Why do law firms, despite well-intentioned planning, fall short of achieving their anticipated revenue and market share growth?  

All businesses, including law firms, are under tremendous economic market pressure to be the top-performers in their industries. However, with the added pressure of external competition and client demands, these businesses are failing to fully execute their plans. Nexl has investigated the root cause of this problem, and we’ve found that that law firms have what we call the “execution gap.” In this blog we’re going to answer the following questions: 

1 – What is the execution gap and what causes it? 

2 – What are the benefits of closing this gap? 

3 – Why use Nexl to help close this gap? 

What is the execution gap and what causes it? 

The execution gap occurs when strategic plans and hard-working teams meet work with unreliable systems, which creates misalignment and failed execution. 

The majority of law firms have a clear vision of what they aim to achieve and a well-thought-out strategy for how to reach their main goal. However, due to misalignment, these firms fail to execute their strategy.  

If this sounds like your law firm, you should not feel alone! In 2016, ground-breaking organization management research was conducted on the topic of strategic execution. The research asked 80 senior leaders from 20 countries and 25 industries, including legal, where they focused their attention when thinking about strategic execution. Their responses revealed what the biggest barrier to successful execution is: major misalignment between strategic business plans and action, leading to a strategic execution gap.  

Later research that focused on law firms showed that the number one challenge facing firms in Europe, Asia and the United States is failure to implement and execute their strategies.  

At Nexl, we’ve investigated this problem and its cause within law firms, and we believe the answer is even more specific. Despite heavy investment in people, planning, tools and training, law firms continue to suffer a loss in market share and gain additional market pressure – all due to a lack of transparency, enablement, and alignment.  

Fortunately, Nexl created a reliable system for closing this gap. Nexl’s Revenue Operations Cloud platform was designed to help your firm bridge the execution gap by aligning and enabling your marketing, lawyers, business development, and client service teams.  

What are the benefits of closing this gap? 

The simple and most obvious benefit of closing your execution gap is the growth in revenue that your law firm will experience. Data shows that law firms can expect an ROI (Return on Investment) of more that 500% once their execution gap is closed. Law firms will thus realise their potential, increase revenue opportunities, and be even more empowered to achieve their new revenue goals.  

When closing an execution gap, law firms can except their once misaligned teams to become more collaborative, leading to an increase in both marketing and business development engagement, as well as lawyer and practice group engagement.   

Furthermore, law firms can except to see increased efficacy of their sector-based business development programs. This means that law firms will be strongly positioned both internally and externally in their key markets. If you would like to understand how to implement a sector-based business development program effectively with the help of Nexl, click here to read more.  

Why use Nexl to help close this gap?

Nexl was designed to align your law firm, its people, and its technology. Nexl automatically captures all your firm’s interactions with clients, prospective clients and/or referral sources, analysing and enriching those interactions into actionable relationship insights. Therefore, by using Nexl’s Revenue Operations Cloud to close the execution gap, law firms will experience an increase in: (1) Alignment, and (2) Enablement.  

(1) Better Alignment: 

By using Nexl, partners will generate 208% more revenue due to their business development and marketing teams being aligned with their lawyers and practice leaders. 

(2) Better Enablement: 

Law firms will also achieve higher ROI (Return on Investment) when revenue strategies are enabled by tools that allow for higher impact, with lower effort and faster time to value. 

Overall, law firms will gain a full spectrum view of their life cycle engagement that will translate into the ability to not only support their clients at every touchpoint, but also be able to see where and how they’ve interacted and helped each client.  

If you would like to know more about Revenue Operations click here to read our whitepaper and request your demo below by clicking on the “Request Demo” button.