Regional accountancy firm wants happier partnership with allied law firm…
Our client was an accountancy firm working in an established partnership with a legal firm that analysed the annual changes to tax structure so that the accountants could devise investment products and services that maximise client tax savings. When we entered the relationship, the conflict was happening at two levels. Trust and communication broke down when the two firms started charging each other for work done outside of the partnership framework, which we discovered was very narrow. But also customers were being let down: they could find better products from the competition.
The challenge for the alliance was that the accountants were hearing this feedback but there was no systematic way of sharing it with the lawyers. While the lawyers were in the dark about customers’ expectations and judgment, the accountants judged the lawyers as unresponsive and uncreative. The solution was to capture the perspectives of the professionals in each firm and use the findings to define the kinds of conversations and processes that would put the customers’ needs at the centre of the product development process. Along the way, professionals from both firms recognised they needed more cross-disciplinary conversations involving experts from both companies, and fewer closed conversations involving only specialists from one discipline. Learnings from this process helped the team cope when the accountancy firm was subsequently acquired.