Soundbites

Does your firm have a forward thinking client acquisition strategy?

Last week I read the following paragraph over on BTI Consulting’s The MadClientist page:

Clients’ overarching needs don’t change every day. But, they do change every 18 to 24 months—like clockwork. The law firms who really want the business will be in dialogue with their clients about their plans for the year, will have in-depth and pointed client feedback, will be planning for the next year with their clients, and hopefully have helped on-board clients’ attorneys over the last 3 years.

and it made me wonder – how many firms looking to acquire (as opposed to just retain) clients have such a forward thinking strategy?

Not many would be my guess.

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PayPal’s Top Lawyer Louise Pentland comments on “Here’s the risk, you decide”

Casey Sullivan of Bloomberg Law‘s Big Law Business posted an interview transcript with PayPal’s Louise Pentland overnight [Australia time]. Overall this is a pretty good interview transcript, but there was one response in particular that Pentland makes that I wanted to bring to your attention. When asked by the team at BLB:

We’ve seen the general counsel role shift into more of a chief legal officer role that interfaces more seamlessly with the business side. Can you speak to that shift?

Pentland replies:

As an in-house lawyer, the best you can get is when you’re integrated with the business team and you’re part of the team making it happen.

I think with PayPal, it was different. It was almost like a law firm inside the company. People didn’t go to the business team meetings. They weren’t on the leadership teams. It was a very strange structure in many ways. People weren’t assigned or aligned by business initiatives. It’s a team of 200 people, so it’s not a small team. I immediately aligned people with their primary responsibility, dedicated to their teams and the businesses they supported. It was so welcome; businesses were crying out for it.

It’s easy for lawyers to sit in the background and say, ‘Here’s the risk, you decide.’ Then you think about how to litigate. But that resulted in what was sometimes, in the worst case, people were lawyer-shopping because they didn’t like an answer. There was no accountability.

(my underlining for emphasis)

It’s that last paragraph in particular that really resonated with me, and one which I think private practice lawyers accustomed to providing non-commercial but legally factual advice to clients should take heed of.

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How does your law firm encourage new clients to work with you?

As long-term readers of this blog will know, I’m not adverse to looking outside the world of law for ideas on how we might better position ourselves to attract and win new work. These same reader will also likely know that I have a very amateur interest in photography.

Combining these two was an article on diyphotography.net last week (4 April 2017) by Enzo dal Verme titled ‘How to encourage potential clients to work with you’, in which Enzo lays out 11 ways photographers can better market themselves to win work from potential new clients.

I really like Enzo’s suggestions and think that all but one would work well in the business development arsenal of any law firm. For that reason, I thought I give a high-level overview of Enzo’s 11 suggestions here:

  1. Have something unique to offer.
  2. Identify your potential clients.
  3. Be a specialist.
  4. Double check what you have to offer.
  5. Make sure you have what it takes to prove that you could really be valuable to them.
  6. Find a quick and impactful way to get your message across.
  7. Follow up.
  8. Be reliable, precise, professional.
  9. Don’t be pushy!
  10. Be creative.
  11. Ideally, you let your clients find you, you don’t go looking for them.

I’ll leave you to guess which one of the 11 items above I don’t agree with. In the meantime, take the time out to read Lenzo’s post in full – I guarantee you you won’t regret it.

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What does ‘being responsive’ mean to your law firm?

Ask nearly every lawyer you know whether or not they are “responsive” and to a T they will say “yes”. Most will likely back this up by saying they respond to emails within 24 hours and phone calls within 3 hours. Great stuff, but very reactive.

But does how a law firm see ‘being responsive’ equate with how in-house lawyers view their law firms ‘being responsive’? More importantly, can a law firm be proactively responsive?

A partial answer to this question was provided by Bupa’s legal chief Penny Dudley in an interview she gave to Legal Week yesterday (4 March 2017) – Bupa legal chief Penny Dudley on stepping up, what she looks for in a law firm and Brexit challenges -when asked the question:

What do you look for in an external adviser?

she replied, in part…

…I am obviously very keen on a firm’s responsiveness; even up to the point of anticipating things for us.

Wait, “anticipating things” for you – that’s not responsive! Or, is it…?

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How much are internal meeting costing you? – Set a zero-based time budget

If you’re anything like me, then you’re expected to attend way too many internal meetings each day/week. I don’t say this to brag, most of the time I’m not needed and I offer no value being at the meeting. In these situations my presence at the meeting is actually an “opportunity cost”;- I could be far more productive being somewhere else.

If this resonates with you, then you may like a concept I read in a blog by Michael Mankins (‘Collaboration Overload Is a Symptom of a Deeper Organizational Problem’) on Harvard Business Review  yesterday called ‘setting a zero-based time budget‘.

In Mankins’ own words, this involves:

Set a zero-based time budget. One discipline that we have seen work to reduce the number of unnecessary meetings is to create a fixed meeting time bank in which all new meetings are funded out of the current bank. To start, determine the total amount of time currently dedicated to meetings by level in your organization. Then place a ceiling on that total. Now, for every new meeting an executive requests to schedule, ask (or require) him or her to remove some other meeting of equivalent (or greater) time. At the very least, this approach will highlight the total time devoted to meetings in your company. Over time, it may enable your organization to lower the ceiling and liberate countless hours of unproductive time.

Administrative nightmare and probably unworkable in a partnership structure – but I LOVE the idea!

I can but dream…

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Is your team Gold-plating its services?

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Earlier today Kiron D. Bondale posted ‘Avoid Gold-plating Through Agile Delivery‘ on the PM Hut site.

There’s a lot to like about Kiron’s post, and many things in it really resonated with me from a business development perspective, but what I really want to share with you though is this brilliant piece of commentary by Kiron:

“As it is with jewelry, on projects gold-plating is all form with no substance. The increase in costs is rarely justified by the value provided by superficial “bling”.

It could be an analyst adding in requirements which they came up with on their own without ensuring that those are actually required, a developer who introduces a code change or feature they believe is useful without checking with others or a quality control specialist who decides to test above and beyond approved test plans.

Don’t get me wrong – the intentions are usually good and I’ve yet to encounter an instance of gold-plating which was done maliciously. But it doesn’t matter – gold-plating is work creep.”

and ask: “Does any of this sound familiar to you?”

Because I’m guessing that if you are being honest with yourself, it does. And trust me, there’s no quicker death nail in a client relationship than scope creep.

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$180K for a First-Year Associate – so what!

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One of the big news items this week has been the decision by Cravath, Swaine & Moore to raise its starting salaries for first year associates to $180,000. Cries of “Not worth it!” and “What value do first year associates provide clients?” (answer: probably none) can be heard from all four corners of the planet.

My view on this though is so what? I don’t really care what you pay your first year associates. In the same way I don’t really care what you pay your other associates or partners. Nor do I really care what your rent is costing you.

Unless, that is, I get to thinking that: I am the one paying for all this. In which case, I suddenly become very interested.

But here’s the thing: I’d only really start to think that I’m the one paying for all your luxuries – the boat you have moored at the marina, the sports car you drive, the house you live in, the first year associate you can call on day and night – if I didn’t value the service you provide me. In other words: If I didn’t think I was getting value for money.

So if you’re one of the many private practitioners questioning the move by Cravath, Swaine & Moore, my only comment/question is this:

If you are providing your clients with a value for money service offering – and you are able to communicate this, why should it bother you?

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Medibank Idea Exchange

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For my sins I am a member of Medibank Private Health Insurance. I understand it has something to do with having a young family and the Medicare rebate. Anyhow, regardless the reason I get a lot of emails from Medibank that have always gone to straight to my trash folder. That is, until this morning.

What makes this morning any different? Well, I received an email inviting me to join the Medibank Idea Exchange community. In part wondering why they were suggesting the singular rather than the plural, I thought I would take a look.

What did I find?

Well, while I have no intention of joining, what I found was an offer to join an ‘invite only’ community where I will be able to share my thoughts and ideas on a variety of different topics and issues and:

  • Contribute to discussions and surveys – so you can tell Medibank what you think and help shape future business decisions,
  • Talk with other members – so you can share experiences and handy tips,
  • Earn rewards for participating – that you can redeem on a great range of products and services.

and I thought to myself: “there might be something in this for law firms to learn from“.

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‘Best’ or ‘Preferred’?

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Trish Carroll, of GALT Advisory, had an article of hers published recently (February 26, but I didn’t get the email notification till today) in the Australasian Law Management Journal‘s Law Management Hub titled: ‘Get up close and personal to improve your business development‘.

While Trish’s article contains a number of really useful tips, I found it notable because of the following very thought provoking line:

“It is not about being the best; it is about being the preferred.”

99 times out of 100, I totally agree with Trish. And it is a really important lesson for high achieving lawyers to learn: being the best at what you do is no longer a guaranteed successful business model. In today’s legal market there are a lot of average lawyers making very serious amounts of money because they are the preferred ‘go to’ lawyer.

The one exception I would make would be for top-end, bet the bank, niche advisory work where being the best still trumps.

So the question you need to be asking yourself everyday is:

“What will I do today that will make me my clients preferred lawyer?”

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