Reports
Published: 21 September 2023 Download
First4Lawyers White Paper: From first impressions to follow-up calls: Creating a customer journey
Find out how firms’ customer journeys compare to those in 2018 in this brand new white paper from First4Lawyers.
Personal injury (PI) firms are meeting expectations on their websites, but the follow-up communication could be improved, according to this latest research.
In First4Lawyer’s new white paper, they looked at how far firms have come since first carrying out a mystery shopping exercise in 2018. And for the first time, they examined how firms are performing in services outside of PI. The overall picture painted is an encouraging one – but there is certainly room for improvement.
Download a free copy of the white paper and find out what First4Lawyers discovered when analysing customer journeys.
Published: 19 October 2022 Download
First4Lawyers White Paper: Trust me, I’m a lawyer – marketing legal services in 2023
Find out why trust plays such an important role in the way consumers choose a law firm in this brand new White Paper from First4Lawyers.
Featuring specially commissioned IRN research, which surveyed solicitors at both specialist personal injury law firms and broader consumer law firms, the White Paper takes a close look at the progress firms have made in recent years in their marketing strategies and highlights the gaps that need more work.
85% of solicitors have seen consumer behaviour change in the last five years – they are shopping around more before choosing a lawyer and have higher expectations on service. They are laying down a big challenge to how the legal market has long worked.
Six in 10 law firms surveyed have increased their marketing budgets in the last year but they are not analysing the return on investment properly so as to inform future decisions. There are also wildly divergent approaches to the increasingly important issue of online reviews.
Download a free copy of the White Paper and find out if your firm is doing all it can to grow and get ahead of the competition.
Published: 11 April 2022 Legal Futures Roundtable Report in association with Clio: The digital dividend
When talking about legal aid and access to justice, it is hard to look beyond funding. Even the Ministry of Justice has acknowledged the problem, to judge by its agreement to pump an extra £135m into the criminal legal aid budget.
Realistically, though, the government is not going to make up the funding shortfall. So, what else can be done?
We recently held a roundtable, sponsored by Clio, to consider how the type of innovation and technology we are seeing in the wider legal market can support law firms and not-for-profit providers to deliver their services.
In this report, we hear from leading figures from across the access to justice world about how innovation and technology has already changed the way they work and where it can take providers in the future. You can download the report or view online and also watch video excerpts from the discussion.
Published: 23 September 2019 Legal Futures Roundtable report in association with Temple Legal Protection: The future for commercial ATE
Our latest special report, produced in association with Temple Legal Protection, looks at the role of after-the-event (ATE) insurance in commercial litigation post-LASPO.
We are at a time when insurers, solicitors, clients and litigation funders work ever more closely to create funding packages that work for all of them, with conditional fee and even damages-based agreements now part of many law firms’ armoury.
Do discuss this, we held a roundtable bringing together senior commercial litigators to discuss their use of ATE, the challenges they face and how it could work better for all. It was an excellent debate on current litigation trends, approaches to litigation insurance and how it may be improved.
Should the merits threshold for litigation insurance be lowered? Should insurers embrace new approaches to premium pricing? How should ATE be combined with third-party funding? And how should solicitors navigate the ATE market?
These are issues that all commercial litigators should be addressing. This report should help spark those discussions.
Legal Futures Roundtable Report in association with LexisNexis Enterprise Solutions: The law firm of the future
No larger firm can ignore the demands of innovation – that was the clear message from our most recent roundtable, The law firm of the future, sponsored by LexisNexis Enterprise Solutions.
It comes in many forms, predominantly but not just technology, and is not simply a case of automating process. Expertise and process are not mutually exclusive.
Some of the points raised were familiar – the danger of simply putting your best lawyer in charge, the changing career expectations of the next generation of lawyers, and questions over whether the current training regime is fit for the future.
There were also fundamental issues about the conflict between greater efficiency with billing targets and, ultimately, partners’ take-home pay. Can you persuade your partners that doing work quicker and cheaper than before will benefit them in the long run through more clients?
Happily, there is no doubt that the strategies and technologies are out there to help firms compete in this increasingly complex and variegated market. Reading this report will inform your thinking.
Legal Futures Roundtable Report in association with Search Acumen: Exploiting data
The working practices of property lawyers have changed little since the 19th century. Many aspects of the conveyancing process remain offline – documents are still on paper and the data entered manually. The commercial transaction process is laborious, slow and expensive, and both the client and firm are losing out as a result, a maddening thought in today’s world of digitisation, artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain.
We held a roundtable with Search Acumen to discuss what data means for commercial conveyancing. A discussion that started with the growing sophistication of property searches ended up at a vision of the commercial law firm of the future, shaped and staffed very differently from now. Those who are scared of ideas like blockchain should look away now.
In our discussion, Law Society vice-president Christina Blacklaws also emphasised the risk of solicitors not grasping this opportunity – that others will come along to dictate the future, leaving lawyers on the sidelines and part of a vision somebody else is creating. There have been many examples of lawyers not taking the initiative and suffering as a result; maybe here, with a process to which lawyers are so central, there is a chance to reverse this trend.
Legal Futures Roundtable Report in association with the CLC: Regulating the robots
The march of the digital conveyancer continues apace, from the government planning to create the largest repository of open land data in the world, to the rapid adoption of sophisticated technology by conveyancers, such as chatbots and artificial intelligence.
So, how does legal regulation keep up with this? In association with the Council for Licensed Conveyancers, we convened a roundtable of industry experts to consider the current state of the market, the changes that technology could bring, and how the regulator should adapt.
It was clear from the discussion that the greatest challenge will be to devise a regulatory framework sufficiently flexible that it does not require constant tinkering as the technology continues to develop – regulation has always had the problem of constantly trying to catch up with the market. It has to balance protecting consumers with encouraging innovation for the benefit of those consumers. This is no easy task.
Legal Futures Roundtable Report, in association with Thomson Reuters: Profit Motive
This Legal Futures roundtable report, published in association with Thomson Reuters, looks at what SME law firms are doing to grow their profit margins at a time of economic uncertainty and ever-greater competition.
What was so striking about the debate was that despite the very different practices represented around the table, the approach was largely the same. From bespoke property law advice from a traditional partnership to largely automated personal injury work from a limited company, there was more that united our participants than divided them – although the continuing role of the partnership was one of them.
Putting a few lawyers around a table invariably produces a stimulating and challenging discussion, and this was no different. There will always be a place for SME law firms, and this roundtable – showcasing their ability to focus, experiment, and succeed – shows how valuable they are to the legal ecosystem.
