Behind the scenes, every one of those people is likely doing their job well. From where you’re sitting, though, you’re dealing with one firm. You didn’t instruct five teams, and you shouldn’t come away feeling as though you did.

From the outside, the journey tends to slip in the handovers. Explaining your situation again to someone who should already know it. A new fee earner on the file that nobody mentioned. A bill that arrives in a completely different tone from every email before it. None of these is a disaster on its own. Together, they make a client feel like a file that keeps changing hands.

When every score looks fine

McKinsey came across a version of this at a media company that was losing customers at an alarming rate. On paper, its service looked strong. Its call centres, field engineers and website each scored above 90% for customer satisfaction. One executive’s reaction summed up the confusion: “Our service is great!”

Then the company looked at the whole onboarding journey rather than each step, and the picture changed. Each interaction had at least a 90% chance of going well. Yet average satisfaction fell by almost 40% over the course of the journey. Customers weren’t unhappy with any single call or visit. What wore them down was the build-up: repeated calls to clarify a product, fix an order or make sense of a bill.

That research dates from 2016 and comes from a very different industry. Even so, the pattern is still likely to be a familiar story to anyone running a law firm. In our own research with YouGov, 87.4% of law firm partners and practice managers rated their firm’s client experience well. Consumer clients put it at 68.0%. A law firm can get every step of the client journey right and still leave clients with an experience that feels disjointed from start to finish.

Why the law firm client journey so often has no owner

None of this comes down to people not caring. It’s mostly a question of structure.

Most firms organise themselves by practice area and function, and they reasonably judge people on their own part. Fee earners own matters. Business services teams each own a piece: reception, onboarding, accounts, IT. Each team can run its piece well, while the journey across all of them still has no obvious home.

What a firm measures tells the story. A 2024 LexisNexis survey of UK and Irish firms asked what matters most for individual performance. Just over half of law firm leaders (54%) said client feedback. Associates saw it differently, with 55% naming their billable targets. The intent at the top is real. It just hasn’t fully reached the timesheet.

Our research found something similar from another angle. Only 24.5% of firms set a clear standard for how quickly clients should hear back, and actively track whether they meet it. Nobody can own something nobody measures.

Where the joins usually break

Most firms could name their handover points without much thought. They’re also where the client journey most often slips.

• Onboarding to fee earner.
  The client has already shared their details, their story and their documents once. If the fee earner’s first call asks for it all again, it suggests the firm’s teams don’t talk to each other.
  
• A change of fee earner.
  Holidays, departures and reallocation are a normal part of any firm. The trouble starts when a client finds out by accident, because an email arrives from someone they’ve never heard of.
  
• Third-party delays.
  When the file is waiting on someone outside the firm, whose job is the update? We looked at why those quiet stretches matter so much in [link to no new isn’t good news – the other blog Ive written for the newsletter)
  
• Billing.
  Accounts often write in a different voice from everyone else on the matter. A bill the client wasn’t expecting can undo weeks of good work.
  
• Completion and after.
  When the matter closes, who closes the loop with the client?

One of the Legal Ombudsman’s published case studies shows how a join can fail even when nobody is at fault. A cyber-attack locked a firm out of its case management system while it handled a client’s remortgage. The attack delayed the remortgage by several weeks, and the client paid his lender’s standard variable rate in the meantime. The Ombudsman accepted that the attack was outside the firm’s control. But the firm didn’t tell the client about the delay, or the reason for it, until he complained. It accepted its communication could have been better and offered him £250.

The cyber-attack was nobody’s fault. It’s harder to say whose job it was to pick up the phone.

Owning the law firm client journey without a new hire

The encouraging part is that the fix doesn’t have to be elaborate. In the same McKinsey research, a car insurer found its customers’ biggest frustration was simple. They didn’t know what was happening while the garage repaired their car. The insurer piloted a change on 20 cases. Each customer had a named personal contact, the insurer tracked every repair daily, and customers got a short update each day. Net promoter scores for that journey rose by 15 points. For the most difficult cases, such as cars the insurer eventually wrote off, they rose by 50.

Most firms won’t need a head of client experience to get something similar. A few options work within the structure a firm already has.

• A named owner for each practice area’s client journey. Usually someone who already sits close to it, such as a team leader or practice manager. Their remit is to look across the handovers, rather than within any one team.
• A single point of contact the client knows about. Several people may work on a matter, but the client knows who to go to. That person, in turn, knows where things stand.
• A short handover note whenever a matter changes hands. A few lines cover where things are, what the client knows and anything they’re worried about. Nobody then has to ask twice.
• Walking one real matter end to end once a quarter. Reading every email and letter a client received, in order, as they received them. The gaps in a client journey tend to show up quickly.
• Measuring one thing across the whole journey. Response times across every team, or a short survey when a matter closes, can tell a firm more than five separate team metrics.

Something to think about

If a client had a poor experience with your firm last month, whose job would it be to find out? If the honest answer is probably nobody’s, that’s worth knowing.

Our new research with YouGov covers 1,373 consumers, business clients and law firm partners. The gap between how firms see their client experience and how clients see it runs right through it. The full picture is in The Cost of Silence. Available to download here.