In an increasingly competitive legal market, winning new clients is hard enough. Losing them before a conversation has even taken place is an entirely avoidable problem.
In a sector where technical expertise is assumed, it’s the client experience that increasingly decides who wins the work. Yet the metrics many firms focus on are only measuring part of the picture, leaving costly blind spots hiding in plain sight.
Think about what happens when a prospective client reaches out on a Sunday evening. They’re likely dealing with something significant: a bereavement, a property transaction gone wrong, a family dispute. They need reassurance, speed, and clarity. They need to feel like they’re in safe hands.
They receive an automated email.
By Monday afternoon, your team is ready to follow up. By Tuesday, they make the call. But that client made their decision on Monday morning, after speaking to two other firms who responded promptly. Your internal SLA was met, but the prospect is gone.
This is what we call the invisible delay: the gap between a firm’s perceived responsiveness and the client’s lived experience, and it’s one of the most expensive CX challenges in the sector.
Research we conducted with Insight6 found that poor handling of this single moment of truth costs legal firms an estimated £1 million per year in lost revenue. The average NPS score at the enquiry stage across firms studied? A stark -41.
Net Promoter Score has its place, but it captures how clients feel at the end of a journey, and only among those who completed it. It tells you nothing about the prospects who walked away at first contact, or the friction points that existing clients quietly tolerated despite giving you a positive score at the end.
The firms consistently pulling ahead aren’t just measuring satisfaction. They’re measuring emotional drivers: how confident did the client feel? How clearly were things explained? Did they feel in control of the process? These are the factors clients use to assess competence, because most people can’t evaluate legal quality directly. What they can evaluate is how it felt to deal with you.
Getting this right matters more than many firms realise. Clients often choose to go elsewhere because the experience felt unclear, slow, or impersonal, and they share that experience with others.
Technology is often the instinctive answer, but it shouldn’t be the first one. Before investing in new tools, firms need an honest picture of where they currently stand, across CX strategy, measurement, pain points, and team capability. A structured diagnostic can surface that picture quickly, and reveals the practical, lower-effort improvements that can be made straight away.
From there, the path forward tends to be clear: support the frontline people who shape first impressions, respond to client needs without unnecessary delay, and build feedback systems that actually close the loop rather than simply collect data.
It’s also worth recognising that client experience is as much an operational challenge as a people one. Inconsistency often comes not from poor lawyers, but from poor processes. Internal handover gaps, workload pressures, and systems that create friction rather than reduce it all play a part. Brilliant lawyers can and do compensate for broken processes every day, but this creates an experience that varies depending on who a client happens to deal with. That inconsistency is difficult to spot from the inside, and even harder to fix without the right data.
The firms that will thrive in this environment are the ones who adopt a simple but powerful principle: their job isn’t just to solve legal problems, it’s to reduce client uncertainty. Do that well, and growth follows.
Moneypenny has been helping law firms across the UK grow through better client conversations for over 25 years. We’re trusted by 75 of the Top 200 firms and four of the five Magic Circle firms, and our 95-strong specialist legal team, empowered by AI, ensures every interaction reflects well on your firm.
We understand that no two firms are the same, which is why we start with a CX audit designed to identify where the friction is, where the opportunities are, and what practical steps will make the biggest difference. Whether your challenge is out-of-hours responsiveness, enquiry handling, or consistency across your teams, we can help you close the gap between the experience you think you’re delivering, and the one your clients are actually having.
If you’re ready to find out where your firm stands, get in touch with our legal team today.
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