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February 11, 2006
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 an 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. Two 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 04:15 PM | Comments (0)
February 09, 2006
Law School Applications Trend: Way Down
Interesting, surprising and probably very good news in the WSJ Law Blog from a New York Times piece today on the decline in law school admission applications--and possible reasons. There's a great zen-like quote from David E. Kelley, lawyer-turned-writer and producer of shows like Boston Legal, on why it's actually useful to have more lawyers out there to keep the applications down.
Posted by JD Hull at 09:01 AM | Comments (0)
Back to Work, WJC Phone Home and Searching for Tattoos.
No practice tips today. Interesting IP disputes at work I was asked to help on are draining the how-to-lawyer evangelist in me. My limited blog time is spent wondering (see Patrick Lamb's branding post yesterday about some really serious branding) if a GC or client rep indeed ever went completely around the bend--or more likely stayed way too late at Nathan's in Georgetown or The Irish Times on Capitol Hill--and had tattooed "I [heart] Hull McGuire PC for all my tax, litigation, environmental and IP needs". And no word from WJC on the January 27 help-wanted ad and "invitation to deal" for an of-counsel position. We are testing the blogosphere on this one--and may need another assist from Peter Lattman's heavily-visited WSJ Law Blog, assuming he's still game. But as WJC knows or should know that he might run into me at a future Renaissance weekend smaller and more intimate than the one we met at on January 1, or that I might be involved in fund-raising for a relative in 2008, I thought maybe he'd ring us in Pittsburgh or San Diego by now.
Posted by JD Hull at 04:18 AM | Comments (0)
February 08, 2006
"Lovemarks"
Clever, funny and important post today by Patrick Lamb on the book Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands, by Kevin Roberts, CEO of advertising powerhouse Saatchi & Saatchi, and with a foreword by Procter & Gamble chief A.G. Lafley. Like others, I have little time to read--but I am going to read this one. Pat gives a good synopsis of the "Lovemark" concept (think Harley Davidson owners and Macintosh users) in his post. When they have time, Michelle Golden, Tom Kane, Jim Hassett, Arnie Herz and/or anyone else who knows or cares about branding and customer loyalty is welcome to opine and weigh in. More to come.
Posted by JD Hull at 10:21 AM | Comments (0)
Yanks Abroad Gone Wild--Part 2
Lots of us are interested in geographic growth strategies--for our clients and for our firms. Particularly interesting to me (see recent post) are instincts like "growth for growth's sake" and "if it's there, we must conquer it". In that discussion, the WSJ Law Blog has also picked up on Bruce MacEwen's fine recent post in Adam Smith, Esq on the competency of U.S. law firm global expansion. David Maister noticed the post, too, and left a comment to Bruce's post referring to an article he wrote called Geographic Expansion Strategies which appeared a couple of years ago in some European and Australian papers. These are two fine articles. One notion common to both is the importance of deciding whether expansion even makes sense (at what price glory?) and--if so--devising a winning strategy you can really implement. Or, as David puts it, have you really "made yourself ready to win?"
Geographic expansion of a law firm is really an issue of geographic "coverage" of your clients' needs and activities. Whether your clients' activities are regional, national, global, or one square mile, can you get the work done? Expertly? Efficiently? It's not a matter of your firm's geographic "location", your brick and mortar offices. Location is less and less important. No, I don't think (yet) that that good business clients these days are ready for virtual law firms, or that so-called "flattening" dynamics offered by technology will allow a solo or boutique firm to be competitive with Jones Day or or Clifford Chance in any given niche practice area. Most clients still expect brick and mortar locations, and will use 1000+ lawyer law firms when that makes sense. But the dust has settled enough in the evolving global economy that we can all start asking questions about future geographic expansion in terms of "geographic coverage" and not "law offices locations" to service clients in whatever locations the clients are active. For starters, in a given law practice area for a discrete industry, (1) how big/small and (2) where (brick and mortar) do you have to be to service good business clients no matter where they are active? And (3) what level (if any) of outsourcing will be acceptable to the client?
Posted by JD Hull at 08:12 AM | Comments (0)
February 07, 2006
If You Cringe When You Read This One, Read It Again.
Patrick Lamb at In Search of Perfect Client Service has an instructive but disturbing post on "one-bounce marketing" and the start of the once-bounce marketing season. The post is inspired by and based on recent article in The American Lawyer by TAL's editor-in-chief Aric Press. Thanks to Pat, I didn't miss Press's intriguing remarks on this special season of the year. Everyone who thinks that they are really marketing and doing it right should read this one.
Posted by JD Hull at 06:34 AM | Comments (0)
February 06, 2006
Blawg Review #43--And Check Out Act XII, Scene 2...
Bravo! Blawg Review #43 is out--this week by Boston-based and well-read Diane Levin at Online Guide To Mediation. Her theme is Shakespeare. I appreciate any lawyer with a liberal arts degree who can write, especially a literary one who went to Amherst. I now live in Southern California, a part of the country where many of us think Othello is a cologne, Puck a Hollywood agent, Falstaff an imported beer and Amherst a type of expensive German cheese. Can't beat the weather, though.
Posted by JD Hull at 01:17 PM | Comments (0)
When Things Get Fast and Intense, Invoice the Client Twice a Month--But Ask First.
Hopefully, many of the ideas included in this blog benefit both the client and the firm. For me, one overall theme of true client service is this: we can move from "adversarial" (see this blog's first post) one-night-stand relationships many lawyers have with clients to true partnerships with clients by doing things the right way for clients we like. The result is happier clients and more good work. Everybody wins. Here's one that's unusual but effective. I got this idea from my Super Bowl-celebrating Pittsburgh partner Julie McGuire, who does transactional work, and it really seems to work.
If a new or existing client has litigation or a transaction which is particularly intense and time-consuming--especially in the initial stages--depart from your fee agreement or usual practice with that client and temporarily invoice the client every two weeks. Obviously, you should check with the client and get permission; this could be balked at as an administrative burden or misunderstood as an insult if the client isn't on board. But even a gung-ho sophisticated corporate client or GC you've serviced for years--which is accustomed to seeing over and over again monthly bills for day-to-day work in the, say, $3000 to $5000 range--experiences a kind of sticker shock when the bill goes suddenly to $10,000, $20,000 or higher, even if it's only for a short time.
Billing twice a month does two things: (1) keeps the client more attuned in real-time to the actual economic demands of the project (and lets the client plan) and, (2) assuming that the GC or other client rep is seeing work descriptions on bills that show value, effort and the range of things necessary to perform the litigation or deal, the details and intensity of the work are more present-to-mind, better understood and more fully appreciated. In other words, the invoice becomes more of a tool to impart a running report on what you and the client are doing together--and a better picture of your real value to the client on that project.
Posted by JD Hull at 01:04 PM | Comments (0)