I was much concerned by a recent exchange on the Gazette LinkedIn group. It started with a question by HighStreetLawyer’s Gary Yantin about law firms without websites and it drifted (as these things often do) to a discussion about how people block other people (described as “people who just want to sell me something”, which I thought rather pejorative) from communicating with them. Towards the end, there seemed to be something of a competition developing between people about how they managed to avoid ‘wasting’ their time talking to people.

The two primary objectives of all pricing decisions by law firms should be to maximise profitability while at the same time ensuring that the pricing structure leaves the client feeling that they have had fair value for money. And yet opportunities to do so continue to be squandered. There are many reasons for this but the most perplexing is the failure to apply pricing factors that have been available to lawyers in many countries for decades.

There’s nothing like the prospect of losing something to make you feel all warm and nostalgic about it, even when that something is your annual16 hours CPD requirement… There is a widespread view that the current CPD system is not working. Everyone knows stories of people who register for CPD courses and leave before the end, or those who take courses which do not relate to their areas of practice, just to get the points. This is even before you begin to think, why 16 hours? Why not 10, or 25 – or 50 for that matter?

There are too many law firms chasing too little work up against aggressive new competition with huge marketing budgets… You’ve read that many times before, but what can be done to help the smaller law firms compete? Well, to paraphrase a well-known phrase, it’s ‘reputation, reputation, reputation’. You don’t need a huge budget for this but you may need to change a few attitudes and devote some time to it.

In a guest post, Adam Makepeace, the practice director of leading criminal law firm Tuckers, explains why he was elated (kind of) by the government’s legal aid announcement last week but that the Lord Chancellor needs to level the digital playing field between firms if the market is somehow to come to his rescue.