When I was just a wee lad, my father instilled in me the need to be perfect. If I scored 98% on an exam, his only comment was “What happened to the other two marks?”
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Whose Client is it Anyway?
In law firms, most lawyers typically get paid for two things: (1) billings; and (2) bringing in clients. Of course, there are a few lawyers here and there who get paid just for being brilliant, but then again, too few to mention.
Today I want to focus on lawyers who get paid for bringing in clients. Time and again during my tenure in law firm management, I saw lawyers who were billing and earning a lot of money, but who did not have a sophisticated understanding of the financial implications of their relationships with their clients. Usually this came up when they were thinking about leaving one firm and joining another firm. They would tell the new firm how much they were billing and give their best guess as to how many of their clients would follow them. More often than not their best guess was wrong, and not by a little bit, but by a whole lot. Rarely was the mistake that more clients than expected followed them to their new home.
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Speaking Goodly
Many years ago, someone who I was related to was arrested on a relatively minor charge, but one which had potentially devastating consequences for his professional reputation and career development. Having access to money, he hired the late great criminal defense lawyer, Austin Cooper to defend him. That is how I found myself sitting through the only criminal trial that I have ever seen which was not on television or in a movie.
Every corporate lawyer knows that a great corporate clerk is essential to running their practice. However, in order to work most efficiently with their law clerks, corporate lawyers need to be able to communicate with them effectively. Here are some translations from Lawyer Talk (LT), which is the language that lawyers use to speak to their law clerks, to Plain English (PE):
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Playing The Price is Wrong
“The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten” is a quote frequently attributed to Benjamin Franklin. Quite true, but it is more complicated than that when we are dealing with things, such as legal services, that the consumer often does not understand.
I like being retired. I really do. But someone called a pandemic and everyone showed up.
My plans to travel the world have been on hold for a while. So, now and then I get bored. When that happens, I think about whether I should go back to work. Thankfully, the thought usually passes quickly.
There was this one time that an accountant called me to let me know that our mutual client had called him for advice about firing one of his employees. The accountant suggested that the client give me a call, seeing that what the client needed was legal advice.
My first reaction was to wonder what type of an idiot client calls his accountant when he needs advice about employment law.
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Competing With the Big Guys
Over 20 years ago, the flavour of the month in the legal press was that medium sized firms were doomed. The big firms were coming after our clients and we were going to lose them all. We had to merge with bigger firms or die. And yet, medium sized firms continue to flourish.
How we interact with clients sometimes differs from how we interact with other people. For example, I used to have a partner who played golf with clients. His name was Drew, and he was an excellent golfer. We always had to remind Drew that when he golfed with clients, he had to play Client Golf, a game in which he missed a few shots that he might otherwise have made.
Let me tell you about a real person, whose real name is not Emily.
Emily is a superstar. She does it all and has been doing it all for an awfully long time.