One of my favorite shows on TV is The Good Wife. It is one of the few shows that has managed to hold the same quality every season and even keeps getting better. Working in legal marketing definitely makes it more relevant to my life and I am particularly fond of Julianna Margulies as an actress and by coincidence she married a guy I used to work with. He was a corporate associate in a firm I worked for before he became a Hollywood husband!
But what does this have to do with legal marketing you might ask? The answer is everything. Most of the law firms I work with have a corporate focus and legal dramas like The Good Wife and Suits focus on litigation clients because court cases make for better TV. The TV shows often make it all look too easy but the basic principles of finding, securing and maintaining clients are the same.
In the last few seasons of The Good Wife, we saw a perfect example of the dynamic culture of law firms across the world, when newly made-up Partner Alisha Florick and senior Associate Carrie Agos, left Lockhart Gardner to form their own firm and took a good selection of clients with them. The old boys club at Lockhart Gardner naively believed that their longstanding clients would stay with them out of loyalty, but many clients feel neglected at larger firms and prefer the direct contact with the partners they get at a smaller boutique firm like Florick Agos. Smaller firms usually have fewer clients and are therefore able to give these clients more personal attention.
The moral of the story here is that while it is important for all law firms to bring in new clients in order to develop and grow, it is essential that this is not to the detriment of its existing clients. An effective client retention strategy can be more effective than any form of marketing and business development.
