By Legal Futures’ Associates Moneypenny [1]
Legal professionals are too busy to win new business, despite the average value of a case being £4,000, according to a new research report.
Commissioned by leading outsourced communications provider Moneypenny, the report polled 250 senior legal decision makers from across the UK and discovered that 92% of firms struggle to handle new enquiries due to being time poor and under-resourced.
Compared with five years ago, the findings also revealed that 98% of firms report an increase in enquiry volumes, 87% of firms say it’s harder to generate new leads and 94% spend more on marketing – despite only 40% having in-house marketing resource.
Kate Cox, Chief Marketing Officer at Moneypenny, which handles more than 2 million legal calls and live chats each year for more than 1,000 legal firms in the UK, said: “Fewer than 1% of legal firms have enough people and processes in place to ensure they rarely miss a new enquiry. This just demonstrates that the biggest threat to growth to all firms is a lack of time. In the current climate, with many staff on furlough and even greater commercial pressures, firms can ill-afford to miss out on new business leads. “
Encouragingly, 39% of all legal calls are new leads and 97% of firms would try new technology to drive more enquiries – yet three in 10 law firms don’t provide out of hours call handling and two in five firms don’t offer live chat on their websites.
Amanda Jones, Marketing Director for Lanyon Bowdler Solicitors, said: “The marketing mix for law firms is more diverse than it was a decade ago. Digital is a bigger, busier medium. Websites are more important now, as is driving traffic to them. Firms that pay attention to their SEO reap the benefit as we have seen at Lanyon Bowdler. The same goes for live chat. It’s great to increase visitors to your site, but a channel to move them on from their visit is a differentiator in a client’s eyes.”
Moneypenny’s commercial lead for the legal sector at Moneypenny, Bernadette Bennett added: “39% of legal firms’ new leads turn into new clients or cases – many of which originate via the telephone or company websites, so improving enquiry handling is an easy place to start. With the right outsourced technology in place and simple improvements to call handling, out of hours cover and live chat, firms can make a tangible difference to their bottom line – generating greater returns on their marketing spend, without any real impact on their in-house resource.”
To download a copy of Moneypenny’s ‘Coming of Age’ Legal Inbound Marketing Report in full visit: https://www.moneypenny.com/uk/resources/blog/coming-of-age-legal-inbound-marketing-report-2020/ [2]
Established in 2000, Moneypenny is the world’s market leader for telephone answering, live chat, outsourced switchboard and customer contact solutions. In total, more than 13,000 businesses across the UK benefit from Moneypenny’s mix of extraordinary people and ground-breaking technology.
For more information about Moneypenny’s work with the legal sector, visit www.moneypenny.com/uk/legal-answering-services/ [3]