On August 20, 2024, the Asian Legal Business(ALB)released the "Top 15 Growth Law Firms in ALB China in 2024" list, and Blossom & Credit was listed on the list with its high-quality legal services, cross-domain growth scale, and professional breakthrough development.
ALB is a top legal magazine under Thomson Reuters and one of the internationally influential legal media outlets. The selection criteria for the "Top 15 Growth Law Firms" list have comprehensively referred to key indicators such as growth of fee-earners, number of new offices, new key partners and new important client wins, and growth in turnover of the applying firms, and selected law firms with absolute advantages and comprehensive strength in several fields.
Relying on distinctive development strategies and precise market positioning, new players continue to emerge in the market. In the past year, the law firms on the list, From aggressive expansion strategies to meticulous talent cultivation, these firms are redefining success in a competitive market through distinctive development approaches and precise market positioning. In an interview with ALB magazine, Lawyer Li Yinwu, Managing Partner of Blossom & Credit, shared Blossom & Credit's own growth story.
1+1>2
Mergers, new team joining, and accelerated recruitment are common measures firms take to expand. These strategies can also help firms achieve exponential “self-renewal.”
In 2022, Li Yinwu, then leading a credit legal services team in a large firm, finally decided to take the team to join Blossom & Credit after many rounds of discussion with the latter. With a two-decade track record and more than 200 lawyers and support staff, Li's team is the largest credit legal services team in the industry, and aims to help enterprises quickly recover funds, accelerate cash flow, reduce overdue and bad debts, and improve credit legal risks management through ex ante credit and asset investigation, interim credit legal risks management skills training and credit management legal advisory, and ex post credit legal collection services.
Commenting on his decision to join Blossom & Credit, Li tells ALB: "Blossom & Credit has been growing in Beijing for 20 years, and has gained rich experience, won many accolades, and made great achievements in capital markets-related areas. The more critical factor of ‘harmonious collegial relationship’ is also fully present in the firm."
n addition to the credit legal service team, Blossom & Credit has also attracted other practice teams across the country in the past year, such as those for intellectual property, non-performing assets, marriage & family affairs, investment and mergers and acquisitions, etc., bringing in more than 150 professionals. The firm now has over 400 employees, four times that of the same period last year.
That post-reorganization, the firm has also upgraded its branding, including by changing its English name from "Bastion" to "Blossom & Credit", "which fits the credit legal services team's vision of 'achieving long-term prosperity with integrity', and also shows the firm's unremitting pursuit of prosperity and honest business practice".
The addition of new teams is not just an increase in the number of people. It has helped the firm achieve the effect of "1+1>2". According to Li, the smooth transfer of new teams has enabled Blossom & Credit to rapidly grow the number of offices. In the past year alone, it added 11 new offices in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Suzhou, Chengdu, Wuhan, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Tianjin, Hefei and Shenyang.
In addition, the credit legal services team led by Li previously had a dedicated marketing department for market promotion, business development and client acquisition, enabling lawyers to focus on practice. "After Blossom & Credit absorbed the team, this model was immediately rolled out to the entire firm, and a general marketing department is established to be responsible for front-line development of the overall national legal services market."
"The marketing department has efficiently expanded our previous relatively monotonous service into a full-service model with a wide range of offerings, giving clients more choices and greatly enriching their "one-stop legal services" experience, which has naturally increased clients' willingness to pay for our services. This is a successful breakthrough in creating incremental business on top of the existing client base."
"Led by the marketing department, our practice groups have also carried out integrated professional transformation based on market feedback, which is conducive to integrating resources and driving professional development." Li shares that the marketing department has driven Blossom & Credit's operating efficiency so that the firm achieved substantial revenue growth last year.
KEEPING UP WITH THE TIMES
Behind the rapid growth and continuous breakthroughs of firms, there are often various difficulties that law firm management and partners, and even all lawyers, need to confront together. Competition in the legal services industry has become increasingly fierce in recent years.
Li similarly believes that firms need to keep up with the times. "The recent market reality is that clients' willingness and ability to pay have declined, but their requirements for services have increased. Considering that some traditional practice areas are no longer very profitable, firms need to proactively seek new areas and new directions."
"For example, many firms are actively developing international business, and Blossom & Credit has also set up an international practice group. However, if the products and services provided by different firms are homogeneous, competition will eventually still end up in a price war. Therefore, we need to constantly find our own advantages and specializations to be unique, so as to gain a place in this complex competitive landscape."
Once they embark on the road of expansion, firms in the growing stage also face some common challenges.
"After rapid development in the past decade, the legal industry has achieved breakthroughs in upscaling. However, simply adding people is not enough to produce economies of scale. There are many large but weak firms on the market." Li believes that a firm can only make substantive progress by creating greater value for clients by starting from the needs of clients, constantly uplifting professional competency, and innovating and breaking boundaries in service and operational models. "The only way to achieve all these is to achieve all-round upgrading of the management level, so that scale can unleash incremental benefits and quantitative change can lead to qualitative change."
PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE
In terms of future development, Li says that Blossom & Credit will adhere to long-term optimism and will not be tempted by short-term gains. "We must seize the opportunities created by macro trends and avoid the risks of going against the tide. Going with the flow does not mean lying flat. Instead, it is about looking for new opportunities that are aligned with the macro environment. We must not only expand practice areas in line with the times, but also study various industries based on the trends to become industry legal experts."
According to Li, the firm will focus on the following aspects. "We have a bigger vision: to become a top provider of one-stop commercial legal services; to create a new market-oriented, professional, digital and integrated shared legal services platform; to create a platform for young lawyers to grow professionally and launch their careers, and provide them with more support for work and life; and to create a firm culture of "humility, tolerance, collaboration and innovation."
