Get under the skin of your client's business

Too often law firms strive to be all things to all people. At my firm, we have found a real benefit in focusing instead on offering a complete commercial service to a number of specific sectors where we have strong expertise: real estate, media, retail and fashion, travel ?and leisure.

Our clients see our services as separate sectors so we need to mirror that in the way in which we advise, consult and communicate with them. This requires us to work that much harder to understand where our value is to clients by really getting under the skin of their business which enables us to gauge more effectively what our best opportunities are. For instance, we are frequently instructed on standalone corporate actions such as mergers and acquisitions for clients in our specialist sectors, in which we involve experts in other legal disciplines. This often opens the door to those individuals as we advise them on day-to-day matters going forward, which enables us to add further value for the client. With our connections in the marketplace of each of our chosen sectors, we often have the chance to refer investments and other deals to our clients and contacts that they would otherwise be unlikely to access without our relationship.

We’ve always had a number of specialist areas where our knowledge of the industry has influenced our advice, and we’ve come to understand that this is where we really add value when we advise them on legal matters.

They don’t think of themselves as having problems that sit in neat categories defined by the different areas of legal practice; they have business problems that play out in particular ways because of the sectors in which they operate. We have learned from them that where we hit the sweet spot in our advice is where a number of our different lawyers work together across practice areas. Combining an expertise of different areas of law with a nuanced understanding of a client’s particular sector will help to come up with pragmatic and focused commercial solutions.

This feedback from clients was the starting point and we have endeavoured to replicate this as ?it is clearly a successful formula. Over the last year, we have gradually been seeking to formalise a number of sector teams in this way – and make ?sure everybody in the firm ?thinks along these lines. SJ

Daniel Bellau is a corporate ?partner at Hamlins

www.hamlins.co.uk