Our clients need outstanding legal advice, but excellent service is about more than that. It requires us to think about each point of the client relationship, from taking them on as clients to supporting their people via training and knowhow. It is also important to ask clients what they think of our service and whether we are providing value for money.
When we get all this right, we ensure that in handling clients’ most critical commercial issues we work with them as one team to achieve their objectives.
The events of last year propelled some of our markets and clients into uncharted territory. In supporting them, our people have been flexible and creative, pulling together, identifying opportunities, finding solutions and working incredibly hard under enormous pressure.
In these challenging times, we have continued to invest in client relationships for the long-term, ensuring that we continue to give value for money by, for example, seconding people to our clients to support them whenever our resources allow it.
Strengthening our client focus
We are building and strengthening our internal client and industry sector teams to improve further our understanding of our clients’ businesses and commercial challenges, which enables us better to meet their legal needs. We have also put in place a Client Relationship Review programme in order to:
- demonstrate our commitment to our client relationships by seeking opportunities for improvement;
- obtain a deeper understanding of our clients, the value of our work to their business and their future needs.
Constant quality
Maintaining an outstanding service to our clients is of paramount importance to us. We recently consulted widely on the need to implement a structured programme for quality assurance in the practice. As a result, we are developing a customised review process that will enable us to assess what lessons can be learned from completed pieces of work and to identify ‘best practice’ which can be shared throughout the firm for the benefit of all our clients.
We talk to our clients constantly to maintain a mutual understanding of pressure points and deadlines. This helps us to manage our work for them in the best interests of people working on all sides, for example, by staffing matters responsibly to get the job done, round the clock or on a ‘follow the sun’ basis if necessary.
Delivering Value
We take a flexible approach to pricing as the needs and preferences of our clients vary, particularly in the current climate. We think about pricing proposals in the context of the broader client relationship which enables us to develop innovative approaches in response to clients’ changing needs. We have worked with them to agree the fee structure most appropriate to their objectives, whether to address cost, mitigate or share risk, create value for the client, or a combination of all three.
For example, one of our clients, Rio Tinto, wanted to develop a new approach which involved outsourcing some of their more day-to-day legal work to CPA Global, a legal process outsourcing company in India. Rio Tinto's managing attorney, Leah Cooper, said: "We took a long hard look at our internal costs and the amount we were spending with outside counsel and saw an opportunity to make significant changes to the way we deliver legal services … By shifting work to CPA Global our internal team will be freed up to get involved in some of the more complex and challenging legal matters, which in the past might have been sent to outside counsel at significant cost…” We supported Rio Tinto in this initiative to help them ensure that legal services are provided to them in the most efficient way.
