Marketing & PR

The Solicitors Regulation Authority is under pressure to ban solicitors from offering potential claimants up-front inducements to bring an action so as to bring them in line with new rules coming into force for claims management companies.

The reasons why one law firm succeeds while another doing similar work fails, boil down to knowing your market, committing to your sector and its clients, and the partners’ contribution, according to a legal thinktank.

The public believes that legal aid solicitors are not as good as other solicitors, research undertaken for the Law Society has found. Focus groups held in London and Birmingham either side of Christmas also revealed that the public think legal aid solicitors are paid private practice rates.

The crackdown on personal injury advertising started today as the Ministry of Justice unveiled plans to ban inducements to bring a claim. The current rules for claims management companies only ban the offer of “immediate” cash payments or similar benefits, but a consultation issued today proposes extending that to all inducements for making a claim.

Law firms are “markedly” worse at business development and client management than other professional services practices, research has found. The study also revealed that just 58% of lawyers who should be involved in business development at their firms actually are, far lower than other professionals.

Everyone in a law firm should be involved in sales and business development, says Kate Fleming of HuthwaiteFleming, and she explains how those who see themselves solely as service providers can help create value for clients

Following on from my previous post about Foursquare, now I am concentrating on Squidoo and HubPages. Squidoo is an online publishing platform and community that lets you create “lenses” (pages) about a particular topic. It is free to join and you can even earn 50% of the company’s advertising revenue for charity or yourself.

There is widespread ignorance of the differences between legal services providers and consumers are shocked to discover not all of them are regulated, research commissioned by the Solicitors Regulation Authority has found. Consumers expect “all legal service providers to be appropriately skilled, qualified and regulated” and so distinguish between providers on such things as customer service and the quality of relationships.

The Cabinet has given its backing to Lord Young’s blueprint to reform health and safety and curb the excesses of the compensation culture, the peer revealed today. He also expressed a desire to see an end to referral fees and said the Ministry of Justice had agreed to extend the road traffic accident claims process to other areas of personal injury.

The Prime Minister today attacked lawyers for helping to create a compensation culture and promised to “curtail the promotion activities” of claims management companies. Among the other solutions which the government is to investigate following the Young review is a road traffic-style claims process for all low-value personal injury claims, including clinical negligence, while the Jackson report has received strong support too.

The Legal Services Consumer Panel has had to put on ice plans to develop best practice standards for legal comparison websites, Legal Futures has learned. The work formed part of the panel’s 2010-11 workplan, published in March, but has been shelved because the panel has since been asked by the Legal Services Board to investigate will-writing regulation.

Martin Gregory begins a series looking at three of the less well known/utilised on-line applications. In the coming weeks, he will concentrate on Squidoo and Hubpages – tools that can help promote your law firm’s visibility on the World Wide Web, but he starts with Foursquare, which he says is possibly the most intriguing and scaleable social media network to emerge in recent years.

The top law firms are looking to bulk up their business development capacity as they face a major reduction in their fees, a survey has claimed. With partners in the top 10 firms seeing their average billable fees fall by £875,000 last year, recruitment consultancy Ambition says firms have responded by hiring marketing staff.

Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) complaints two years ago about the way some conveyancing law firms were advertising their prices led the Law Society to issue guidance last week on “headline pricing”, Legal Futures has discovered.

QualitySolicitors is continuing to blaze a trail into the future of legal services. Its TV ad that premiered earlier this week demonstrates an intent that needs to be followed carefully. Craig and his team have moved the profession on significantly since their arrival a couple of years ago and we should thank them for that effort.