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Just being business savvy represents value-add to the client-it creates meaningful competitive differentiation.
In 1988 General Motors began running ads describing cars as Not Your Father's Olelsmobile. This was an extremely rare (and ultimately unsuccessful) anti-branding campaign. GM was seeking to communicate to its customers that the historic negative brand connotation for Oldsmobiles was wrong-that Oldsmobiles weren't stodgy box-mobiles.
Over time, the expression, Not Your Father's Oldsmobile came to refer generally to product offerings that are new, different and better than whatever came before them. With that meaning in mind, I suggest that lawyers need to adopt business development strategies that are Not Your Father's Oldsmobile.
The reason law firm marketing needs something new, different and better is that existing strategies aren't enough - they do not create meaningful competitive differentiations in the minds of clients and prospects. In fact, in the minds of many (if not most) clients and prospects, legal services (especially high-margin, associate-level services) are fungible commodities. What clients can get from one firm is not significantly different than what they can get from a dozen other competing law firms that are equally eager for their business. Ultimately, clients and prospects often have little, if any, understanding of what legal counsel actually does. So, in engaging counsel they might limit their decision to two criteria: price and the quality and the existence of malpractice coverage.
The "Oldsmobile" phenomenon is that-even in the face of lackluster results-law firms just keep doing the...