Managing Partner; Taye Awofiranye explains how the firm is adapting to client’s changing needs

1. What do you see as the main points that differentiate The Trusted Advisors from your competition?

Our main differentiator is summarized in FIT, an acronym for our famed tagline “Forged in Trust’’. We expend concerted efforts not only to select our team but also honing each of its members into a proud bearer not only of the firm’s confidence but a worthy repository of our client’s trust.

“Trust” is at the core of our brand. It permeates every aspect of our practice and manifests in a tripod of diligence integrity and creative engagement.

Our team’s youthfulness and an insatiable appetite for excellence is the core of our practice and the natural product is the vibrant push for progressive excellence, not only in distilling understanding and owing the client’s personal position and needs, but preferring that bespoke solution that speaks to their individual needs.

2. What practices do you see growing in the next 12 months? What are the drivers behind that?

The composition of our team and the rapid industry awareness together with our recent bold investment in service infrastructure positions the firm for continuous growth across its 7 practice areas. However, a more notable growth index is projected on our fiscal and finance, ICT & Media, as well as our admiralty practices.

Our short-term projection highlights three practical areas for particular by impressing growth forecast. Our fiscal and finance practice area is projected for incremental client acquisition due to rapid capacity acquisition and development initiatives and a fast-rising industry acceptance.

The ICT and Media practice area is poised to optimally leverage our recent engagements with players within the Nigerian tech law ecosystem and our widespread knowledge sharing engagements is boosting widespread industry awareness and improved acceptance within the industry. We maintain tremendous thought leadership in maritime law and admiralty practice

and a leveraged feasibility should see us quickly emerge as an industry lead in this area of practice in the coming years.

3. What is the main change you’ve made in the firm that will benefit clients?

Our commitment to quality service delivery sign- posted by our painstaking human capacity development and progressive investment in service infrastructure is beginning to yield results with exponential growth in client acquisition and satisfaction feedback as well as a predictable

improvement in our client retention index.

4. Is technology changing the way you interact with your clients, and the services you can provide them?

Our first of its kind “Looya” app integrates the best of CRM product designs with the most advanced offerings in e-legal services delivery to provide one-stop offering for optimal service delivery to clients. The proprietary application integrates with the firm’s HR and finance solution to deliver on the go cutting edge access to our offerings.

We have been able to leverage this solution to effectively optimize the contribution of each member of the team and to ensure full-time, real-time availability and presence with the clients even beyond the limit of close of business. With “Looya” in our grip, we are positioned to take the frontline in tech leveraged legal service delivery.

5. Can you give us a practical example of how you have helped a client to add value to their business

Generally, we take pride in providing value add to clients across multiple strata of their day to day operations. We are accustomed to offering tremendous value add in product and entity structuring for budding start-ups to avoid needless regulatory hurdles and we are constantly helping clients fill strategic resource void arising from the recent trend of increased workforce mobility through our bespoke retainership arrangement. However, one of the most recent notable clients value-adds has been our contribution to enhance the revenue stream of our clients in the real estate industry, including the foremost real estate company in Nigeria and a state-owned real estate corporation, by creating strategic clause banks for their transactions and structuring intervention to safeguard their reversion and recover title and possession in deserving circumstances.

This intervention has directly led to multibillion-naira worth of revenue generation and has driven up commercial rent collection in a substantial way.

6. Are clients looking for stability and strategic direction from their law firms-where do you see the firm in three years’ time?

We understand that we occupy a significant strategic position in relation to our client’s operation, it is not surprising that our clients celebrate the strategic necessary alignment not only with their set value system but also some stability and strategic direction.

In testament to our hard-fought success in balancing our strong core of excellent Human capital with clarity on the group’s strategic direction and an unwavering commitment to client satisfaction, we remain buoyed by the incremental acceptance by our client and stay committed to going the extra miles to meet their needs.

Our outlook for the coming years is to sustain our culture progression excellence in thought leadership and ultimate client satisfaction.