Let’s start with a question. How many clients come to your firm for a will, and once completed, they disappear forever. Taking all their potential future value with them. We’re guessing it’s a lot. Our research indicates that near 70% clients never return to their solicitor for further services after an initial engagement.
This presents a major issue for firms, with a hugely competitive market for private client services like wills and probate. The private client practices that will thrive will be the ones that keep clients continually engaged, as this will allow them to expand the value of clients over time across their different service offerings. Platforms like Legado allow firms to leverage technology to make that ongoing engagement both as efficient to manage and productive in practice as possible. Here’s why…
The current state of play
The typical approach to re-engage clients after an initial transaction sounds a lot like this. A paralegal will, from time, dig out the names of some old clients. Then a solicitor will eventually find some time and maybe give that old client a call. This process relies on paralegals and solicitors having time to spare so that they can go through this laboured series of actions – time that they likely don not have.
The cost to your practice
The result of this process is a complete lack of long-term client engagement. The opportunity cost to the firm is great – as time goes by, a clients’ circumstances will change massively (from buying a new house, going through a divorce, selling a business, etc). These changes bring about the need for more services for that client, but without continuing to engage that client, you won’t be there when they need them.
Optimising the approach
The process of continually engaging clients doesn’t have to be a huge challenge though. The issue is bandwidth; solicitors and paralegals have so little time to search through old clients and re-engage them.
Client-facing platforms like Legado use automation to give that time back. Making functionality available to allow solicitors to easily engage clients on a continual basis, like automated will re-engagements that prompt a client back to their existing will stored within the firm’s platform and encourage them to review this will with their solicitor. Tools like this allow you to easily engage clients continually over the long term and bring them back to your services.
Importantly, Legado’s platform takes this one step further by ensuring you can retain the human element – letting you control whether re-engagement prompts go directly to clients, or so you as the solicitor, where you can determine the action you want to take, whether that’s giving them a call, or meeting them on the golf course.
The way forward
Clearly, the private client firms that can effectively capture business from their clients on an ongoing basis are best positioned to thrive in today’s highly competitive market. But the antiquated processes in use by the majority of firms right now restricts this. Using digital tools like those made available with platforms like Legado allow firms to take the strain out of managing client engagement over time, and to keep the personalised, human elements where they count – creating a future for firms that is more efficient, more engaging, and more productive.
Written by Angus Duncan-Timpson, Associate at Legado Technologies.
For further background, Legado’s platform provides Law Firms with a client-facing digital experience to interact and exchange documentation with their solicitor, which can be uniquely configured for the firm. The platform allows firms to increase client engagement, capture efficiencies for their fee-earners, and drive the modernisation of their private client services.