Law firms have a fascination with discovering what clients look for in a lawyer. Yet to the best of my knowledge, the answers coming back from clients haven’t changed for the last 20 years.
There are 4 As. I’m not sure who first described the relationship in these terms, but it’s as true now as ever. Clients are asking themselves:
- Affability – Do I like you, and do you like me? Clients don’t expect you to always be interesting, but they expect you to be interested in them.
- Ability – Are you good at what you do? You might ponder how I would know; much of it is your firm’s reputation, coupled with the professionalism you display when I meet you.
- Affordability – Can I afford you? This is not the same question as “how much do you cost?”. My willingness to pay is related to my understanding of the seriousness of my position and the perceived results of a successful outcome.
- Availability – Are you available to work with me, and are you keen to work with me? It doesn’t have to be you personally doing the work, but if it’s not you I’m buying you need to tell me why not upfront. If I’ve built trust with you, I’d prefer to work with you.
The Client's View
The client rates these factors in the order:
- Affability – I want to work with people I like.
- Availability – I want to work with someone who wants to work with me & can do so.
- Affordability – I want you to offer good value.
- Ability – Since you work for a good firm, I assume you're a good lawyer, so sector expertise means more than legal know-how.
The Lawyer's View
The lawyer commonly presents himself or herself in the order [with the underlying message in brackets]:
- Ability – I know your problem, have seen it before, and can fix it. [Be quiet and let me tell you the solution]
- Availability – You’ll get me, because I'm an expert. [In fact I’d rather not delegate anything to anyone]
- Affability- The main thing is that we are good lawyers. Let's concentrate on the matter in hand. [Just look at the brochure with the client quotes.]
- Affordability – Let’s not talk money. [I’ll tell you about our hourly rates in an e-mail after the meeting]
2 Implications
- If the lawyer is leading with the ability card, yet the client is looking for affability, we are immediately off to a poor start. You can mitigate this by showing your interest though planned questions. These allow the client to put the project in a wider context, and allow you to show your wisdom through the choice of question.
- A client can only decide affordability by setting gain against cost. We cannot assume that the client knows why we are recommending what we are, and what would be the costs/implications of not taking this action. Their budget may be too small, and we must therefore be open in discussing the overall cost set against the overall benefit. This is best done face-to-face.
Practical Implementation. The next time you are discussing a project with a client, ask questions that put the project in context. As the meeting progresses ask about the impact/costs of not doing the project, either now, or not at all. Ask & listen. Doing so will cover the affability, ability and affordability bases in a very professional manner.
Training departments in law firms spend a great deal of time and effort getting their training "right". We gather feedback from delegates, and constantly revisit the programme to get it as near perfect as possible.
Yet perhaps we shouldn't bother.
Over the past dozen years or so I've seen, delivered, read-the-course-notes-from and taken part in a huge quantity of training. Most of it was well designed and delivered, with a few exceptions. The subsequent impact, however, did not seem to be linked to the design or delivery of the training. Success depends on the willingness of the delegates to become participants.
In former days, when we had days rather than hours for training, a large part of the initial phase was spent "digging for pain" - drawing-out from the delegates the necessity for the training, their own personal journey, and how they would apply it. This phase prepared the ground for the seeds to be planted. Nowadays we move swiftly into the planting phase, throwing the seed out hoping that some will bed in.
This is not necessarily a bad strategy. The Darwinian process of the tough surviving means that those who are motivated and willing to really listen will succeed, and those who are just chair-fodder will fail. Capitalism at its finest. Yet we should not, in these circumstances, take the feedback from the non-participants too seriously. If delegates don't want to participate, modifying the training in line with their thoughts may be a big mistake.
It's not really a secret, is it? Business development planning doesn't work in a law firm.
Depending on your firm, the stated aims of business development planning will include:
- To enable the firm to accurately predict revenue, and hence match expenses
- To promote and facilitate "whole-firm" thinking
- To enable individual partners to be directed/encouraged before the year commences
- To encourage more creative thinking in client development
- To form part of the overall remuneration profile
- To allow sales to be tracked against predicted profile
- To enable marketing to allocate appropriate resources.
But even in firms where the aim of the bd planning process is stated, the plans aren't assessed against the aim. Do they really encourage creative thinking? Or facilitate whole-firm thinking, even if the "promoting" part could be considered a partial success? And who is really held accountable to whom?
Meanwhile, at the partnership level, the overall purpose of bd planning is a mystery to the partners, who complete tedious forms with initial gusto (the analystic part at the front, which can be cut-and-pasted from last years), and eventual imagination (the action-planning which forms the last few pages - often a collection of optimistic new contact meetings arrayed over the next few months). Don't even ask more junior lawyers the content of the plan.
Not that it matters. Once the plans have passed initial scrutiny we're already 3 months into the FY, and the plans aren't looked at until next year unless disaster strikes.
But something has changed. Disaster has struck. The "+10% fees" strategy, dressed up as a business plan, has come unstuck. Faced with declining revenues, stressed clients and empty diaries, partners are suddenly adrift. The very reason for the bd plan was to give structure to times such as these, yet the whole planning edifice has failed to give the point-of-need support which a partner needs.
If a business development plan can't help a partner faced with a empty diary, supported only by a telephone, e-mail and a slightly-neglected CRM system, it's useless. In fact it's worse than useless; it's like a parachute which you had for emergencies, which when unfurled is threadbare and useless.
So what's to be done?
Produce a real bd plan. One that's for you. One that actually engages with you, your clients, your network and your aspirations. One that you can scrawl on, update, and use for real direction.
If you want to see one, click here. It's not pretty. It's just very useful. And when you've completed it you can have a sensible discussion with others about who is doing what.
Mentoring doesn't have to be an old guy passing his knowledge onto a keen young wannabe.
There are other ways of doing it:
- 2 way mentoring
- Peer mentoring
- Facilitated group mentoring
- Peer group mentoring
- Team mentoring
- Reverse mentoring
Most of these should be self-eveident. If they're not, click here to download an overview.
Linking lawyers with other lawyers not only frees up our workload, but it also provides a source credibility we cannot hope to match, even if we're ex-lawyers ourselves. It does mean that we need to build up the bench strength of mentoring skills, but as someone who spends over 60% of his time teaching sales skills, I can assure you that the skills are just as valuable when chatting to clients. This means that our coaching & mentoring skills programmes can be badged as bus dev programmes, and hence get greater traction.
An added twist is the realisation that Gen Y love feedback & love being mentored (no surprise there) but that it doesn't need to be face-to-face. The mash-up between social networks (Facebook, Linkedin etc) & new forms of mentoring provide different ways to facilitate group learning. You don't need to get everyone in the same room - not even on video or audio link. Instant Messaging works fine, and when suplemented with some webcasting technology provides outstanding opportunities at little cost.
In fact this blog post may even cut down my workflow. So ignore the above. Phone me and offer work!
Zeigarnik is not well known. Yet her research in 1920's Viennese coffee bars is the answer to why procrastination causes stress. She noticed a curious phenomenon. When a customer asked for the bill the waiters could easily recall the food that had been ordered. However, if the customer paid the bill, but then queried it a few moments later, the waiters struggled to remember anything about the order. It seemed that the act of paying brought a sense of closure in the waiter's mind and erased the order from their memories.
The Tests
Zeigarnik then tested this hypothesis in her laboratory, where she asked people to carry out a number of simple tasks (such as taking up counters or placing toys in the box), but some tasks she stopped the participants before they had finished. At the end of the experiment at the participants were told to describe all the tasks. As with her observations of waiters, unfinished tasks stuck in people's minds and so were far easier to remember. According to Zeigarnik, starting any activity causes your mind to express a kind of psychic anxiety. Once the activity is done and dusted your mind breathes an unconscious sigh of relief and all is forgotten. However, if you are somehow prevented from completing an activity you anxious mind quietly nags away until you're finished what you started.
So What?
So what? Well, as soon as you know there's a task to be done - or a task yet undone - your unconscious mind nags your conscious mind not to forget. And your unconscious mind isn't situation-aware, you can be nagged at times even when you can do nothing about the situation, yet be completely unaware when you do have the chance to do something - the time to remember you've run out of loo paper is when you're in the supermarket, not when you're delivering a sales presentation - or worse, sitting on the loo.
Taking Action
To pacify your unconscious mind, you need to have a system so that you know what you have to do, you know the next step in each matter, and you knew that the system works. And it's no good trying to cheat your unconscious mind. It knows whether you really have a working system!
If you're current system is suspect, I recommend Getting things Done by David Allen. I have been teaching time management for over 10 years, and this is by far the most practical book on getting a system that works. It doesn't solve procrastination, but it does give you piece of mind. Do it now, or there's one more thing to try to remember!
In his recent book Outliers: The Story of Success
Malcolm Gladwell suggests there was a time to be born in New York if you wanted to succeed in law. He builds the case based on the study of several individuals who made it big in the expansion in corporate take-overs in the 70s and 80s in New York. His point was not just that these successful people were born at the right time but they also did 10,000 hours of practice in a field not popular with the big firms of the 50s and 60s and this is what meant they were ready for the brave new world when it came.
The question is therefore - were we born at the right time for the current changes in the business environment and have we spent the last 10 years practicing enough to be ready now?
Mark Jarvis
mark@penningtonhennessy.com
There is a lag between what's happening in "the real world", and the effect it has on law firms.
So have a look at the short video on the landing page of Right Brain Media http://www.rightbrainmedia.com/, and ponder how long do we have to adapt, and what will adaption look like?
Jamie Pennington
Jamie@penningtonhennessy.com
It may be an inevitable condition of life that it takes so long to learn so little. When I was catapulted from senior litigator at a major City firm to partnership with Pinsents in 1994, building a practice would have been easier if I had known:-
- That all high performers receive coaching, not because they are poor performers, but to become the best, because they are restless to improve
- That selling was an art, needing tuition, then constant practice – just like the piano, learning a language
- That there were people outside the law who had the skills and experience to give me a head start – that sales skills were not something that would just happen by magic
- The elements of Key Account Management – that the intensity of approach needed to achieve success was the same as the most complex areas of litigation
- What was really needed to win a pitch – what was going on in the mind of the buyer
- That networking was much more than being affable with as many people as possible
- That I would differentiate myself from most other lawyers by actually doing it - putting sales and other learned skills into practice
Patrick Raggett
Patrick@penningtonhennessy.com
If a partner wants a quick guide to how well a lawyer
is doing, she will look at his chargeable hours.
- Q. Is this a fair measure? A. Not
always.
- Q. Is it a quick and easy guide? A. Yes.
But what if that same partner wants to understand the
contribution her HR department is making, or perhaps the success of her marketing
team.
- Q. What's the "quick and dirty"
equivalent to chargeable hours that can be applied to these support
teams? A. ???? (It's difficult, isn't it?)
The fact that there's no easy answer is perhaps one of
the reasons that law firms are willing to cut support jobs in tough times,
without a corresponding reduction in responsibilities. Since the firm has
never had a clear measure of the success of the team, it's hard to produce
metrics that will convince the firm of the folly of redundancies.
Measuring Professionals
Professionals dislike being measured, and will cite
examples of the police force, teachers and the NHS as examples of places where
a target culture has become counter-productive. There is, however, a fine line
to be drawn between accountability via performance indicators & being
measured by specific goals.
For example, "staff turnover" could
be a useful measure of HR performance, but if it is a goal to keep it below 10%
we could end up keeping people we should have let go. A good marketing
indicator could be "% revenue from clients for whom we have worked for less than 24 months", but if this
becomes a goal we could be sacrificing supporting existing clients in favour of
bringing in new ones. Yet we do need some hard numbers for assessment.
The HR response
The HR & trg team's dilemma has been addressed by many
authors - three on my shelf are "Running Training Like a Business
",
"The HR Scorecard
" & "The Human Resources Scorecard
"
In the corporate world there has been a protracted battle for HR to be seen as
"strategic", and to get a place at the "top table".
Marketing's response
The marketing challenge has had less of an airing. This is because in the corporate world the link between marketing and revenues (which we can measure) is hard-wired
into most corporate cultures. There may be battles between marketing and
sales, and even marketing and operations, but the link between their activity and
revenue is not really questioned.
In a professional services firm - particularly law
firms, where there is a heavy emphasis of service over product, the linkage
between marketing and revenue is less clear. Partners get in the way. The
sales force own the business, and routinely remove the linkage between
marketing and revenue. Marketing are therefore forced to measure either
the completion of internally-driven projects (websites, brochures,
client-service interviews) or rely on internal perceptions ("Do we think
marketing are doing a good job?"). Usually a combination of the
two. Since the partner perception measure is almost entirely subjective, marketing’s
scorecard often relies upon the managing partner's personal view of the
marketing team. Once this relationship is strained there are few hard measures
to fall back on to justify the team's rationale.
A Possible Solution
In a professional services firm, therefore, both
HR and marketing have a similar challenge. How can we establish a fair basis for making a quick assessment.? For
without any agreed output measures, how can any performance be assessed?
There are 2 stages recommended:.
Agree the internal performance indicators that you as a team should be
using. They need to be balanced, so that you can answer "yes"
to the question "If these were the only results that we achieved as a
team this year, could we say that we have been successful?" There are
usually 6-8 performance indicators, usually a mix of soft and hard measures.
The second stage requires you to answer the question. "Which 3 of
these performance indicators are so crucial to our role, that it would be reasonable
for partners to form an initial judgement on them? " No 3 indicators
will be fair and complete measures, and if you go to 4 it wouldn't be disastrous.
The aim, however, is to provide a quick metric for partners, and enable you to
argue how reductions in your team will affect these goals. These metrics would
be published regularly (monthly?), and form the basis for performance reviews.
The resulting indicators will be far from perfect, but so are chargeable hours for lawyers. At least these measures are a fairer metric than whether the managing partner - and perhaps a few other senior people - like you or not.
In 2007 Tim Morris of Said Business School, Oxford University set out his research into "Developing New Practices: recipes for success." as a chapter in a book entitled "Managing the Modern Law Firm" (See Foot of Blog for details).
In researching forty examples of new practice development (50% of which failed), he identified the 3 ingredients that were always present in successful practice development:
Defensible Turf.
- Successful new practices removed barriers to acceptance of the new practice especially by key stakeholders
- Successful new practices used external sources, such as powerful clients, to legitimise the new activity
- Successful new practices used internal sources of persuasion to in order to carve out autonomous territory
Differentiated Expertise. Successful new practices displayed a body of knowledge that is both distinctive and shared an approach to structuring client work that was commonly understood within the firm. This depended upon the market conditions, and can be achieved by:
- Lateral hires.
- developing existing people, or
- grouping together existing resources geographically
Organisational Support. Successful new practices were offered both intangible and tangible support like:
- Trained associates
- Cross-selling the new practice by partners with long-standing clients relationships
- Political sponsorship
- "Breathing space" from normal client pressures,
Application to a Lateral Hire's Failure
Laterals are often brought in to a new practice development scenario. A typical hiring rationale would be:
- Turf. They will bring powerful clients, which will give credibility presence in this market.
- Expertise. They bring a new angle as an adjunct to our existing work, one where we can see real growth possibilities.
- Support. We have under-utilised associates who can provide initial support, and long-standing clients who could benefit from this service.
When the partner arrives, the scenario unwinds:
- Turf - Key clients don't come, or workload is far below expectations. Partner needs to be "fed" work by existing partners, who begin to resent the work not going to long-standing colleagues
- Expertise - Existing partners, failing to see a large client base or large projects, begin to believe that the expertise base wasn't perhaps that different to their own, and they could offer it themselves. The autonomous territory begins to be undermined.
- Support - Long-standing partners have reservations about cross-selling, partners question the laterals' ability, and budgets come under scrutiny. Pressure begins to fold the practice into an existing one. The lateral questions their own ability and security, and their own internal persuasive powers dissipate.
The three ingredients are distinct, yet intertwined. Turf relies on confidence, which comes from both belief in the expertise/distinctiveness of the budding department and support from the firm's big-hitters. Without a solid start, underpinned by existing clients who quickly give new instructions, a lateral is immediately at the top of the downward slide, whatever the warm words given by a firm's management committee.