'Give more to get more', Evident Legal tells law firms

Law firms must "give more in order to get more", the chief executive of Evident Legal has said, launching www.legalsimplicity.co.uk, a new service which enables lawyers to draft documents for free. Jonathan Brewer said law firms should take the same approach with their small business clients and has published a 'white paper' on the subject.

Evident Legal offers free advice and documents to businesses through Simplify the Law, launched in November, which links businesses to commercial clients.

"Lawyers do lunchtime sessions and tweet about cases, which is all well and good," Brewer said.

"That sort of stuff is information 'just in case' a small business needs it in the future.

"The advice the small business needs is 'just in time' to solve the problem they have at that very point. None of us want to be told how to solve a problem we might have in the future.

"Unless law firms show they can be part of the solution, small businesses will continue to struggle through for themselves."

Evident Legal's white paper on "Generosity Strategies for Winning New Business" argues that "being more generous with time or resources than prospective clients would expect of a law firm will challenge the common perceptions around the cost of dealing with law firms.

"Helping small businesses negotiate their way around the legal issues than can cost them dear will help those businesses grow.

"As they grow, the evidence is that they will have more legal problems, will be more likely to turn to a firm and more likely to want the sort of retainer arrangements that bind clients to that firm."

The paper concluded that using generosity to "capture the lifetime value of such businesses" offered a real opportunity for growth for law firms "with the courage to stand out from the crowd".

Brewer said Evident Legal's www.legalsimplicity.co.uk, launched this week, would be financed through advertising and sponsorship.

"Our gamble is that by removing the barrier of cost, more lawyers will turn to our service and we can then monetise that traffic indirectly through advertising and sponsorship, as well as by developing additional value-add services that some users may wish to purchase.

"We hope that lawyers will find this to be a refreshing and transparent approach and rally to the cause of free automation for the profession."

He added that the "proof would be in the pudding" in terms of traffic, but there had been more than 130 registrations on Tuesday, when the service went live.