Now is the wrong time for personal injury firms to reduce marketing spend because of Covid-19, writes Qamar Anwar, managing director at First4Lawyers
This year, more than any in recent memory, has highlighted how much businesses need to be aware of their costs and budgets. Businesses can be forgiven for not having predicted an unforeseen global pandemic, but what about what’s been right in front of them for some time? Why are personal injury law firms failing to understand what potential clients are looking for and wasting their marketing budgets as a result? This year, we undertook research to try and understand this, surveying 100 personal injury and general consumer law firms on how much solicitors understand their clients, and gauging firms’ marketing activity and spending.
We are at a uniquely difficult time for personal injury firms, squeezed at one end by Covid-19 and lockdown—which has severely affected the number of new injury claims of all kinds—and at the other by next April’s launch of the Ministry of Justice’s whiplash reforms. By then they will be two years overdue and the politics of personal injury means that any further delay is unlikely.
But people will still have accidents and will still need lawyers, and with the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) review on the legal services market due imminently, following its December 2016 report that found the sector was “not working well” for consumers and small businesses, there have been industry efforts encouraging consumers to shop around before choosing a lawyer, making it more important than ever that law firms present themselves positively to the outside world.
However, while more than two-thirds of solicitors polled in our research believed that clients shopped around before choosing a lawyer, the reality is that only around a quarter do, highlighting the importance of a good first impression. Our research also highlighted that recommendations from family and friends, as well as having a local office and a quality mark, do not rank as highly with clients as lawyers think—surprisingly, most solicitors still do not think that online searches are that important, although personal injury lawyers (15%) are nearly twice as likely to think they are the main route to finding a firm than other lawyers (8%).
Firms are making a big mistake in underestimating the importance o