How to convert more leads into clients is a question every law firm would like to know the answer to. Every business, in fact, would benefit from understanding the secret of turning an interested party into a fee-paying client. It doesn’t matter how many potential clients a firm may have, if the individuals working for the firm are not skilled in transforming them into clients, they could be losing these opportunities and therefore not delivering the return on investment on the firm’s marketing spend.

New entrants, increased client expectation and continuing fee pressure have shifted the battle ground of legal services to the client experience. In this rapidly evolving landscape, firms are realising they will live or die based on the customer experience and technology will play a key role in defining that. While the importance of technology is increasingly recognised in the legal sector, few firms are using technology to define intellectual property and value in the way other service companies are. Think about Amazon, Airbnb, Uber, LinkedIn – they all position themselves as a tech business first. Retail, hotel rooms, taxis and recruitment are just by-products of their platforms. It begs the question: when will we start to see law firms think in a similar way?

We need to move away from using technology to try and recreate the thought-process of a lawyer. The idea is not to build a lawyer’s brain, although we may well want to approximate some of its features. Rather, the potential tech offers is in designing a system that arrives at a similar, if not a more accurate or informed outcome as a lawyer might, by building on the strengths that computers have that humans do not, namely: the ability to simultaneously process large amounts of data, to calculate probabilities more accurately, and to identify patterns and relationships that exist across a large evidence base.

We all know that nothing in life is certain. As the actor, director and philosopher Clint Eastwood once said: “If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster.” He also said he’d tried being reasonable and didn’t like it. They should teach this kind of philosophy in law school. One thing in life is reasonably certain though. If you’re a law firm worth your salt, at some point you will be approached by another entity (most probably a work introducer) with a whizzy idea to ‘partner’ with you to ‘help you accelerate your growth’. In commercial speak this means, ‘we’d like to keep feeding you work but we’d also like to share in your profits’. The arrangement may be pitched to you as a joint venture – a win-win no less.

The skills shortage in our businesses is the biggest threat to our industry when looking at cybercrime. Cybercriminals are not just after money but are looking for sensitive information too, so the legal services sector is an obvious target. In the last year we have had reports of around £7m of client money being lost to such crime. This is not an IT issue and it should not be left to the IT teams to sort out. It is a high-level responsibility and a board-level issue that must be taken seriously. We suspect that we will look back on 2016 and ask why we didn’t respond quicker.