Our main business at CopyForce is referring
legal professionals to litigation support companies in
cities across the world. We often get asked what the
selection criteria is for companies in our network, or if we
have control over our affiliate companies. The answer to
both questions is related.
When CopyForce was started in early 2000, we spent almost
that entire first year doing market and field research to
find out who the best companies were in an initial list of
100 target cities. Without giving all of our trade secrets
away, we accomplished this mostly through referrals from
paralegals and attorneys in each local city. With a sampling
size of client recommendations proportionate to the size of
the city, we found in almost every case that a few companies
would rise to the top. It is from these top choices in each
city that we built our company.
Although we do not have control over any of our affiliates’
policies and procedures, we have found that the
best-of-the-best companies always do a better job of
implementing industry “best practices” than their
competition. Depending on the size of the market, we have
from one to five affiliates who we would feel comfortable
using. We typically have one lead affiliate that we call
first each time, but we maintain close relationships with
“backup” companies for large projects, conflicts of
interest, and in the case of national accounts, to give our
clients a choice of who they can use.
The bottom line is this: Our business is to recommend
companies who are going to do the best job on every project,
one at a time. They make us look good, which in turn makes
our client look good, which keeps them coming back for more!
One last note on our affiliate selection process: We do not
require periodic fees of any kind for a company to be a
CopyForce affiliate. We charge our affiliates a referral fee
only if we bring them a project, similar to the commissions
they are already paying their sales force. This structure
enables us to work with who we want in each market, since we
are not asking for any financial commitment before actual
results are produced.
