Vincent Le Faucheur, tell us about yourself and your activity?
I have been a lawyer for 25 years, today at the head of the firm The Reaper Lawyers, specializing in labor law and social security law. We work exclusively on behalf of companies, and especially “temporary work” companies. We made this choice because it is a niche with significant legal assistance needs. In the legal profession, competition is fierce, it is not easy to stand out. Especially since companies expect their lawyers to understand the complex issues they face. I observed that there was no offer in the field of temporary work, so I was bold in creating a specific sector offer based on advice, legal assistance and training.
How do you manage these two hats of lawyer and entrepreneur?
I consider myself first and foremost as an entrepreneur, because a law firm is also a business. It’s a complex dynamic, of course, but for me it’s a matter of priorities. I kept my activity as a lawyer, and I manage the business aspect by devoting myself to the evolution of the market of my clients. To give you an example of a “business” approach, our clients are very worried about the drop in their margins. This is how we created a tool that has become standard practice in the temporary employment sector. Together, we have made possible the use of the time savings account for temporary workers, in order to retain them and optimize the amount of our customers’ margins.
Is innovation a way to stand out from the competition?
Yes, our firm is a pioneer in this regard. We are, for example, the first to have developed MOOCs dedicated to URSSAF inspections and accidents at work and occupational diseases. Our goal is to share with our customers and prospects an educational tool, as well as our knowledge and practices. Digitization for a lawyer means agreeing to share their know-how with the public in order to make themselves known, and this is quite unprecedented in the profession. We seek to stand out by constantly innovating. For example, by diversifying our activity. We are one of the few firms in France to have created our own training organization, a relevant tool in terms of offer and services. In this context, we train our clients’ employees in all the legal issues they may face. We provide legal training, and even offer our clients training dedicated to the diversification of their activity. The law thus becomes a weapon of economic conquest.
Is the pandemic at the origin of all these new strategies?
Our customers collapsed economically during the first lockdown. Some have lost more than 90% of their activity! So I thought about what we could bring in such a context. That’s how I got up every day at 3 a.m. to decipher the Official Journal every day and communicate to our clients a very operational legal newsletter, every morning at 7:30 a.m. My collaborators ensured the HOT LINE from 8:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. We also organized a Webinar every two weeks where we welcomed more than 1,500 participants to each of our interventions. In such a context, we participated in the economic survival of our customers.
You mentioned innovations in the legal profession. What about?
Today, customer expectations are changing. There is a taboo around the question of fees, clients worry about the cost of the services of a lawyer. We have therefore decided to propose a new service offer based on an unlimited legal assistance subscription. The real need lies above all in the demand for transparency of fees and decorrelation of notions of time. Then, understanding the editorial content of the lawyer’s work has become a real issue for clients. This is why we have adopted the “legal design” technique, which consists of providing information in understandable language. Let’s not forget that it is above all the customers that we are addressing. Finally, we are always looking for technological innovation, for example by creating a collaborative platform in the management of accidents at work to facilitate exchanges between us and our customers. This initiative was a resounding success!
