HuthwaiteFleming has the skills and experience to help law firms deal with a period of unprecedented change, which presents a number of challenges for both law firms and their professional staff. These challenges need to be overcome if firms are to grow and compete successfully in the years ahead:

• Competition for client business continues to grow and is likely to become more intense as firms amalgamate and as new players enter the market.
• Clients are becoming more sophisticated and more demanding. At the same time they are less loyal, and are more likely to shop around for services they regard as undifferentiated commodities they can buy from anyone.
• The need to grow continues to rise in importance, both to remain competitive and retain key professional staff who are increasingly targeted by rival firms also seeking to grow rapidly. While some firms have a strategy for organic growth, others seek to grow by merging with other established firms. Whichever strategy they choose, the larger firms that result need to surmount the difficulties of bringing together organisations and individuals with different personalities, business approaches and cultures.
• The key to growth is the ability of firms to broaden the range of people who have the skills to win new client business and develop major accounts, through first getting appointed to the panel and then capitalising on this in terms of winning profitable business. Achieving such a change with professional staff, who see themselves as lawyers rather than salespeople, is not easy. The demands of their client work already stretch their working week, leaving little time to either acquire selling skills, or to apply them to the pursuit of new clients. Helping these people to accept that being a good lawyer is no longer enough to ensure long-term success is a crucial first step in reducing reliance on a few Rain Makers.