Legal Market Research Reveals Massive Shift in Clients’ Buying Criteria

Global News

24
Nov
2013

Editor

Legal market research released this week by Peppermint Technology revealed a significant shift in the buying behaviour of clients. 41% of corporate legal clients regularly shop around for a lawyer with each new matter, presenting a huge threat or opportunity for law firms, depending on how good they are at retaining clients and winning new business.

Corporate clients are also less inclined to use ‘recommendation’ to select a lawyer (down 26 percentage points in a year) and are looking for cost certainty, customer service and quality accreditations to make their choice. This year 32% of corporate clients (9% more than 2012) said online facilities are important to them.

The good news is that two thirds of corporate clients expect spend on legal services to increase in the next year, 27% of them saying by a ‘significant amount’.

The private legal client market also holds latent promise providing cost predictability can be guaranteed; 68% cite this as the main reason they do not instruct solicitors to help with legal issues. ‘Customer service’ continues to climb the selection agenda, up 6% in 3 years as a key decision factor for private clients.

However, many law firms (despite gathering an increasing amount of client feedback) find they are unable to move their firms forward and deliver what their clients want due to ‘inadequate technology’ and ‘incomplete and out of date’ management information.

This is the third year Peppermint Technology has carried out research into what clients want from their legal service provider, which tracks trends in buying behaviour and customer experience attitudes in the market. This year, for the first time, the findings were launched and discussed at the Peppermint Research Forum held at Microsoft’s Customer Briefing Centre in London, attended by over 100 law firm leaders.