Lawyers know an incredible amount about their chosen speciality. And they are usually hungry to know more. This knowledge is both their biggest strength and their biggest weakness.
The strength of knowledge is evident when the lawyer is engaged on a client matter - the knowledge combined with experience enables the lawyer to get the client from A to B in the best way possible.
The weakness of the knowledge base is that it is impossible for anyone to forget what they already know, so far too often the lawyer assumes a base level of knowledge in the client which he or she doesn’t have.
Meanwhile, at the same time, the client doesn’t know what he or she doesn’t know, and can hence not offer up relevant information, or understand the background to the lawyers’ enquiries. This imbalance has become more prevalent in the internet age, with the rise of the “instant expert” - clients who have read 2 internet articles and think that they have mastered the topic. These people genuinely believe that all they need is a light steer to accomplish the legal task themsleves. A dangerous precedent.
The challenge, therefore, is to treat your client as a well-educated yet ill-informed individual. This means that you explain why what you do matters to him/her, the costs of getting it wrong, and what to do to ensure she/he gets it right. The trick is to do this without appearing patronising or overly technical.
You can often see a very stark illustration of getting it wrong when you read an article penned by a lawyer for a trade magazine. The article often builds from a non-existent client knowledge base, adds information which no reader is asking for, and finishes without explaining what the potential client should do next.
Remember that a lawyer’s knowledge is rare, and what you consider common knowledge isn’t.
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?
The aim of a website is to get business. Discuss.
Your firm’s website is part of the marketing machine, and as such should help you get business. However beautiful it is, however much time was invested in it, however much the managing partner likes it, if it doesn’t help you get more work, it’s just a work of art.
Something that serves no purpose but to look good.
So does your website get you business? Originally you couldn’t know. Now you can. You can track leads, track page ranking, track dwell time, track conversations and track a whole lot more. You can then write stuff that people want to read & comment on.
Ask marketing. And if you are marketing, be prepared to be asked.
Talk to every one your team, and ask what you could do to help them. This includes support staff. They will be astonished and rejuvenated. If you're too important or too busy to do this, you should step down from partnership. - Phone up a client and ask them how things are going. Not in legal matters, but generally. Then consider how your network of professionals could help that individual with his/her problems, and take action. Your client's loyalty will rocket.
- Find somebody to give honest praise to. Someone who who has done something you noticed that was good. It doesn't have to be earth-shatteringly important. But the person who receives the praise will remember it for months, and redouble their efforts in that area.
Demonstrate the behavioural change that you'd like to see throughout the firm. That's the core of leadership
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.
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