According to law firms the biggest barrier to success in new client acquisition is their lack of process and discipline. This is one key finding from The PACE Partnership’s Healthcheck – a recent benchmarking exercise into how professional services firms manage the task of creating new clients. As a profession, law firms did not perform well in this area of practice management. Additionally, lawyers rated themselves lowest, or equal lowest, in no less than six of the 10 core aspects of new business development practice examined.
The nadir for law firms was in the core aspect of ‘managing the process’ of new business development. Most law firms accepted that they had little or no way of knowing what new business opportunities their fee earners were working on and what new fee income was ‘in the pipeline’. They had no system able to provide an accurate picture of the firm’s overall efforts in generating new work from clients. And there were virtually no measures on the quantity, focus or quality of effort that individuals were directing towards new business development.
