A new trend is emerging in the legal profession in the United States and Canada. Law firms are sending lawyers to sales training. A year or so ago, Baker & McKenzie hired Gregory Fleischmann, who is not a lawyer but who was at that time director of global marketing at Deloitte LLP, a major accounting firm. This recruitment made headlines, but few followed up to find out what the results were.
The results? Baker and McKenzie is now doing more business than ever before. Why? In a recent interview, Fleischmann says it’s because the way law firms operate is changing rapidly and these changes demand that they not only provide services, but upsell and bundle services to maximize profits in light of heavier competition and changes in the industry as a whole.
The old paradigm of the legal firm billing by the hour for services and no one asking questions about the price tag has changed dramatically. Today, businesses often view law firms as they do other outsource options and will farm out work to more than one law firm, breaking up components of the work to be done to find the best value for their bottom line. Today’s law firm, in order to keep up with this trend, must offer blanket, flat rate pricing and service bundles to meet their clients’ needs.
To do this, the lawyers who are servicing these clients must now act as salespeople to upsell the offerings of the firm on top of doing the legal work.
Although this trend in legal circles is new, it’s catching on fast. Many law firms, even if their current clientele do not demand piecemeal services, are training junior lawyers to become salespeople for the firm so they can stay ahead of the trend and capture more business from existing clients without changing their current billable hour paradigm.
Law firms are seeing more client requests for proposals and “bids” than ever before. With 2014 showing a sixty percent increase in such requests over 2009, according to one Chicago-based study by Citi Bank. So the trend is clear and sales trainers and salespeople should be aware of it.