What we, at insight plus, have learned about the marketing of legal firms.

• The core principles involved in marketing a legal practice are as follows:
  a legal firm's most valuable marketing asset is its staff;
• the most powerful marketing tool is word-of-mouth recommendation, not advertising or publicity;
• reputation management may be a better term to use than marketing;
• word-of-mouth recommendation is driven by a lawyer's authority position in the marketplace or very favourable perceptions of the firm;
• favourable perceptions stem from positive interactions between staff and clients and from staff exceeding clients' expectations;
• marketing action plans are more effective when they are developed at the individual level and then aggregated rather than developed using an autocratic  'top-down' approach;
• there are three spheres of marketing that must be incorporated into a marketing plan:
  - strategies,
  - tactics,
  - personal marketing skills.

The starting point must be the development of competence and confidence in each lawyer's personal marketing skills.  Otherwise the planned strategies and tactics will languish in a document banished to a ' lower drawer'.

The most important personal marketing skills are:

• pursuing new business opportunities(from current clients and prospects),
• questioning to understand and develop clients' needs,
• cross-selling,
• managing client expectations,
• handling the issue of fees,
• building relationships,
• detecting and handling dissatisfaction.

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