Too little too late?
Date: 11 March 2011
Authors: Jon Robins
Issue: Vol 161, Issue 7456
Categories: Opinion, Legal services, Marketing
Are law firms too late to build the solicitor brand? asks Jon Robins
The holy grail of the post-Legal Services Act world appears to be the creation of a solicitor-led legal brand instantly recognisable by the public and which will see off competition from all those household names—Co-Op, Halifax,
Which? et al—heading their way.
National branding
The speed at which firms appear to be signing up to the QualitySolicitors scheme—100 new branches opened last week—suggests a somewhat late-in-the-day conversion on the part of the profession to the belief that salvation does indeed lie in the power of collective marketing schemes. Either that or it suggests the beginnings of mass panic ahead of the 6 October start date for alternative business structures (ABSs).
Another attempt to create a national legal brand called Face 2 Face Solicitors was launched earlier this month. It claims to be “the first solicitors’ franchise” and will have a centralised back office and will give firms a range of models to choose from the likes of Loyalty Law to QualitySolicitors.
“We’re not interested in ‘pile it high and sell it cheap’ and we don’t think that solicitors are either,” commented Ray Gordon, who runs the Legal Mentors consultancy behind Face 2 Face Solicitors. “What we’ll be offering is a face to face service with someone who really cares about professionalism, client service and best practice.”
Professor Stephen Mayson, of the College of Law’s Legal Services Institute, is impressed by the “the concept and the growth” of the likes of QualitySolicitors. “It’s always struck me as necessary in a market with a fragmented supplier base of traditional firms which is likely to be up against ABSs owned and driven by high street brands.”
There are now some 175 firms advising clients from behind the QualitySolicitors shop front. Its chief executive Craig Holt reckons that his network will have 30% of the private client & SME market within “a relatively short period of time”. “The latter is estimated to be around £10bn and we believe group turnover can be grown to around £3bn,” he tells me.
But is it really possible to create a legal version of, say, Specsavers (held out to lawyers by the Legal Services Board (LSB) in a 2009 paper as a possible model)? Rather like lawyers, opticians have enjoyed a charmed and protected life—at least until the 1980s when their monopoly came to an end with the introduction of a scheme allowing people to buy their glasses wherever they wanted with NHS vouchers. This allowed for unqualified and unregistered retailers to sell glasses and, as a consequence, radically reshaping the market although it didn’t make life any cheaper for specs-wearers. Deregulation did mean that a small number of players—Vision Express, Boots Opticians, Dollond & Aitchison etc—covered 70% of the market. In the LSB paper, the regulator reflected that “the distinctive joint venture business model” of Specsavers was “worth noting”. Each practice is an independent business owned jointly by the franchise and the practitioners. “Specsavers offer economies of scale in product purchasing, training, support services and marketing, but the practitioners are responsible for delivering eye care services and the day-to-day running of the business and are responsible for meeting regulatory standards.”
But advising on the law isn’t the same as selling specs. Neil Kinsella, chief executive of claimant firm Russell Jones & Walker, reckons it’s a futile endeavour to try and build a brand out of the “solicitor” concept. As he puts it: “A chocolate bar isn’t a brand, a Mars Bar is. At the heart of any brand are shared values. It’s difficult to build a brand around a disparate group of professionals coming together defensively. Different firms want different things.” Kinsella predicts joining collective marketing schemes will become like “gym membership”—sign up with the best of intentions one year, drop out the next.
Household name?
Martin Wyatt, director of Legal Mentors, insists that Face 2 Face Solicitors will become a household name. He argues that “for too long the partnership model has mitigated against clear, business decision-making. By October firms will all of a sudden be up against the big boys and [partnership] will no longer be a model that will work”. Craig Holt reckons that QualitySolicitors will soon have around 200 firms with 400 branches and each one contributing “around £40k” totalling £16m and “almost all” will go on marketing and advertising.
Tony Williams, of the Jomati consultancy, believes that the new collective marketing schemes offer “a very credible mechanism by which smaller firms at relatively little cost can get the benefit of a larger brand together with a degree of best practice in relation to their operations and back office services”. But as he points out, success depends on a number of factors: quality of the firms, the way the brand is promoted, the consistency of service delivery and the cost effectiveness of the centralised services.
Prof Mayson notices that the dash to join the likes of QualitySolicitors might not be entirely the result of cool, considered strategic thinking. But any rush to expand the network must not be at the expense of the quality standards and the challenge for solicitor brands is to ensure that they have the right membership—in other words, “those firms that are capable of living the brand values”.
Jon Robins is a freelance journalist and co-author of The Justice Gap
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