk to law firms about innovation, most are proud of their innovativeness. However, when we ask clients about the innovativeness of their external lawyers, we get a lot of silence.

The sadness of silent clients

This silence is bad because it means that the law firms are failing to take advantage of a key marketing tool: Differentiation. When law firms truly innovate (i.e. innovate in a manner noticed by clients), they differentiate themselves from their competitors by providing services with extra value. Such differentiation helps law firms avoid the trap of competing for the lowest price in RFPs and increases the likelihood that clients will pick them out from the crowded marketplace for legal services.

Further, when law firms engage in noticeable innovation, they can reap substantial benefits in recruiting and motivating talented colleagues. For example, although most associates are attracted to firms by piles of cash, many of them are much more interested in being associated with an innovative firm promoting a cutting-edge culture. Similarly, law firms can easily boost the motivation of such employees by simply encouraging their creativity to produce something of significance outside of the daily grind for billables.

How to get the attention of clients

In this article, you will learn how to set up an innovation program that clients notice with the following four steps:

·         Being counter-intuitive by starting with your clients

·         Following the lean startup approach to testing

·         Doing the all too obvious by communicating your innovation effectively

·         Measuring your innovation to maximize benefits and uncover improvements

1. Be Counter-intuitive: Start with your clients

For some reason, us lawyers like to think of innovation as a top secret experiment. We don’t talk about our innovation plans with anyone outside the firm until we are ready for the big rollout (i.e. the day that we deliver our innovation to the market). Unfortunately, if your firm is not talking to clients from the outset, you might find that you are wasting a lot of time on your innovation program.

Do your clients want this?

Although law firms are typically introducing innovations in order to improve their services to clients, they can easily forget to ask the key question: “Do your clients actually think these improvements are important?” Or, better stated, “If your clients had a choice, would they prefer different improvements instead?” All too often, clients are looking for different types of improvements than the innovations being offered by firms. In this case, the firms are just spending a lot of time and energy on innovations that fail to interest clients (i.e. the firms might have been better off skipping the innovation program altogether).

Maybe you already have an innovation

As an additional benefit with talking to clients first, you might discover that you don’t need to spend time on an innovation project, because you already have a great innovation. For example, when one of our law firm clients started talking to its clients about innovations to its service model, multiple clients noted that the firm’s client intake questionnaire was surprisingly innovative. In particular, the clients were impressed with the questionnaire’s ability to help them define the scope of their matters and resolve hidden time-saving issues at the outset. Based on this discovery, the firm saved itself the expense of developing a new innovative product and turned its attention to further improving and promoting its questionnaire.

2. Testing: Get outside the building

Once you identify an innovative project that your clients want, you should efficiently manage the time and energy that your colleagues put into the project. In this case, we strongly recommend that you follow the Customer Development method created by Steve Blank (a founder of the Lean Startup movement in Silicon Valley and teacher of the Lean Launchpad for the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps).

How to use a lean approach

According to Steve’s Customer Development approach, when you develop an innovative product, you need to repeatedly “get outside the building” and test versions of it on your customers. With this approach, you can use the constant feedback from customers to avoid wasting time on fully developing a product that doesn’t match your customers’ expectations.

Similarly, when your colleagues are working on an innovative project for your clients, they need to test versions of their work on these clients. By obtaining client feedback, your colleagues can save time on fully developing innovations that don’t match client expectations.

Setting up a Client Innovation Council

In our experience, your firm can most easily get client feedback without imposing on your clients if you set up a Client Innovation Council. This council would be made up of those clients that were most enthusiastic about your innovation project. In their role as council members, these clients would be asked on a regular basis (e.g. every 3 months) to briefly examine and provide feedback on your innovation developments.

3. Getting Noticed: You need a communication plan

Once you have fully tested your innovation, it’s time to roll it out to the market in a way that clients notice. Let’s start with an example of how you definitely should not roll out your innovation.

How not to communicate

Back in my law firm days, my firm introduced a state-of-the-art system for managing documents more efficiently. Presumably, such efficiency would be impressive to clients because the lawyers would require less time for tracking down contract templates and other key documents (i.e. the client would be charged less due to such time savings). Unfortunately, I don’t think our clients were ever made aware of this wonderful savings due to the fact that (i) the firm’s marketing team never informed the clients and (ii) the lawyers didn’t understand that they should actually communicate this type of information to the clients.

A better approach to communication

If you want to avoid the above mistake, you need to focus on the main communication avenues that will make your clients aware of the benefits of your innovation.

First, you need to ensure that your marketing team communicates this innovation to both your existing and potential clients. For existing clients, you might want to send out a one-pager announcing the innovation. This one-pager could be followed up by multiple articles in which the firm casually references the innovation. For potential clients, you should consider including the innovation in your website. In addition, such innovation could be included in your firm brochures as well as the Differentiation Section of your work proposals.

Second, you also want to encourage each of your attorneys to further communicate the benefits of your innovation. For example, when your attorneys make presentations – whether as client pitches or at conferences, they should be encouraged to include a slide that references your innovation. Similarly, when they conduct interviews of potential colleagues, they should also be promoting your firm’s innovative approach to serving clients.

4. Tracking: Uncovering benefits and improvements

As a final step, you will want to continually measure your program so that you can uncover its true benefits and discover opportunities for further improvement.

Identify benefits for communication

When you roll out an innovation program, you want to make sure that it is set up so that you can measure its progress. These measurements will make it easier for your colleagues to communicate the benefits of the program. For example, if your innovation is supposed to save time, you need to identify exactly how much time is saved (e.g. check your billing reports to see quicker turnaround times from client request to attorney response). On the other hand, if your innovation will deliver some incalculable form of greater client satisfaction, you can still measure such benefits via regular client surveys. In either of the above examples, the results of such measurements can easily be communicated to clients in a manner that gets their attention.

Uncover process improvements

In addition, with regular measurements, you can uncover methods for further improving the overall process of your innovation. For example, when our client set up an innovative training program for the business units of key clients, we discovered that only a small percentage of training participants were sending feedback. This feedback was crucial for the in-house team as they needed this data to evaluate the program and communicate its value to the Board. With our assistance, the law firm discovered that their colleagues were not sending follow-ups on their requests for feedback from training participants. The firm quickly corrected this problem and the feedback percentage jumped substantially, and so did the satisfaction of the client.