Positive half-year financials and increased deal flow may be pointing to a brighter outlook for law firms, but for the foreseeable future the balance of power will remain firmly with clients. With each panel review that passes, law firms are falling over themselves to get in in-house teams' good books, throwing in secondees, training and all manner of other added extras in an attempt to secure lucrative mandates.

Despite this trend, Legal Week Intelligence's annual Client Satisfaction Survey, which this year polled more than 1,400 senior in-house counsel on how they rate their external law firms, has consistently found that the factor clients value above all else is quality of legal advice. Out of 10, clients place an average value of more than 9.5 on the importance of the standard of legal advice provided.

The perennial problem for law firms in a competitive market is how they maintain the quality of advice – and lawyers giving it – without putting up costs. This dilemma has become even more acute now many 'added extras' have become the norm, forcing firms to throw more and more into the mix to stand out. 

This year, for the first time, our research looked at the various legal process outsourcing options that have sprung up in recent times as firms attempt to control costs on day-to-day work. And it is fair to say that as a whole clients are not overwhelmed with what these low-cost options bring to the table.

Across the eight categories we measure, effective use of outsourcing is given the lowest importance rating at 4.4 out of 10. And yet this measure, together with a second new category, which asks how effectively paralegals are being used to control costs, are also the only areas where satisfaction ratings outstrip importance ratings.

This suggests that, where law firms have outsourced legal work or used their own service centres, clients have been surprisingly pleased with the outcome. More to the point, it demonstrates the uphill battle that law firms face to convince clients that cheaper work doesn't always mean an inferior outcome. 

The results show it is the larger and arguably more sophisticated clients that need the most convincing. Among this group there is almost a level of snobbery that comes with instructing the best and biggest law firms, and that is not an attitude that will change overnight.

There is, however, one driver for change offering light at the end of the tunnel for those firms that have embraced legal process outsourcing. Chief operating officers at these top-end companies are the one band that has embraced this model more than any other group. And that is a voice even the most powerful general counsel can't ignore.