Post-recession market forces have heralded a new era of law firm business acceptance and strategic planning.
Previously, legal firms could focus almost exclusively on rate increases and client loyalty for growth. Now, firms are facing intense competition from in-house legal counsel, alternative service providers, and other firms. Growth rates have also been relatively flat for the past 8 years.
To overcome these challenges and stay ahead of the competition, leading firms are taking stock and have begun strategically planning their futures. Learn how your firm can improve performance and increase growth with intelligent automation and a more strategic law firm business acceptance plan.
Strategic business acceptance
How can a firm ensure that any new business won’t interfere with long-term objectives? With new intelligent automation technology, teams can easily operationalize their law firm business acceptance plans to address this issue. By coding strategic criteria into the business evaluation process, firms can determine whether an opportunity aligns with firm strategy.
Growth strategies and conflicts complexity
A lot of firms are pursuing mergers and lateral-hiring growth strategies to acquire talent and their clients. One of the biggest challenges of mergers, however, is conflicts clearance.
Merger talks are always sensitive discussions that should be quickly evaluated before a news leak. Make sure all conflicts of interest are cleared before any merger or lateral hire can happen. Otherwise, the merger talks will mostly consist of your teams trying to sort our potential client overlaps and multidimensional conflicts with thousands of clients across the two firms.
Accurate, fast, integrated conflicts technology can help your firm power through massive merger conflicts projects. Whether your firm is interested in a big rainmaker lateral hire or a global merger, partners can use this technology to conduct speedy, high-quality conflicts checks. Once a deal is done, the firm can use automated intake templates and procedures to make business acceptance even more efficient.
Global alignment
It’s also important for your entire firm to evaluate new clients against a global strategic plan. But your firm can’t do this if business acceptance decision-making is decentralized. For example, a firm’s Paris office shouldn’t take on a new client that hurts the Palo Alto office’s plans of bringing on an anchor client that’s perfect for the firm’s 5-year biopharmaceutical micro-niche strategy.
To avoid situations like this, your firm should invest in firmwide technology that assesses all new business evaluations with common strategic criteria. Read our recent ebook for more information on how firms can align strategic plans with business acceptance. You’ll also learn how other big trends are impacting the future of client evaluations.