What We Do
We are in the business of creating dramatic client loyalty. When all is said and done, you will know what your firm’s clients value most and what drives them crazy, understand the opportunities ahead and any stumbling blocks in the way, gain competitive intelligence that can lead to more matters or explain a few things, and have clear direction and support for deepening your relationships.
Our Services
We created this product to help clients make smarter decisions and anticipate client priorities by giving them the ability to analyze the voice of the client to deliver a greater, and differentiated, client experience.
Clients demand that outside counsel not only provide excellent legal work but also add value through superior client service. Each client has a different set of priorities and a different understanding of what constitutes seamless service. Wicker Park Group will use feedback from firm clients to help you design and implement a custom Client Service Program that will:
- Ensure every client has a consistently extraordinary service experience with everyone at the firm; and
- Create an internal culture where partners trust that their clients will receive the same level of service excellence from each attorney, practice division or support function.
WPG will assist your firm in developing client service standards, facilitate a workshop on client service and lead skills-based client team training.
Most clients have something they want to say to their law firms and are just waiting for someone to ask. Wicker Park Group helps facilitate the conversation by conducting sophisticated client feedback interviews for you with in-house counsel and other corporate clients. Different from a “thank you” visit, our interviews are designed to reveal what clients want, expect and value in their law firm relationships. Our conversations yield competitive intelligence about how and why clients make decisions as well as result in a tangible roadmap for growing and strengthening valued relationships.
As law firms have created internal teams around key clients or industries, they have great need for effective team structure, meeting facilitation and program assessment. It takes an incredible amount of work for firms to first get these teams off the ground, to keep them running and then to ensure they reach goals. Wicker Park Group is well versed in the opportunities and challenges of teams, has established and run them for others and can bring a fresh outside perspective to make them a success.
Depending on your firm’s needs and preferences, Wicker Park Group can also train your firm to facilitate its own client teams. Wicker Park Group is well versed in the opportunities and challenges of teams, has established and run them for others and can bring a fresh outside perspective to make them a success.
With legal expertise common in today’s industry, excellent communication and other business skills are consistently identified by law firm clients as the critical differentiators between average and great attorneys and firms. These skills also directly correlate to an attorney’s realization, perceived value and ability to develop business. To provide attorneys with tools for engaging clients in a meaningful way, Wicker Park Group offers Client Conversations, a turnkey program and toolkit. The program challenges attorneys to schedule and conduct three to five meaningful client conversations in a short time frame and provides the skills to improve their day-to-day interactions with clients and prospects. The goal is simple: to increase the number of face-to-face meetings with clients and improve the quality of every interaction with clients in order to retain and expand quality business.
For law firms interested in conducting their own client feedback programs, we have developed ClientKit™, Wicker Park Group’s proprietary toolkit to help carry out this approach. You can jumpstart client feedback programs in your firm with tested, step-by-step guidelines—all supported with training for attorneys and staff on our methodology and implementation. With this formalized approach, you are guaranteed consistency in methodology, communication and deliverables and are more likely to win faster internal buy-in to begin a client feedback program.
It’s all about client relationships. If you aren’t investing in the relationship, you run the risk of losing your client to someone who will. Think beyond the day-to-day work and create a productive cycle of relationship building that will be your road to sustainable revenue growth.
Differentiation is a key driver in why firms get hired. Understanding what a client wants and expects, as well as how a firm compares to its competitors, is fundamental to achieving differentiation. Through our previous professional roles and consulting with clients of Wicker Park Group, we have deep experience with conducting competitive research, developing marketing budgets, evaluating practice viability, identifying and vetting laterals and assessing brand position and reputation.
For the law firm needing to reach a large number of clients in a relatively short amount of time, Wicker Park Group offers an Electronic Survey client feedback tool. Wicker Park Group will collaborate with your firm to design a custom electronic survey that determines how the firm’s clients view the firm’s service and capabilities and capture NPS (Net Promoter Score) ratings. Wicker Park Group will analyze the results, identify common themes, highlight opportunities and provide other service recommendations. After reviewing electronic survey results, you might determine that follow-up phone or in-person interviews are required to immediately address any specific client needs brought to light by the survey responses. Viewing the responses through the lens of our ongoing Client Feedback Interviews and research with other law firms across the country, we will provide information on general trends and benchmarks for comparison.
An essential part of providing excellent legal service is evaluating that service with the client’s input. With Mid-Matter Evaluations (MMEs) and Post-Matter Evaluations (PMEs), we help you focus on the unique circumstances of the matter, including project management, billing and achievement of specified and implied goals. Clients communicate their service experiences while your firm further develops client service initiatives and increases client loyalty.
Wicker Park Group has made this process simple by developing a workshop to train key partners and personnel how to effectively conduct matter evaluations and creating a Matter Evaluation Toolkit with the necessary forms, questions, templates and model communications. Should you desire, a member from our team can participate in actual post matter evaluations.
You do not have to go it alone. Wicker Park Group has extensive firsthand experience in developing and facilitating law firm retreats and meetings. With a team made up of former CMOs, lawyers and business owners, we have helped set the direction and carry out the logistics for dozens of such gatherings. We also have been instrumental in launching new initiatives for firms and companies, including advisory boards as well as client, industry and practice group teams.
Wicker Park Group is available to speak at your firm retreats or meetings through our Speaker Series, which is very different from our advanced workshops. We can share either an industry perspective on what we are hearing from law firms and their clients or an insider’s perspective that includes an overview of what your clients recently told us in feedback interviews. We also speak regularly on timely business development, law firm management and client service topics.
It’s a given that clients expect their attorneys to be highly skilled at practicing law, but great lawyers are also asked to be exceptional communicators, project managers and budgeters. Wicker Park Group has developed a series of advanced workshops and one-on-one training to help attorneys build skills, create new behaviors and drive cultural change to strengthen client service and business development. Law firm CMOs play an integral role in these sessions and their follow up. Wicker Park Group not only offers business development training and coaching but also strategic advice and presentation and meeting instruction.