Recently our chairman George Beaton talked with Sam Nickless, Chief Operating Officer at Gilbert + Tobin about what the Client Choice Awards mean to his firm and how they use their success to inform their marketing, talent acquisition and business strategies. Here’s an excerpt of what Sam had to say.

We were very pleased to win two Awards in 2019, especially the one for most improvement in Net Promoter Score. This shows our people how the efforts we’re making in this area are being appreciated by our clients.

We like the fact that these Awards are based on responses from clients – the more we can understand about what clients are saying the better. Also our marketing team loves that they don’t have to write submissions required in other awards.

George asked Sam what does winning mean to the Gilbert + Tobin team, especially given the firm regularly wins law firm Awards and innovation Awards. We don’t set out to make improvements in our business with the aim to win awards, but they are important to see that we are doing the right things. They also are a motivating way to recognise our team that has does the hard work to help us win. 

When the Awards are announced we run internal and external media to celebrate our success. In proposals and tenders, law firms make lots of claims about themselves – being able to back these up with the external validation of an Award from clients is uniquely positive.

We look forward to the results each year to see whether we are making progress. We’ve used them for a while now, so the longitudinal insights, i.e. multi-year trends, are now very useful. In particular, we used them to help us take a different approach in some markets to others – for example to focus on awareness in a market where we are newer (such as Melbourne) and consideration in Sydney where we are more established.  

I know there are a lot of awards – but I believe awards where clients are the only arbiter should be among the few to enter each year.