With both the individual barristers and Chambers to promote, marketing The Bar has never been easy. In this special report we look at how barristers, clerks and Chambers can make their BD and marketing more effective ... and more cost-effective.

1. How barristers can use business development to squeeze the best results from even the smallest marketing budget
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“Marketing isn’t about spending large sums of money on advertising, sponsorship and hospitality. Intelligent marketing is about spending less and generating more.”

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How barristers can use business development to squeeze the best results from even the smallest marketing budget
Helping Smarter Professional Service Firms Grow
www.tenandahalf.co.uk
Contents
Page 3 Which of the following 10½ situations apply to you?
Page 4 As a Chambers, what do you need to market?
Page 5 Part 1: 10 ½ Ways to Market Chambers
Page 11 Part 2: 10 ½ Ways to Market Barristers
Page 16 Claim your FREE 45 minute initial business development consultation

3. Protect existing relationships with solicitors
Develop those relationships to open up new fee-earning opportunities
Achieve dual marketing success: promote Chambers, promote your members
Use low cost, low risk strategies to stay visible and promote your expertise
Which of the following 10½ situations apply to you?
1. You have good links to the right solicitors but aren’t generating the volume of work you should
2. You regularly work with some solicitors in a particular firm, but not others
3. You just can’t seem to make the inroads you should with some firms despite the fact your specialisation or location seems to match
4. The volume of work you traditionally receive from a particular firm or solicitor has tailed off dramatically recently
5. You have identified a new firm you should be working with but making contact is proving more difficult than it should be
6. You are receiving new instructions but levels of repeat business aren’t what they should be
7. You are finding it difficult to maintain contact with certain solicitors and the volume of work you receive from those solicitors seems to be suffering as a result
8. Attendance at your seminars and social events is dropping off … quickly!
9. Solicitors know about certain barristers within Chambers but have no knowledge of your other members or their expertise
10. You’ve worked hard to create a brand but your brand isn’t as recognisable as it should be
10½. You just keep doing what you always have; it’s easier that way and other methods seem too costly!
How many of these scenarios apply to you? 2, 3, more?
If you can relate to 3 or more then this report will benefit you.
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4. As a Chambers, what do you need to market? You’ll notice we haven’t started with the age-old question “why do you need to market?” There’s a simple reason for that. This report isn’t designed to touch upon the potential decimation of legal aid nor does it wade through the threats posed by Alternative Business Structures. This report is designed to help you take stock of what you already have and help you market what you have more effectively using the most powerful promotional tools at your disposal – your members of chambers and your clerking team. Unlike other legal service providers such as solicitors or patent attorneys, Chambers success revolves around the ability to market two very different propositions at once - its members and, increasingly, its brand.
Part 1: Marketing Chambers
Part 2: Marketing Barristers
SIGNIFICANT CASES
CONTACTS
PROFILE
TRUST
SIGNIFICANT CASES
CLIENT CARE
ADDED VALUE
BRAND ‘PROMISES’
SPECIALISMS, KNOWLEDGE, EXPERTISE
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5. Part 1: 10 ½ Ways to Market Chambers
1. Consistent shared core vision
A Barristers’ Chambers is no different to any other business in that if it is going to succeed in creating and promoting a consistent brand, all of its members must be agreed on what that brand should be.
This creation of a shared vision is even more important for Chambers because you are in essence a collection of individuals rather than a firm in the traditional sense. However, if you are going to market your name alongside your members, there needs to be a common bond law firms can latch on to, a consistent message that will help them recognise the benefits of working with you as opposed to your competitors.
This is not an onerous task. All it involves is sitting down and working out what your Chambers stands for and what promises you want your name to make to your clients. Are you going to be a modern Chambers or a more traditional set? Are you going to trade on your specialist knowledge of niche areas or base your offering on higher service levels and closer working practices?
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Whatever decisions you come to, your core brand needs to be communicated through every
channel – from your collateral, your website and your premises through to the personal contact your clerks and your members have with your chosen target market.
2. Knowledge audit
Once you know how you’d like to be perceived, it’s important to work out what
you actually have to sell (and I
make no bones about using
such a dirty word!).
You need to list the skills,
the experience, the knowledge
and the successes your set has
behind them. These are your
assets and your inventory and
by completing this knowledge
audit you will be able to work out exactly what to market and from there, who you should be marketing to.
It is this level of focus that is sometimes lacking in the professional services, not just at The Bar but in legal and accountancy practices of all different sizes. By focusing on what you have to sell you will be able to focus on who to sell to. This will immediately make your marketing more effective, more cost–effective and less time consuming for those involved.

6. Part 1: 10 ½ Ways to Market Chambers
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3. Segment your current database
By completing steps 1 and 2 you will have worked out your core values and what you have to sell. Now comes the exciting bit – getting those messages in front of your current and prospective clients.
With regards to your current clients, do you know where the bulk of your revenue comes from?
Have you ever analysed your clientbase to identify your top 10 or 20 clients?
And from there, have you identified
the other solicitors within those
firms who aren’t giving you work?
In practical terms highlighting your
top clients shows where your
barristers and clerks need to spend
most time and effort. It will also show where additional opportunities may lurk within firms who already instruct you.
The process will also uncover holes in your current database. Which other firms/solicitors/industry contacts need to be added? What level of opportunity do they offer?
Once you are happy with the content of your database, it’s time to segment it. We use a four- tiered system (platinum, gold, silver and bronze) and have designed specific client management
models for each. These models employ a mix of personal, email and mail contact, the combination of which is dependent on the revenue and potential opportunity offered by each segment.
Its purpose is to organise us so we focus the limited time and resource we have available on the contacts most likely to provide work and do you know what? It works!
4. Adopt ‘Intelligent Marketing’
Marketing is wrongly perceived as expensive, as an overhead rather than as the asset it is.
That said, there are expensive marketing activities – advertising, sponsorship and hospitality all successfully eat away at already restricted budgets and (probably) achieve very little in return. If that is the case it’s time to embrace ‘Intelligent Marketing’.
Intelligent Marketing costs less but delivers more. It is also measurable and more than achievable if you marshal the resources you have at your disposal (the members, the clerking team, your website, your case management system and inexpensive add-ons like MailChimp), assign responsibilities to each and focus on marketing solely to the targets most likely to actually generate work.
And what are the silver bullets?
Turn the page and we’ll
share them with you.

7. Part 1: 10 ½ Ways to Market Chambers
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Networking
Spending more quality time with solicitors
Finding the right publishing and speaking opportunities
Providing practical informative e-bulletins rather than unnavigable and overly-long technical papers (which have the knock on benefit of not taking your members so long to write)
Providing engaging interactive workshops rather than dry seminars (more on page 9)
Using your website to maximum effect (and again there’s more on page 9) 5. Introduce a “Culture of Follow-Up” We only work with professional service firms so are qualified to make the following sweeping generalisation of solicitors, accountants and barristers: even the most proactive... nay, prolific business developers let themselves down with a lack of structured follow-up. The excuse is there’s no time. That the job takes over as soon as they’re back at their desks. This is nonsense. There is always time to drop a new contact a quick 3 line email, to find time for a coffee or for lunch or even just for a telephone call (however fast technology moves there it still can’t equal a good old fashioned phone call). Your clients – whether they’re solicitors or the lay client influencing the solicitor on your behalf – will rarely have work for you there and then.
The trick is to stay visible and stack the odds of a future instruction heavily in your favour. That will not happen until you introduce “Culture of Follow-Up” where acknowledging a meeting and moving that acknowledgment towards face time is a necessity rather than a preference. All it takes is discipline and a few minutes here and there. You can also contact a solicitor about a specific case you dealt with for them even if your involvement has ended (e.g. you may have covered an interim hearing but not the later hearings). Ask what has happened in the case and show your interest in both them and the lay client. 6. Client service reviews When was the last time you spoke to your clients? And I mean really spoke to them? When was the last time you asked them what you do well? What you need to change? What additional services you need to introduce to make their lives easier? Ask them where you excel … and where you don’t! The easiest way to find out why people buy your services is to ask the people who already buy them. They will give you an objective and constructive overview of your service, highlighting the areas you should be promoting and underlining which areas need improvement.

8. Part 1: 10 ½ Ways to Market Chambers
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As an extension you will generate generous brownie points just from taking an interest. That interest will lead to more work and, most probably, referrals. You will also learn how to make yourself more attractive to other law firms operating in the same space which again will win you new work and new clients to develop.
7. Improve your client experience
Law firms and accountants have spent a lot of time getting their front of house right. They understand the value of making their client’s experience as positive as possible because, as the managing director of a firm of accountants in Stoke told us “clients make their minds up on whether they’re going to work with us before they even speak to one my colleagues.”.
From the cosmetic point of view what impression does your premises create? Are your meeting rooms in need of a lick of paint? Is your crockery matching and chip-free? Does the doorbell work?
I could tell you horror stories of visiting Chambers where there’s been gym kit sitting
in the corner of the conference room or – and this is true – two large dogs staring up at me from a study when I went to use the Gents! Would I have seen that at even the smallest regional legal practice?
From a more practical point of view are you accessible? Is it easy to park?
Are your clerks and barristers contactable out of hours? Are visitors welcomed warmly?
Even the way a client is greeted counts in your favour, in person or on the phone. If the first person the client comes into contact with is disorganised, dishevelled and unsure how to progress an enquiry, you will not win their work.
8. Cast the net wider
Sometimes it looks as though
a set has hit what economists
term ‘saturation point’. They
think they’ve contacted every
firm and every solicitor they
can – whether that’s in terms
of geography or in terms of the
practice areas the set serves.
Now, my old sales manager would have told me to just start at the top of the list all over again but a more sensible approach may be to cast
your net a little wider. For regional sets that means looking at towns or cities a little further afield that are either not being served or are being served poorly by your competitors.
For national sets with distinct sector expertise it means looking at cities further out of London or looking at areas with specialist law firms but without specialist barrister support. There is a very progressive firm in Blackburn that specialises in media and technology and very successful they are too. How many London or even Manchester sets would have them on their radar?

9. Part 1: 10 ½ Ways to Market Chambers
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9. Re-vamp your seminar programme Are attendances down at your seminars? Or are attendees becoming less likely to stop for a chat before or after the main event? All over the UK legal seminars (and I include solicitors’ here) are too prescriptive. They are one-sided, a glorified reading of dull text heavy PowerPoint slides and the audience - to be brutal - would take as much benefit from just reading the doorstop of a hand-out (and that’s probably just a print out of the slides anyway). But that doesn’t mean seminars aren’t a very powerful marketing tool but it does mean that if you want your seminars to stand out and you want attendances to increase, you need to give them a face-lift. Here are 3 tips on how to do this. a) Drop the word seminar and replace it with ‘workshop’ Make it more interactive, have a mock debate over a contentious point of case law, introduce reasons for people to get involved and if you are only to make one change, make sure it’s to switch from bullet points you read through to images you talk around!
b) Don’t rely on people coming to you, go to them If you work with a number of solicitors in a single firm, offer to run the workshop at their premises before or after work to make it easier for them to attend (and harder for them to avoid). c) Look at online options Excellent packages are available for under £80 per month that manage the process, send the invites and automate a detailed follow up and analysis package on your behalf. And they record the webinar for you so you can burn DVDs to send out to clients or append them to your online information repository for clients to use when convenient. And always remember to market your seminars as an easy route to much needed CPD points. And make sure that’s prominent! This is the sway for many a solicitor. 10. Does your website earn its keep? More and more your website is a prospective (or returning) client’s first point of contact. What greets them when they find you? Does your site reinforce your brand or does it look ‘cheap as chips’? Either way its overall appearance will match the level of investment you put into its construction.

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Is your site easy to navigate? Is it easy for the visitor to find the information and the barrister they’re looking for? You’d be amazed how
many people would rather return to Google and start their search again than fight their way through an unfamiliar site.
A search bar or, better still, a series of logical drop-down menus together with a series of large easy to read buttons is the approach proven to encourage navigation. And it’s the ability to navigate easily around a site that leads to making contact.
Is your site ‘sticky’? Do people keep coming back? Is there a reason for them to keep coming back? Regularly adding content gives people that reason to return. Better still it gives people a reason to tell other people to visit your site.
The other benefit of regularly adding content is that it will improve your search engine rankings which again will increase the volume of traffic to your site.
10 ½. Out of sight, out of mind
The truth is if you don’t stay in touch, you won’t be best placed when opportunities present themselves. Clerks can take responsibility but having clerks and barristers involved will improve results and win you more work.
There are a multitude of touchpoints you can employ – newsletters, online resources, coffees at court, lunch, email, LinkedIn, phone calls, articles .
Just remember to do everything you can to become visible and stay visible.

11. Part 2: 10 ½ Ways to Market Barristers
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1. Personal knowledge audit What are your specialisms? Where have you had most success during your career? What are the examples you have that show how you reach the right result the right way? Which areas of law are you most interested in? How could your experience to date be packaged to help you break into those areas? I’m willing to bet it’s been a long time since you considered all of these questions, let alone wrote the answers down so you could consider them and use them in a meaningful way. This is your personal knowledge audit and the results will tell you what you have to (sorry, that word again!) sell. Until you have worked out exactly what it is you have to sell, any significant marketing progress will be nigh on impossible. 2. Construct your personal brand What do you stand for? What will solicitors and their clients get from working with you? Once you have answers to those two questions you will be well on your way to building your personal brand. From there you and your clerks will know exactly how to
communicate the essential message – the benefits clients will gain from working with you. One tip, don’t base your brand on your technical ability. Your CV will show where and how you’re technically brilliant. This is about what client s get for their money over and above your reading of the law. The areas the research we’ve conducted across the professional services shows what clients really want is: Professional likeability: You will be able to get on during even the most difficult times. This creates trust and a stronger – and more pleasant - working relationship. Responsiveness & approachability: Be there when you’re needed. Return calls, return emails, answer the phone out of hours and never sound like talking to the person on the other end of line is the last thing you want to do. This creates a massively positive perception of you which leads to repeat instructions and referrals. Add real commercial value: Not seminars, newsletters or the odd phone call. Use your experience and specialism to best effect so that every solicitor you work with knows that when they call you, you’ll need the minimum time to get up to speed and will be able to find a creative, innovative and effective solution … quickly!

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3. Adopt ‘Intelligent Marketing’
Marketing is solely about creating visibility; become visible, be visible, stay visible.
Marketing isn’t about spending large sums of money on advertising, sponsorship and hospitality. Intelligent Marketing is about spending less and generating more.
When you’re at court, stop and have coffee with someone you’ve worked with previously. Take an interest in their caseload and engineer new opportunities to work together. This isn’t ‘selling’, it’s just conversation!
Write articles in the right magazines (the ones your clients read, not your peers)
Get speaking slots at the events solicitors in your area attend
Write for the newsletter of relevant associations and professional bodies
Build a STATOY (“saw this and thought of you”) email programme of relevant magazine articles and send them to your contacts.
4. Initiate review meetings
When was the last time you sat down with a client after concluding a case and just chatted it through? Asked what they thought of your performance and asked them to let you know where you could have done things differently to make their lives easier?
Not only will this investment of 30 minutes mark you out from your competitors, it will also
create additional trust and a stronger working relationship which in turn will increase repeat purchase and referrals.
How about taking it one stage further and have your Head Clerk carry out a client review once a year to give the client a more impartial conduit to provide feedback?
All of the things you learn can be used to improve your service and delivery and if the points raised are on that client’s wish list, you can guarantee they’ll also be on other solicitors wish lists. Taking heed will make you more attractive to all of them.
5. Make the first move
You have to understand
your market whether it’s
defined by geography, by
sector or by both. Which
firms do you work with
regularly? Which don’t
you work with regularly?
Which do you have one or two contacts at but recognise the other members of the team aren’t giving you anything at present?
Build this understanding into a list because
every name on it – current client or prospect – offers a potential opportunity for work.
Then make the first move, get in touch. Invite them to a workshop or offer training.

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If you’re uncomfortable making that first move make sure you’ve gone through the list with your Head Clerk so that they can prioritise contact on your behalf. The legal world is full of too many people who wait for the call. In our experience the most successful lawyers (whether they’re barristers, solicitors or attorneys) are the ones who make the first move. 6. Broadcast success Don’t be shy, if you’ve had significant results using what you consider to be an innovative interpretation of the file, tell people. Yes, client confidentiality needs to be protected wherever necessary but if the judgement is out in the public domain turn it into a short email bulletin and send it out to all of the solicitors and industry contacts on your Chambers’ database. At best, it’ll encourage solicitors to come forward with a similar case having recognised you’re the person to talk to. At worst, it’ll remind them you’re out there and this is an area in which you specialise.
7. Get your web page right Following on from the last point, your web page should be a CV listing successes, reported or significant cases and your specialisms. It should reflect everything you listed in your personal knowledge audit but it should also link to any articles you’ve written, the slides and/or notes from any workshops you’ve delivered and any other press you’ve garnered. This will not only make prospective clients more certain of your suitability, it’ll also improve your ability to be found via the search engines which means more people will find you when they’re searching for the skills you have. 8. Get involved in social media Not with Facebook and only with Twitter if you’re going to inject a huge volume of personality (good examples of this are @Charonqc and @BabyBarista). The best tool for barristers is LinkedIn. Not only does it allow you to share slides, articles (your own and those you’ve collected for STATOY purposes) and involve yourself in the discussions raised in the groups you join, it also acts as a passive and non-intrusive FREE marketing campaign.

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If you link to every solicitor you’ve worked with, opposed or even just met, every time you update your profile or add a status update your name will appear in their in-box. Again, it’ll rarely generate work immediately but it maintains that all important visibility, keeping you front of mind for when an opportunity does arise.
You can also get involved with the discussions specialist legal groups are having (for example
Family Lawyers UK, Property Law Forum, UK Employment and HR Law, Association of Partnership Practitioners). This will help boost your visibility in front of solicitors practising in your area and demonstrate your understanding and expertise at the same time.
9. Create ‘thought leadership’ credentials
Embracing intelligent marketing will allow you to create a library of thoughts, opinions and advice. What you need to do is open that library up to the biggest audience possible. Can you get published in magazines with international circulations? Can you send
clippings to radio and TV companies so it’s you they turn to when they need comment on your area of expertise?
I used to work with someone whose speciality was investigating the shadier areas of the merchant fleet and when the story broke Al
Qaeda may have a secret navy he was never off the TV. Did he know more than any other recognised expert, no. Did he make sure the right media people knew he was available for comment? Always!
Better still, is there potential to write a book? There is no faster route to establishing thought leadership credentials than along the spine of a book. Yes, it’s time consuming but it will pay dividends.

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10. Make people refer you
The cheapest yet most productive source of business for barristers is referrals. It’s true you can’t make people refer you but you can make them more likely to refer you. How? By looking after them properly. That’s all.
Be responsive, be approachable,
provide the required level of bedside manner and be prepared to explain things ‘off the clock’ where necessary. You will be amazed at the difference this makes.
One of our clients (the managing partner of a patent attorneys, another profession not immediately associated with client care) told me when he was training the then owner of the firm repeatedly told him it was his job to provide a level of service that would make his client start his next conversation with “I’ve just been with my attorney and you’ll never guess what he did for me …”
In today’s market the need to be recognised and referred has never been as great for all lawyers – and that includes barristers.
10 ½. Remember it’s your business! It sounds obvious but you are, for all intents and purposes, self-employed so your earnings depend on the volume of work you generate. Some work will always arrive on its own but, as things get tighter and the market gets more competitive, business development is the only key that will unlock a steady stream of interesting work.

16. Helping smarter professional service firms grow www.tenandahalf.co.uk
Dear reader,
I hope this report gives you some new ideas.
I hope it also shows how easy it is to improve the returns your marketing and business development generates. If not, we would be delighted to answer any questions or share more ideas on how your set win more work.
Please call us on 0115 969 9817 to arrange a FREE boot-fitting. We can discuss how you can put start to implement the ideas in this report and look at how the adoption of Intelligent Marketing will help your Chambers grow.
Yours faithfully,
If you would like a FREE initial 45 minute consultation, call Douglas on 077865 40191 or email douglas@
tenandahalf.co.uk
“Our experience with Size 10½ Boots has been a breath of fresh air and, speaking as someone who would have laughed heartily at the idea of BD training for barristers 3 years ago, I am a convert and looking forward to what we can achieve with our new found direction and approach.”
Scott Baldwin, Head Clerk, St Mary's Chambers
“10½ Boots presented a seminar to our barristers and it was clear they knew their audience and their business very well. The presentation was very beneficial as within days I noticed certain barristers had altered their networking skills. Clear and simple tips were given which proved that effective networking can be achieved almost instantly. It was pleasing to see in a recent chambers event that those techniques were still been used by those who attended the seminar.”
Russell Hobbs, Senior Clerk, KCH Garden Sq
Douglas McPherson, Director, Size 10½ Boots
E: douglas@tenandahalf.co.uk
T: 077865 40191
Bernard Savage, Director, Size 10½ Boots
E: bernard@tenandahalf.co.uk
T: 07771 897772