Banks are the largest source of business for most major law firms. Their size and dispersed structure makes them challenging clients for law firms to cover.

Cox Consulting recently carried out the second edition of Banks on Law Firms, a multi-client study focusing on the issue of how law firms manage relationships with their clients in banks. Published earlier this year, ‘Banks on Law Firms 2010’ is a hard-hitting analysis of the ineffectiveness of most leading law firms’ relationship management and business development efforts.

The report revisits these issues three years after the first edition was published and two years after the financial crisis produced unprecedented upheavals among banks and, to some extent, law firms themselves. It finds that lawyers have been making welcome additional efforts to keep close to and support banking clients. However, clients describe deep-rooted weaknesses in law firms’ behaviour on many key dimensions, including:

•an often breathtaking ignorance of banks’ own businesses, their key people and their strategic aims

•relationship partners who are unable to develop consistent and productive relationships with clients

•an inability to provide institution-wide strategic advice and support, meaning that banks had to turn to other advisers during their acute times of need in the past few years

•a wasteful overload of indistinguishable marketing from top firms, but a failure to use direct personal sales approaches

Dermot Cox carried out face-to-face interviews with 32 general counsel, mid-level in-house lawyers and business people at 20 major investment and commercial banks in London. Many leading law firms, magic circle, mid-tier and US, have subscribed to the research. The report is now available to other firms. Subscribers receive the transcripts of the interviews (on an anonymised basis) as well as the detailed Executive Summary, with practical recommendations. Several respondents describe the dramatic days and weeks following the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the differing behaviour of their major firms during this period.

The subscription fee for Banks on Law Firms 2010 is £5000 excluding VAT. This includes five copies of two volumes of interview summaries, ten copies of the Executive Summary and a presentation of the findings. A PDF of demonstration extracts is available by email for interested firms.

Cox Consulting’s experience in the banking market includes being commissioned by five leading firms to carry out research among nine investment banks to explore the viability of their proposal that the firms provide them with a single portal collecting all their public knowhow resources in one place. The positive conclusions from this research contributed to the successful creation of the BLT Portal.