« March 2007 | Main | May 2007 »
April 30, 2007
Writing to and for clients.
Writing to clients is as important a thing that you do as a lawyer. Don't waste their time with long-winded lawyer-speak, which sophisticated clients dislike anyway and find amusing at best. Chicago trial lawyer Patrick Lamb discusses "Good Writing" at his highly-regarded In Search of Perfect Client Service. A short post, it ends:
What do our clients lack? Time. Don't waste it. Each word you write or utter should prove you value their time more than your own.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:45 PM | Comments (0)
Jack Valenti (September 5, 1921 - April 26, 2007)
See this New York Times obit, which is fair and pretty comprehensive.
To me, Jack Valenti was not just the Motion Picture Association of America CEO, Hollywood's "DC guy" or the fellow who came up with the movie ratings system. Part of our neighborhhood, he was the elegant, dapper but tough-looking little guy and ex-LBJ aide you saw walking often by himself near the southwest corner of 16th and Eye where he had his office, about two blocks north of the White House, and one block west from I had my first private practice lawyer job in Washington, D.C. in the ASAE Building. When you saw him walking around you knew that he was a "Washington somebody" whether you specifically recognized him or not: Washington royalty--but without the button-down boringness. He exuded it, but he never seemed like a self-important DC jerk. Some of us wandering around downtown DC during lunch or in the evenings after work did recognize Valenti. He was the man on the far left in the famous November 22, 1963 Air Force One picture, looking on while LBJ was being sworn in.
Posted by JD Hull at 10:07 PM | Comments (0)
April 27, 2007
Rule Eight: Think Like the Client--Help Control Costs.
Rule Eight: Think Like The Client--Help Control Costs. (See the first 7 rules 1-6 here and 7 here).
Ask any associate lawyer or paralegal what a "profit" is.
You will get two kinds of answers. Both answers are "correct"--but neither of them helps anyone in your firm think like the client.
The answers will be something like this: (1) "A profit is money remaining after deducting costs from receipts." This is the correct young transactional/tax lawyer answer. Or (2) "it's money left over at the end of the hunt." This is the correct fire-breathing young litigator answer.
The right answer?
A profit is a reward for being efficient. And until a lawyer, paralegal or staffer gets that, she or he will never know how a client--or a law firm partner--thinks.
Rule 8 is really simple. Watch and minimize costs and show the client that you are interested in doing that. Go beyond just avoiding wasteful spending, and think of the client's business as yours. Factor cost (including fees!) into everything you think, say and do. Let the client know that you know that holding down costs is good for both the client and your law firm. You want repeat clients, and a maximum of steady income streams, so let clients know you really care about saving it money because of just that: you want to keep costs down so the client will stay with the firm in the long-term.
Most clients not only get this but appreciate it greatly in time. Three years ago, at the beginning of a fairly intense but short-term lobbying project in DC for a new client (a high-tech company with a fabulous product), I told the client's CEO--by the way, she was brilliant, talented and rich but surprisingly unsophisticated on the use of lawyers--that she had three options on legal paths she could take on the project, and that I wanted her to use the least expensive one on legal fees. She actually said: "Dan, you know we really like you guys. But your goal has got to be to make as many thousands of dollars you can a month from this project. Why a cheap avenue for me that involves fewer lawyer hours? Why should I take this seriously?" My answer: "Because whether you sell this company or not, we want to represent it or whatever company you next develop on a long term basis, and we would rather work for you for years and years than just a few months."
That made sense to her. Everyone in our shop needs (1) to think in terms of holding down client costs--attorney fees and out-of-pocket expenses--at every step and every moment of a client project, (2) to know why, and (3) to be prepared to explain that to the client.
Posted by JD Hull at 10:29 AM | Comments (0)
April 26, 2007
"How Much Money Has The Client Spent So Far?"
What Each Timekeeper On A Project Should Know.
Knowing what the client is paying your firm informs and affects the strategy of a big project--indeed, the business strategy of the entire company if the stakes are high enough--and, importantly, the thoughts, instincts and habits of your people who work on it.
Suppose you have a great business client you want to keep, and you want to expand that work. Initially, you start off doing "day-to-day" work for it: a mixed bag of projects for a Fortune 500 company or a substantial start-up. Steady, fun and interesting stuff--but nothing fancy or high pressure. Planning. Monitoring or applying new environmental regs. A lease. Compliance items. Employment issues. Putting out fires. Spot projects for in-house counsel. Nothing too contentious. The monthly bills are rarely more than, say, $8000 to $15,000.
The client seems to like your firm--and, importantly, you like the client. You want more. But suddenly, the general counsel presents your firm with an intense litigation project or regulatory dispute which will consume a good senior litigator and 2 or 3 associates off-and-on for 18 to 24 months. This results in monthly bills suddenly ballooning to $40,000, $80,000 or more.
In this situation, I think that every lawyer working on that highly active project (1) should know what the client is spending ($) and (2) be given a written report in cumulative totals every time the invoice goes out. It especially should be given to the involved associates for this or any other active litigation or intense transactional work or deals you are billing hourly. We've written that younger lawyers are not truly partnering with a client, and giving great service, unless they watch costs. See "WAC?" Rule 8, Think Like The Client--Help Control Costs". So they need to know about the money the client is spending and see that on paper. Knowing what the client is spending informs and affects the strategy of that project--indeed, the business strategy of the entire company if the stakes are high enough--and, importantly, the thoughts, instincts and habits of your people who work on it.
Note: I know that not everyone would agree with me on this one, and there are exceptions to everything. When I was an associate and later a partner in a larger firm, associates were given written reports only of their hours and those of all other "competing" timekeepers. Actually, I liked that system. We had time-honored professional, proprietary and Machiavellian reasons for keeping non-partners in the dark about money.
Posted by JD Hull at 07:41 PM | Comments (0)
April 25, 2007
US and Canada Revisit 1991 Air Quality Agreement
Air pollutants released at one location--especially those released through smokestacks--can travel long distances and affect air quality hundreds of miles away. Before global warming became a hot topic, this cross-border transport of particulate matter and "acid rain" occupied more of center stage. Within the US, the focus has been on power plants in Midwest harming air quality in New England states. It's an international problem, too. Earlier this month, the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Canadian Ministry of the Environment began to revisit US-Canadian cross-border issues. See article and links at Environmental Protection, a publication for industry professionals.
Posted by JD Hull at 05:09 PM | Comments (0)
April 24, 2007
Israel: 59 years
Israel turned 59 today. Starting last night, and in cities all over the world, the anniversary of Israel's independence has been observed with picnics, memorials, recollections and a bit of malaise. See this AP story in the International Herald Tribune.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:08 PM | Comments (0)
Elefant and Levin on the Virginia Tech tragedy
Blogging is still young. WAC? has made no secret of the fact that we think the jury is out on "whether blogs matter". We don't know or care. We do like tossing out ideas that have worked for us or we think merit exploration. Each of us doing business, lawyering or just sitting on a beach is a player of some rank in our bold, demented, sad, dangerous, exciting and wonderful new world--whether or not we have a blog, read a blog or know what a blog is. Yet here are two posts on a recent American tragedy which, by themselves, and for different reasons, do make blogs and blogging worth it. DC-based Carolyn Elefant wrote Virginia Tech Tragedy and the Law at her Law.com Legal Blog Watch column. And Boston's Diane Levin has offered Why I will not be observing One Day Blog Silence at her Online Guide To Mediation.
Posted by JD Hull at 03:26 PM | Comments (0)
April 23, 2007
Williams: South Seas Journal
Craig Williams, the California lawyer who writes the well-regarded May It Please The Court, sometimes blogs from abroad. During late March through mid-April, he's been on a dive boat (if you're from Scranton, Albany, Cardiff or Manchester, that's not a floating Irish bar) in the Coral Sea, between New Guinea and Queensland, Australia, and famous for its best feature, the Great Barrier Reef. And then he spent some time inland around Day Ten in apparently Queensland and the Northern Territory, and its Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. In eleven posts so far, Williams has blogged consistently and in interesting detail about his South Seas travel adventure.
Posted by JD Hull at 10:39 PM | Comments (0)
David Halberstam (1934-2007)
Halberstam, a New Yorker, Yankee's Yankee and Pulitzer Prize winner at the age of 30 for war reporting, was killed in a car accident today in San Francisco. He gave us both the idea and the book of Viet Nam as supreme American hubris in the 1972 bestseller The Best and the Brightest.
Posted by JD Hull at 04:14 PM | Comments (0)
"Is What You Read About China Remotely Reliable?"
Here, from Asia Business Intelligence, by American lawyer and Asia business consultant Rich Kuslan. Kuslan's post is inspired by an article by Carsten Holz of The Far Eastern Economic Review appearing this month at New York Times writer Howard W. French's blog, A Glimpse of the World. Holz's article is entitled "Have China Scholars All Been Bought?".
Posted by JD Hull at 02:06 PM | Comments (0)
From Canada: Blawg Review #105
Canada, as you can see by scrolling down the left-hand side of this blog, has more than a few fine blawgs. The wise and ubiquitous Ed. at Blawg Review has noticed. So this week, Toronto's Connie Crosby hosts Blawg Review #105 in her tribute to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) World Book and Copyright Day.
Posted by JD Hull at 01:18 PM | Comments (0)
April 21, 2007
Saturday's Charon QC: 15 Great Podcasts
Who says lawyers, law professors and businessmen in the US and the UK must be boring, artless and uninspired? Long ago my friend Charon QC in London crashed through those stereotypes. But today marks the airing of his 15th podcast-interview with a luminary of some sort, this one with UK/US television producer Michael Mallinson. All 15 Charon Podcasts, beginning with the first one (and my favorite), of Human Law's Justin Patten on February 26, can be found here.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
April 18, 2007
Tom Collins: A Formal Client Service Standard for the Law Firm
Again, do read and save this must-see post at Tom Collins's consistently useful More Partner Income. Last year, WAC? published some shorter pieces on a related idea we think is ready for prime time at law firms everywhere: "Make client service standards part of each employee review".
Posted by JD Hull at 11:42 PM | Comments (0)
What About "Ease-of-Use Awards" For Law Firms?
What if the services sector competed for clients on the basis of "ease-of-use"?
Develop and apply ease-of-use concepts to pure services? Our clients' services? Our services?
Sure, and why not?
Consider for a moment just products. Cincinnati-based The Folgers Coffee Company, a P&G company with extensive operations in New Orleans, has been awarded an Ease-of-Use Commmendation by the Arthritis Foundation for its AromaSeal™ Canister. If you're a Folgers® drinker, you notice that Folgers® added an easy-to-peel tin freshness seal (no need for a can-opener), a new "snap-tight" lid and even a grip on its plastic red can.
Great companies many of us represent do spend money and expertise on making their goods, equipment and products usable. Think about your car, your luggage, your TV remote (well, strike that one), your watch and even grips on household tools. Think about Apple, Dell and Microsoft. Each year they think through your experience with their products and try to make it better. Continuous improvement models for "things." Folgers did it for coffee cans. IBM and CISCO have ease-of-use programs for the products they sell.
Develop and apply ease-of-use concepts to pure services? Our clients' services? Our services? Sure, why not? It's probably coming anyway, even while it will be infinitely harder to do for services than for products. WAC? has noted before that even corporate clients that sell goods see themselves as selling solutions and not products. In 2004, services sold alone or as support features to the sale of good and products accounted for over 65% of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the US, 50% of the United Kingdom's GDP and 90% of Hong Kong's. Even products sold by IBM and CISCO, now chiefly service companies, are part of a services-products mix in which the services component is the main event.
Law firms, of course, have always sold services. And we are a small but powerful engine in the growth of the services sector. We strategize with and guide big clients every day. While that's all going on--day in and day out--what is it like for the client to work with you and yours? Are clients experiencing a team--or hearing and seeing isolated acts by talented but soul-less techies? Do you make reports and communications short, easy and to the point? Who gets copied openly so clients don't have to guess about who knows what? Is it fun (yeah, we just said "fun") to work with your firm? How are your logistics for client meetings, travel and lodging? Do you make life easier? Or harder? Are you accessible 24/7? In short, aside from the technical aspects of your service (i.e., the client "is safe"), do your clients "feel safe"?
What if law firms--or any other service provider for that matter--"thought through," applied and constantly improved the delivery of our services and how clients really experience them?
And then competed on it...?
Posted by JD Hull at 11:41 PM | Comments (0)
True Lawyer Professionalism
We once briefly engaged for litigation a local counsel who focused more on preserving personal relationships with local lawyers than on going to bat for our mutual client. It was like having a tennis doubles partner on heroin with weights strapped to each leg. The guy never got it. While it's true that one of the advantages of any local counsel in litigation is a knowledge of, and rapport with, the local law cattle, those relationships always come second. Anything less is, at best, unprofessional and, at worst, a conflict of interest. The following posts, from our Federal Courts series, are among the most visited WAC? articles:
See also, Professionalism Revisited: What About the Client?, from the San Diego Daily Transcript, April 29, 2005, by one of America's most client-centric lawyers.
Posted by JD Hull at 05:10 PM | Comments (0)
April 14, 2007
Dining in London with Saturday's Charon.
Only a handful of writers have been able to capture the pleasures and pitfalls of breaking bread in their age--of, say, just a simple lunch or dinner. Dining is a ritual humans have enjoyed/suffered through, with others or alone, for centuries. "Lunch" must be explained by each generation--without being boring--and most of the writers who could do this are long dead. However, the erudite Charon QC, a man of the right appetites, and quite alive and kicking in London these days, is an exception. To see what we mean, visit Charon's post "It was time for lunch..." The setting is a Bar and Dining Room, the place Somewhere in London.
Posted by JD Hull at 10:42 AM | Comments (0)
April 13, 2007
Justin Patten: The "Iceberg Costs" of Litigation
My firm loves business litigation and trials--and prefers defendants. But some of our clients need to sue. Our rule #1 of litigation and first advice for clients is always (seriously): just don't do it--even if you have the best facts, law and resources. You don't need to put it in writing to your client; you just say it, and you say it more than a few times during the decision-making process leading up to suit. You really have a discussion. See my friend Justin Patten's Memo to Clients on this subject at his well-regarded Human Law site. Justin gets it.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
"Why China Should Care About The United States..."
That article is here, by Dan Harris at his prolific and truly great China Law Blog, subtitled "China Law for Business". Sometimes Harris just catches fire. This post got 41 comments between March 29 and April 4. CLB is informed, insightful, feisty and often funny. And flat-out uncanny in the number of comments Harris regularly attracts. Someone should slap the guy just to see if he's really okay. But you do it.
Posted by JD Hull at 08:32 PM | Comments (0)
April 12, 2007
13 months at Duke: lawyers, pols and money.
I was gambling in Havana/I took a little risk.
Send lawyers, guns and money/Dad get me out of this. (W.Zevon)
Here, from the Associated Press. It's over - and it's not. As a Duke person, one who covered the Civil Rights beat in Durham off and on for a year working on The Chronicle, Duke's student daily (back when student newspapers wrote about such things regularly), I've stayed out of this. But the most astute thing that can be said was already said by someone else anyway--reportedly said yesterday by one of the wrongly accused lacrosse players--to this disturbing effect:
"If the State can do this to you [i.e., us Duke players] even if you have the resources to fight, think of what the State can do to you if you don't."
Posted by JD Hull at 04:34 PM | Comments (0)
April 11, 2007
WAC? loves Baseball Blawg Review #103
Do see Blawg Review this week and Jon Frieden's #103.
Occasionally patriotic, WAC? loves baseball, our national sport. Like the law profession itself, baseball (1) is great fun to play or watch, (2) is way more complex than meets the eye, and (3) features some of the most difficult, funny, demented and inscrutable rogues on the planet.
A bonus: the first opening day ceremonial pitch (in 1910) by an American president was a hurl by my kind of Chief Executive--a portly Cincinnati-bred lawyer's lawyer and former journalist who graduated from WAC?'s law school in 1880 and who spent some time in the humble suburb of Indian Hill, Ohio, where I attended high school and grew up, sort of, mainly, before heading to points East and to DC.
DC area-based Jonathan Frieden, an IP litigator who writes E-Commerce Law, is the host of Blawg Review #103 which, in honor of baseball's opening day, is the "BaseBlawg Review". Fine job by Jon and his interesting blog, which we just discovered. See in particular Jim Hassett's piece on how to qualify new clients. Trust us: Having No Client--and instead working harder and smarter to get the right client--is always better than the Working for the Wrong Client.
Posted by JD Hull at 04:50 AM | Comments (0)
April 07, 2007
Culture Clash: Marco Island v. Key West
If you are one of the many Europeans on holiday right now in Florida, and want to see two different American cultures in south Florida side-by-side, spend a couple of days in the staid Midwestern America retreat Marco Island, and then drive further south toward the Florida Keys--for fun stay close to the feral Everglades as you go--and see truly wild and anything-goes Bohemian Key West. Enough diversity for ya'll?
Posted by JD Hull at 04:38 PM | Comments (0)
April 05, 2007
Come 2009, will WAC? have an old friend in the White House?
WAC?, a recovering Democrat still surrounded by Rs on all fronts, is not sure whether Hillary Clinton can be elected. However, out of everyone in the current field of candidates, this lawyer, leader, manager, innovator and Renaissance woman, who has at least sounded more and more like a Republican in the past 2 years, would make the best chief executive, hands down, love her or hate her, no contest--and that's just a fact, Jack. And she certainly married well... If Hillary wins, WAC? and Hull McGuire may very well have an old and fun friend in the White House.
Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 09:33 AM | Comments (0)
April 04, 2007
Redux: Services, Client Service--and "When Cultures Collide".
1. Services, and relationships--with or without products and goods--are becoming the main event globally.
Whether you work for an international business law boutique, the phone company, or IBM, "products" or "goods" are still with us but increasingly have become part of the overall mix of providing solutions to clients and customers. Things traded you can touch and feel are no longer the main event.
See, for example, IBM's website or anything written about IBM in recent years if you don't believe me; they are no longer just a hardware, equipment or products giant--but a "services company", and perhaps the world's largest. IBM sells solutions. Selling and leasing IBM products are just part of those solutions. So IBM's success or failure will depend on managing relationships and how its customers, clients and partners at all levels experience those services.
Moreover, here are twin big-ass problems (i.e., challenges), a looming crisis and, for the stout-hearted, an opportunity of the first order:
2. Old problem: customer/client service and care will continue to get low, low marks.
Customer and client service and care is difficult, and seldom seen anywhere, folks--both within the US or internationally. Few industries and professions (1) are good at it, (2) know it's difficult, or (3) even know what it is and how to flesh out the details. Hard-won customers and clients can, will and do switch providers in a heartbeat if the "service level" is poor or mediocre--which is almost always. As the services sectors grow globally, already-increasing cross-border trade will mean that there's a new and tough wrinkle in your service (or product, good, widget) and how it's delivered from the standpoint of customer/client service and care: complex, critical differences in peoples internationally which can make or break a deal or ongoing relationship.
So what happens when you pour business people of different national, religious and cultural origins all over the world into this cauldron: an entire services-based planet of already fragile commercial relationships--and one that just can't get a bead on customer/client service and care in nearly all industries at all buying levels?
3. New problem: business relationships increasingly will have international and cross-cultural "languages" we all must learn.
For years my firm has acted for US corporations abroad, especially in western Europe, and increasingly in Latin America. And we have also represented non-US companies in the US seeking to set up manufacturing and sales operations here; believe me, the Germans, English, Welsh, Irish, Spanish, Mexicans, Argentinians, Swiss, Dutch and Italians are not only very different from Americans, they are very different from each other. What happens when the Japanese negotiate or trade with Germans? Or the English with Americans, or the French? Canadians or Australians with the Chinese? With the Saudis or the Turks?
International trade, for decades the province of a handful of elites and specialists in each country, is starting to involve more and more people, firms, professions, and rank-and-file employees. You, and yours, need to know the people, dude. For starters, buy and read R.D. Lewis's 1996 standard When Cultures Collide: Managing Successfully Across Cultures and do it before the price goes back up. WAC? has listed it as a must-read client service book on the lower right of this site since starting in 2005.
Posted by JD Hull at 09:59 AM | Comments (0)
April 02, 2007
The War in Washington, D.C.
“We tried a monarchy once,” Chuck Hagel (Nebraska-R) said recently. “It's not suited to America.” See in London's The Economist the article The War Comes To Washington. If you are not familiar with The Economist, do visit it. WAC? considers it to be a world-wide version of Time and Newsweek combined. It's as fair as print journalism gets, often funny and always well thought-out and well-written. If you are a business lawyer, The Economist is a must.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:40 PM | Comments (0)
Blawg Review #102...
... is up at George Wallace's Declarations and Exclusions. Be sure to check out BR #102, and the April Fool's Blawg Review Prequel, which was at George's other blog, a fool in the forest.
Posted by Tom Welshonce at 10:26 AM | Comments (0)