Cross-Selling Legal Services

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Cross-selling is a process where an individual attorney’s skills become valuable to a client when paired with those of another colleague with a different skill set. The goal is to provide clients unique solutions by aligning services across practices in an array of high quality offerings. This requires an enormous amount of service expertise and firm-wide culture of cooperation. An effective business development strategy expands a firm’s offerings by leveraging services across practices, firm capabilities and attorney experience.

The ability to forge connections across practices requires deep knowledge of your client needs and your firm capabilities. Recently, I worked on a major cross-selling initiative involving both our government relations group and attorneys. Working closely with a carefully selected group, we identified, profiled and targeted the firm’s top 20 most profitable clients. Several steps were necessary to successfully achieve our end result.

First, coordination. We shared client related information and segmented them by creating classifications based on revenue, practice group, multiple representation matters, industry, focus group and lobbying representation. Segmentation made it easier to target and align information around client needs.

Second, capability. With a deep understanding of who our target clients’ industry challenges and what we discover as their needs , we can then bring together a solution set from many areas of service that may not have otherwise thought to work together for a client.

Third, connection. We connected and aligned our capabilities with the needs of our client. Based on value proposition, we created higher-value solutions by combining several services complementary to our client’s needs. In the end, we produced bundled services and solutions that our clients truly value.

Article written by Melania Wenstrup. Ms. Wenstrup is a Business Development Coordinator for Blank Rome LLP in Washington, DC. Contact: Wenstrup@BlankRome.com Ms. Wenstrup graduated from Pennsylvania State University with a Bachelor of Science degree in International Business Management and Business Law. She has also attended the University of Maastricht, Netherlands, where she focused her studies on relationship marketing.