- "We would like you to run a couple of sessions for our partners on getting clients" they say
- "We don't want you to use the word 'sales' because the partners don't like it" they say
- "and the partners don't want any role play" they say
But it's not them who need to get the clients. It's the partners.
- And getting work from clients is called selling,
- Selling is a skill not a knowledge transfer exercise which means role play and
- Getting good at a skill takes time; more than the 6 hours offered.
"The training you ran was well received but doesn't seem to have changed behaviour" they say
I wonder why?
Lawyers are paid to tell clients the law. Right? Wrong?
Lawyers are paid to help clients get from A to B in the most effective way possible. Knowing the law is a given. Most clients are sophisticated enough to know the basic law in their working area. What they want is your opinion, based on your knowledge of the law, your knowledge of their business, and your knowledge of their desired outcome.
Too many lawyers:
- a) Don't know enough about the client's business to understand the bigger picture. You should be like a doctor, asking wider questions before announcing your diagnosis. The discussion is part of the client satisfaction.
- b) Presume that the client is like them, and that the client's preferred outcome is the same as theirs. The client works under a myriad of pressures, both commercial and personal, which make desired outcomes unpredictable.
- c) Refuse to give clear guidance. This is often because of (a), and really really annoys in-house counsel.
So What?
- (a) Be curious about your client's business. It's normally the most important thing in their lives, apart from themselves. OK, and their families too. Or so they say.
- (b) Ask what the client wants to happen. Don't be afraid to ask the naive question, because the client is a human being, and his or her desires may not be the strict logical ones that you anticipated.
- (c) Give a recommendation, even if you are compelled to caveat it. Remember, though, that although caveats may delight your insurers, they can send a message to your client that you aren't as good as you said you are.
First question: Who do you want to keep?
Partners find it easy to divide their team into categories - racehorses, workhorses and mules.
Where should the effort be made to motivate staff? Not the mules, who can absorb a disproportionate degree of time as they are the squeaky wheels for whom nothing is too much trouble!
Racehorses normally get firm-wide recognition. They are those few tipped for the top. Most are genuinely talented. A few are serially lucky, but as Somerset Maughn said, it's better to be born lucky than rich.
It's the workhorses you need to think about. It's them who your career is built upon - the people who deliver predictably good work in season and out of season. It's they who will, if treated well, be working with you for the next 20 years, and who must not be taken for granted.
Camerons are in the press for outsourcing their support services to Integreon. The exact scope has yet to be finalised - or at least made public.
Various people on the Lawyers's blog have voiced their concerns, but for most partners there is some double-mindedness that needs to be worked through. All law firms claim to put their clients centre stage. All firms are grappling with how to manage costs without affecting the client experience. All firms see support functions as an overhead. Oh yes they do. Look at your balance sheet. So all firms are looking at ways of minimizing support costs.
If Camerons believe that the services that will be run form a third party supplier are sufficiently generic to not compromise their strategic advantage, they will make savings by outsourcing. Recent common examples are cloud computing and servers, secretarial services from abroad or group catering facilities.
If they think that they can outsource Marketing & HR, does it not say something about the way that these people are seen by their partner colleagues? It seems to say that partners believe that their added value is less than the cost. And who's to say that they're wrong? But perhaps they are throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Perhaps different people with a different structure could provide better value and at less cost than outsourcing?