The increasing impact of the Internet on the access to and delivery of Legal Services.
Customer Loyalty
Lawyers tend to be concerned with the expectations of existing or traditional clients and have not prepared for the new generation who are far more IT orientated. Lawyers ignore at their peril the fact that 66% of people in the UK use the Internet. Client loyalty is being challenged by the many different types of businesses who are interposing themselves between the client and the lawyer, largely through the Internet. These “Infomediaries” as phrased by Professor Richard Susskind or “intermediation agencies”– will change the way consumers select lawyers.
Solicitors Websites
As a profession the quality of our own websites is sadly lacking. Firms urgently need to update and modernise their websites, making them more interactive, offering “something for nothing” by providing checklists or guides and by incorporating far more imaginative and relevant useful links, such as Google Earth or house price comparison sites rather than the Law Society or the Land Registry for Conveyancing pages.
Price Comparison sites
New price comparison sites have been recently launched such as Moneysupermarket.com to sell leads to firms for conveyancing, probate, employment and personal injury claims. Gocompare.com and tescocompare.com provide similar services. The Yorkshire Building Society launched CompareConveyancers.co.uk for its potential borrowers to select conveyancers. All will be linked from other related topics viewed on the Internet, such as mortgages and wills. Such sites exert a down-wards pressure on legal fees and the imperative for lawyers is to spell out exactly what service is being provided for the fee stated and to emphasise the quality of service delivered.
Referral/Auctioning Leads Websites
Leads produced by such price comparison websites are likely to cost law firms at least £20 –25 per lead, let alone the cost of being included in such a site, which is likely to lead to the development of an E-Bay type auctioning of legal services leads. Newspapers have launched their own legal referral services, such as the Telegraph Solicitors Network, which is advertised on-line, with the Express and Star newspapers having their own versions.
Sites collating Consumer Views and Public Information
All of the above requires the participation of legal firms but in the USA websites (Avvo.com) canvass consumer views and collate all publicly available information regarding the law firms and its lawyers to give a rating out of ten. Solicitors here may be concerned about the SRA publishing complaints against the firm but websites such as Avvo.com obviously intend to go further than that.
ABS, legal services websites and their databases
The Alternative Business Structures, such as Tesco, Asda, Norwich Union, the Co-Op and the RAC, have already developed their offerings of legal advice and services to the public through their websites, with additional benefits such as Clubcard points! In addition to seemingly unlimited marketing budgets and huge brand awareness, they also have enormous amounts of data stored and analysed in respect of their customers to ensure that they target their approaches, through direct mail, email and TV campaigns.
Fighting back
Lawyers should not only be alive to all the changes that are happening around them but they should also be: • Embracing technology by fully integrating case management systems with other technology in the firm and emailing clients rather than posting letters, • Making better use of their client databases for marketing purposes, • Improving their websites, • Resisting low fees strategies to gain new business, by emphasising quality service • Ensuring that the Law Society or other Lawyer lead networks are developing E-Conveyancing and other forms of electronic legal service delivery.
Fiona Gregory Consultant