When law firms look and sound alike

Law firm partners and strategy consultants constantly ask, "why did you choose firm A?" Or, "would you choose firm B because they are (as they themselves say on their own websites) a pre-eminent private equity, technology or life sciences firm?" What sets any one law firm apart from the hundreds of others seeking substantially the same business and having substantially the same "taglines" about the depth and breadth of their purported experience and expertise?

A technology-focused firm. A firm with deep intellectual property expertise. A firm offering a market-leading life sciences practice. A firm with extensive complex litigation experience. If there exists a law firm "branding" strategy that hasn't yet been used, it would be surprising. So, assuming that all holds true, where should any firm turn and where should it focus its efforts? Several thoughts come to mind:

Relationships matter, more than brands. Brand has become secondary, if not generally irrelevant in most cases (with limited exceptions). There are few firms, if any, that can rely on "brand" for client relationships or business generation. Wachtell Lipton, comes to mind, perhaps, for one of the few remaining firms with a brand that continues to resonate in a specified, high-end market segment. In fact, law firm branding appears to be in a state of perpetual change, whether a result of constant national and international mergers or straight-forward "rebranding" exercises. Law firm names have changed more in the past decade than ever before. First, there were the firms with four, five and six surnames linked together in a jingle of "Blackstonian" seriousness. Then there was the more recent trend to shorten long-form firm monikers, a movement toward catchier, easier to recall one- and two-name law firm brands.

And, yet with all that, and the hundreds of firms claiming essentially the same expertise, it is fairly apparent that clients today seek to hire lawyers, before law firms. They seek lawyers they can trust. They seek lawyers who offer high-quality, responsive services. They seek lawyers who understand their objectives and business needs. They seek lawyers with whom they can have a substantive discussion about pressing issues. Firms have become necessary, at least from a client perspective, mainly for purposes of supporting those lawyers that the client has hired. The history of the firm, the alleged specialties, the purported leading edge practices, are today mostly a secondary client concern. It is the relationship between counsel and the client that will likely lead to any initial engagement and to any future engagements. With the recognition of relationship-driven engagement, it becomes more critical than ever to extend those client relationships within a firm. Recalling the old "80/20" rule, where 80 percent of a firm's work likely comes from 20 percent of its client base, a firm should focus on ensuring the permanence of its existing client relationships and extending those relationships and touchpoints from top to bottom within both client and law firm. It is highly likely that developing and mining those relationships, and deepening and extending current engagements with existing clients, will also lead to the formation of future relationships. The continuous evaluation, iteration and contemplation of alternative branding strategies in priority to relationship driven engagement is probably an ineffectual distraction.

Adopt "niches" early on. Handling a venture capital investment has become commoditized. The same can be said for many middle-market merger and acquisition transactions, high-yield offerings or even run-of-the-mill patent troll cases. There is no longer any magic in providing ordinary course employment law advice or delivering human resource training to a corporate client. If those comments are more or less correct, what should law firms focus on to achieve some form of market differentiation?

Firms must recognize trends before they become commonplace; firms must be able to concentrate expertise in market segments that cannot be easily "self-taught" through a quick online Google education; and firms must become "early adopters" of practice areas that are not quickly or easily mimicked by others. Identifying those practice areas becomes paramount to longer-term success. Where once those practices would have included venture deals, high-yield offerings, corporate investigations, today and tomorrow those segments are more likely to take two possible paths: (a) cross-disciplinary practices that seamlessly integrate intellectual property, corporate, employment, finance and other subject matter, and (b) highly segmented, "nichey" sub-practices within larger practice groups.

Within the cross-disciplinary context, lawyers should be capable of handling and addressing a broader, more fluid set of issues, and offering an integrated solution, without the constant need to refer the client to other law firm attorneys who may be unavailable, non-responsive, too expensive or fail to provide an effective fit with the client. This orientation harks back to an older law firm paradigm, where lawyers were capable of acting as external advisors, and more general practitioner, across broad swaths of subject matter. That capability is likely to prove beneficial, for example, in fast growth technology sectors where the legal landscape remains somewhat unsettled, including areas like the Internet of Things, autonomous driving, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Where, on the other hand, "specialization" offers some form of differentiation, it will need to prove of an "exceptional" nature. Specializing in corporate law, or corporate investigations, generically is not likely to prove a credible source of market differentiation. Any attempt at specialization that seeks to achieve firm differentiation will need to be more refined, and perhaps underpinned by some form of exceptional experience, whether governmental, previous work or otherwise, to separate the firm and its practitioners from competitors. Understanding and addressing those market requirements is critical for law firm success.

Sell solutions and peripheral support. If most work trends toward commoditization, "solutions selling," as followed by many non-legal businesses, becomes more germane to client development and retention. Client solutions should encompass more than just narrowly tailored legal advice divorced from the business context. The provision of business or market intelligence relevant to the client's business, whether or not directly linked to the particular project generating the need for legal advice, offers opportunity for differentiation. Information or intelligence that helps the client develop analytical tools or helps it to assess business data provides enhanced value. If investment banks can provide market data on financial products, price movements and other financial trends, or consulting and accounting firms can present benchmarking surveys, why not law firms? Firms need to focus more on creating and offering these types of business intelligence to support their client's business and corporate strategies. While these forms of information may hover around the edges of traditional legal advice, they will inform solutions that clients find valuable and help to distinguish the service provider offering them.

Focus on quality and value. Clients expect quality and value, whatever the deliverables. In a hypercompetitive legal market, where commoditization threatens nearly all types of work, quality is not a differentiator but a predicate to participation. That means quality control must be systemic and institutionalized within the organization, that inexperienced attorneys are properly and effectively supervised, and that fundamental learning takes place on the law firm's "nickel" for the most part. It also means that attention must be paid to the optics of client interaction so that client confidence in external counsel is never an issue. Beyond that, with hourly rates continuing to soar, it is critical to understand and appreciate the value of the engagement to the client. How much value will the project deliver to the client? Is it solely a cost exercise to the client or will the project result in a potential revenue or growth opportunity? There must be an alignment of the expected value with the anticipated fees. That may mean the firm should initiate discussions about alternative or fixed fees or propose discounted hourly rates. The key is that the firm should proactively think about the issues and not necessarily wait for the client to request fee proposals. Firms need to address value; it should not be incumbent on the client to initiate all discussions about creative fee alignment.

Law firms have evolved toward sameness. There is little that serves to differentiate the majority of most law firms these days. To address that lurking homogeneity, firms must understand what motivates clients, what underpins engagements and what sustains relationships. Asserting pre-eminence, or uniqueness, on a website will no longer suffice.