Should My Law Firm Leave Quality Solicitors?

Should My Law Firm Leave Quality Solicitors
Nick Jervis, Law Firm Growth Specialist & Solicitor (non-practising)
If your firm is a member of Quality Solicitors, you may well ask this question from time to time, “Should my law firm leave Quality Solicitors?”. In this article, I would like to explain my thoughts, based on having spoken with dozens of Quality Solicitors law firm owners about this very question. It really is that common, so if you are thinking about leaving Quality Solicitors, let me give you some things to think about.

Questions To Answer When Thinking About Leaving Quality Solicitors

In this article I will look at the benefits of remaining a Quality Solicitors, the benefits of leaving Quality Solicitors, and the action steps that you should take before you exit your Quality Solicitors membership, should you decide to do so.

1. List The Benefits You Receive From Quality Solicitors Membership

The first thing to do is to list all of the benefits that you receive from your membership.

I know that lead generation, in other words making your telephone ring with new client enquiries, whilst touted as a substantial benefit when Quality Solicitors launched, isn’t often something that is delivered consistently or in large volumes.

The difficulty you will have is knowing which leads are coming solely from the efforts of the Quality Solicitors marketing team, and which just come back to you time and time again as your law firm has been in existence for a very long time.

In my experience, it is often the latter.

I base this on having looked at the visitor numbers to many Quality Solicitors websites and finding them to be below what I would expect another firm of a similar size, which is not a Quality Solicitors firm, to have to their website each month.

I know that other benefits received include access to software providers, search facilitators and many other service providers at potentially discounted rates.

You need to list all of the service providers that you access through your Quality Solicitors membership, then obtain quotes from the same or similar companies as if you were not a Quality Solicitors law firm.

Cost them out and see if the rates are any different, and if they are, does the additional cost still save you money when you take into account your Quality Solicitors membership fee.

2. Your Quality Solicitors Website

This is one that, as a law firm growth specialist, really irks me.

I cannot tell you how many law firms I spoke with many years ago and advised them that if they felt they must join Quality Solicitors, the one thing that they must do is to always keep their own website live as well as the Quality Solicitors one.

They all ignored me, and sadly as most of them subsequently left Quality Solicitors and had to start the website building process from scratch, they lived to regret the choice.

The main reason is that Google rewards the longevity of a domain.

A bad website design on a very old domain name (eg smithersjoneslaw.co.uk) will often beat a new website on a new website domain. Google rewards age.

What this means is that all of those firms that joined and jettisoned their old websites in favour of the Quality Solicitors one lost all of the goodwill in their website domain name, and had to start from fresh all over again. As Google puts all new websites in the ‘sandbox’ (abyss) for six months when they are launched, this is a lot of lost business opportunity.

If your thought of leaving Quality Solicitors at the moment is only a fleeting one, my advice is to buy your domain name and put a website live on it as soon as possible. You will thank me for that in the long term, I can assure you.

It should also help you in your decision making process, in that if you put up a new bespoke website for your law firm on a new or preferably your old domain name which you kept, when you start to receive enquiries from it, it will give you more confidence if you decide to leave Quality Solicitors.

3. Any Other Reasons To Leave Quality Solicitors?

The points above are the main ones, but my advice would be to have an old fashioned piece of paper on your desk with two columns, leave or stay, and over the next few weeks jot down any reasons for or against.

There may be many small benefits of remaining with Quality Solicitors that you have forgotten, or likewise many small irritations or problems cause by your Quality Solicitors membership.

You need to give them all some proper consideration, so that list is the way to ensure that you do not miss anything.

Summary On Leaving Quality Solicitors

For every law firm the decision on whether to leave Quality Solicitors or remain is a personal one.

Use the steps above to ensure you make the best choice for your firm.

If you would like to set up a time with me to discuss this in more detail, I will be happy to help.

Simply download my book below (which will show you the only four methods you need to grow your law firm) and I will show you how to set up a time to talk with me.

FREE BOOK: How To Get New Clients For A Law Firm. Click to Download Now!
 

Case Study

Beating the big boys whilst spending a fraction of their budget

We focus on accident claims, and it’s vital for us to have a strong web presence, which we didn’t have before Nick got involved.

As a result we had to buy in leads from other sources, reducing our profit margins and making us reliant on other companies to generate revenue.

We did have a company working on our Adwords and website, but the truth of the matter is that they weren’t getting the results we needed them to get – we only had a handful of clients coming in from those efforts, making us highly reliant on buying in the leads from elsewhere.

And then I came across one of Nick’s books, was impressed by what I read and got in touch with him.

The rest – as they say – is history.

We started working together with a clear brief: Nick’s job was to help us bring in more self-generated work, so we could stop relying on buying leads.

He started by working on our website, making it more accessible and easier to navigate.

Next he overhauled our Google Adwords, which the previous company had been running fairly unsuccessfully.

Adwords is hugely challenging in our sector, with some very big players bidding on some of the most common keywords, making it very difficult for any smaller firms to get a look in, and I’ve got to be honest and say that I didn’t know how Nick was going to make it work.

But he did, by analysing very closely what people were looking for and tailoring our Adwords efforts towards them.

It worked! We were competing with the big boys whilst spending a fraction of their budget, and the amount of work we got in was tremendous – we jumped from just a handful of leads and clients a month to 500 leads and 150 clients, every single month, all from our online efforts.

Nick didn’t just work on the lead generation side of things either – he helped us with the client conversion process too, training our team, making our sales calls better and improving our onboarding process to avoid drop-offs due to ‘cooling off’.

Now we don’t buy in any work at all, our pay-per-click efforts do a sterling job, and the large client database that Nick has helped us build has allowed us to increase the amount of work we do by a factor of ten, in just three years.

I’m one extremely satisfied client, and despite the dramatic differences Nick has been able to make in the time we’ve been working together, things are still improving thanks to his guidance and support.

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