In the latest in a series of 2025 Strategy insights from our Executive Committee, Don Baker explains how the north direction of our 2025 Strategy – Distinctive Client Experience – will help us create a client experience that sets us apart.

As you know, the north direction of our 2025 Strategy is focused on creating a distinctive client experience – something we’ve focused on a lot over the past year. This essentially involves making our clients feel prioritized, protected and understood, and embedding a shared sense of purpose around our clients that will result in more complex, high-profile matters from our global clients.

Our success will distinguish us from other law firms, ensuring that we deliver an experience tailored around what our clients truly value.

We decided on this approach following extensive research with our clients. They told us very clearly what they value most in their law firms and what it would take for us to distinguish ourselves, and we are now taking action. That isn’t to question the excellent service that we generally individually provide to our clients. However, it means we have an opportunity to up our game in collectively providing a consistent distinctive client experience across the Firm.

With that in mind, we asked our Client Experience (CX) Task Force to consider what we can do to create a distinctive client experience that we can apply across the Firm in a more consistent way.

Our CX Task Force has initially prioritized two initiatives: Voice of the Client; and CX Blueprints.

Voice of the Client

This initiative is focused on ensuring that we’re laser-focused on what our clients value by seeking, understanding and acting on their feedback. We are implementing a way to more effectively listen to our clients on a consistent and regular basis to ensure we understand what they value, what we do well and any areas for improvement.

Our plan is to use the feedback we obtain from clients to identify any wider trends and share and apply our learnings broadly across the Firm.

One of the ways we’re gathering insight is through face-to-face client interviews. We regularly hear in these meetings that clients are impressed that we care enough to ask for their feedback. These interviews have also resulted in a wealth of useful information that we use to take meaningful action that will improve the individual client experience and strengthen our client relationship, showing that we are listening and acting on what they share with us.

Importantly, Voice of the Client will allow us to systematically receive feedback from a much larger group of clients than we’ve included in the past. It also includes periodic check-ins, brief matter surveys and longer annual relationship check-ins. We’ll also do more independent client relationship interviews.

This work lays the foundations for a richer, more consistent and formalized way of gathering, analyzing and acting on client feedback across the Firm.

CX Blueprints

The second initiative of the CX Task Force is the development of frameworks through which we can positively influence the client experience at scale across the Firm. We’re calling these CX Blueprints.

The idea is that, practice by practice, we’ll chart the journey we go on with our clients when we work with them for any given matter. We’ll then consistently apply best practices at critical points we identify on that journey.

This might include formalizing kick-off meetings with our client where we introduce our team and set expectations regarding the manner and frequency of updates or internal kick-off meetings to ensure that everyone on our team understands the client’s objectives, as well as the client’s working style, business and industry.

These CX Blueprints will remind us to communicate effectively with our clients and each other at key stages. They will help us to collectively deliver a distinctive client experience more consistently across the Firm.

So far, we’ve developed CX Blueprints for five of our global practices, and we plan to roll this out to all practices globally. We also plan to use the feedback we receive from our clients through Voice of the Client and otherwise to update and enhance the Blueprints.

The CX Blueprints for the five global practices listed are available on Connect. Please take a look and try them on your matters. We welcome your input and suggestions.

A collective effort

I’m grateful to everyone involved for all the hard work that has gone into this element of our strategy so far. We’ve had a terrific start, and we’ll need your support to make it happen.

We’re confident that, by doing all of this and more, we will generate additional repeat work and develop more and closer trusted-advisor relationships, giving everyone increased opportunities to perform even more great work on the highest profile matters with our largest clients. This will benefit White & Case, our people and our clients.