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August 05, 2006
"Give Me Your Tired, Your Rich Abused Fortune 500 Clients."
Life is short, it's Saturday, and an English blogger in an e-mail got me thinking. Let's review.
This blog, "What About Clients?", is about just three (3) simple ideas:
1. Real Service. Corporate clients all over the world are underserved and not happy. You can change that. But client service, like practicing law correctly, is very hard. You need to work at it.
2. The New Muscle Boutiques. Boutique firms with top legal talent in America, Europe and Asia are still bottom feeding. Unless your firm is doing a quality-of-life experiment, or trying to make law practice easy and not stimulating, you should be actively pitching to and stealing BigLaw clients. Get off your knees, get a grip. It's okay, we live in a free markets world. Just keep your rates high and your services superb.
3. International. American lawyers need to meet lawyers and clients from other countries.
The other regular "WAC?" topics are Sensitive Litigation Moments (federal courts), IP/Tech, Natural Resources, Politics, Real Heros, Writing Well and Keith Richards Watch. These are about client service and/or specific practice areas in which my firm Hull McGuire PC does all over the U.S., Western Europe and Latin America with 12 lawyers, a minimum of outsourcings and the help of lawyers from a fine long-standing international group (www.iblc.com).
And I am not 100% sure why we started "Keith Richards Watch"--but it was in large part a tribute to and comic relief for American baby boomers who may be burned out from practicing law. Besides, only Keith could get me to change my rule on not representing individuals.
Cheers.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
British And Irish Bloggers With Attitude--Redux
We've posted on this subject before, i.e. here and here, and we'll keep doing it. If you scroll down the left-hand side of this blog under Non-U.S. Blawgs, you'll find lots of great blogs/blawgs from the United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland) and from the Republic of Ireland. One provocative, smart, well written and loads-of-fun blog is Charon QC...the Blawg, quickly becoming a WAC? favorite. As in trying to describe Geeklawyer, another wonderful English legal weblog, words fail me. You just have to visit CQC.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:36 PM | Comments (0)
Sensitive Litigation Moment No. 10: Stand Up, Guys.
Jonathan Stein at his busy and thoughtful blog The Practice offers some fine advice in "Stand up and be heard". Jonathan and I have very different day-to-day law practices. But this is a great post for any trial lawyer, new or experienced, in state or federal forums. Another reason for standing up in court, rather than sitting--even if you have the option to sit or "sitting" is the local practice--is the overall goal to make that courtroom "yours". It's hard to be, or appear to be, supremely confident and in charge of your environment when you are sitting down. It makes you look unbecomingly detached, too.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:00 PM | Comments (0)
August 04, 2006
"Oh, New York City, you talk a lot...let's have a look at 'ya!"
A Little Face Time Maybe?
In another month, and for 4 days or so, I'll be in and around New York City, a city I love, especially in decent weather. As usual, I'll see people I have known for years. But I'll also be meeting in the flesh people for the first time I've talked with for months, or even years, only on the phone.
And this will happen: if I have never seen his or her picture, I may think that he or she is, say, a tall, dark-haired 30ish human--a definite image I conjure up during phone talks. If after meeting that person it turns out I've been really talking all this time to a short blonde 50ish person, it doesn't change any mental images long-term. I will still revert back the tall, dark-haired 30ish image after I get back home and talk to her or him again on the phone. With e-mails, it's worse; even if I have formed a picture, only a partial personality comes across in those many back and forths before I meet my pen pal.
Until I meet him or her face-to-face, nothing is enough. Meanwhile, the world still changes rapidly as we speak and type. What's next to make us efficient yet isolated and numb? Do we talk to each other enough with our live human voices? Do we see each other enough with our eyes, "in real time"? What has all this fabulous technology done to render obsolete important human energies, chemistries and nuances to work together and solve problems? So maybe "vibes" is not so silly an idea.
Work, like life, is a social experience. What are we losing these days?
Posted by JD Hull at 08:12 AM | Comments (0)
August 03, 2006
First-Rate Mediators Are Worth Their Weight In Gold.
Robert Ambrogi is an interesting guy. A lawyer and ADR specialist, he is also a polished journalist and wordsmith. Bob writes well, and economically--yet not enough of us take the time to rave about it. Go figure.
His new piece, "Do Mediators Sell Themselves Short?", in Law.com's Legal Blog Watch, started me thinking. A late convert to abitration 10 years ago, I now speak about ADR before groups, especially international ones. I finally learned that smart non-US companies--especially those based in certain European jurisdictions where court litigation really is more efficient--are not that worried about what law gets applied. Instead, they insist on binding arbitration clauses in their deals where American companies are participants because they do fear that even a fast-track federal court in the U.S. will mean excessive fees and delays.
So is ADR is always "cheaper, faster and better"? No. The quality of the arbitrator(s)--not the rules you adopt--is everything. Period. In large commercial cases, binding arbitrations are not cheap. A panel of three blue-ribbon arbitrators, experts, far away venues, and travel and lodging will cost you. Arbitrations, moreover, often take on the tenor and procedures of "real" trials, and many are quite lengthy. Finally, many decisions and awards are honest but "less than scholarly". If you have great facts and winning law, you might be disappointed.
And why mediate? If it's not binding, what's the point? Isn't it just another expense? I used to ask the same questions. The answer is that mediation is very effective when you don't want a binding result and if you have a very good mediator. I concluded this in 1999 during a productive eve-of-trial mediation in Salt Lake City in which a hard-working mediator gave three pumped-up parties and their counsel new takes on their respective cases in a day's work. If a mediator pro-actively, thoughtfully and energetically guides all parties, mediation can serve as a sober reality check on how a judge, or even a jury, might view the facts and decide.
So in Utah my GC--who loves trials as much as I do--and I settled it. And we settled "well", without regret and with our eyes open. We paid the arbitrator, handsomely, as I recall, and it was worth it. Since then my firm has used mediators sparingly, at the right times and in the right circumstances. Getting back to Bob's article, a skilled and skillful mediator works (a) very, very hard and is (b) worth his or her weight in gold. By all means, pay them. And maybe pay them more than arbitrators. What they do takes a mix of legal ability, people skills and energy that very few of us have.
Posted by JD Hull at 04:45 PM | Comments (0)
August 02, 2006
England and Wales Mull Competency Checks For Lawyers.
According to the Law Gazette, the London-based legal weekly, The Law Society of England and Wales is considering performing preventive competency checks on solicitors. Antony Townsend, the Law Society's first chief executive for regulation, noted that
the traditional assumption that once a member was admitted to a profession, that person would remain competent, and that the regulator’s role was to weed out ‘rogues and villains’ was changing. ‘Increasingly, the focus of consumer concern has been about continuing competence, not just character.’
The idea for the checks on UK lawyers derives from a similar UK program for monitoring physicians. The lawyer program would "spot emerging problems" and "remedy poor practice early", without the need for after-the-fact sanctions and discipline.
The Law Society is the regulatory and representative body for 116,000 solicitors in England and Wales.
Posted by JD Hull at 09:50 PM | Comments (0)
August 01, 2006
Happy Birthday to "What About Clients?"
Today is the first anniversary of "What About Clients?" Thanks to Chicago lawyer Patrick Lamb, D.C. wunderkind consultant Chris Abraham and D.C. telecom lawyer Mark Del Bianco for getting us--Tom Welshonce of Hull McGuire in Pittsburgh, and me--started, and to the people (all 4 or 5 of them) who still read this blog. Our first post was one year ago today. It's still our favorite, it's what this blog's about, and it's here.
Posted by JD Hull at 05:30 PM | Comments (0)
So, you think your customer service is pretty good already, do you?
Sure about that? Whatever your level of confidence is, don't miss a post by corporate lawyer Patrick Lamb at his blog In Search of Perfect Client Service called "Overcoming The Lake Wobegon Effect", with an assist from Harry Beckwith, author of the 1997 customer service bible Selling the Invisible. "And all the children are above-average..."
Posted by JD Hull at 01:38 AM | Comments (0)
July 31, 2006
Sensitive Litigation Moment No. 9: Proper Pro Se Appeals.
We don't know anything about the case. We have made no investigation. And we have made no secret of our preference for federal judges over the alternatives to them in the American judiciary system. Don't get us wrong. But this man, this Appellant, is in any event an artist. See this July 12, 2006 Notice of Appeal.
Posted by JD Hull at 03:11 PM | Comments (0)
July 30, 2006
Blawg Review #68: Blachman is Everywhere--More Power to Him.
Jeremy Blachman is out early with Blawg Review #68. His new, much-discussed and apparently funny-as-hell book Anonymous Lawyer makes me happy, and I haven't even read it yet. Here's an overachiever who's about to get rich and famous satirizing a class of overachievers--lawyers--who in real life are 10 times worse than the jokes about them. A happy thought. The ultimate. We stand in awe and envy. From what we've heard about the book, AL will do more to spotlight anti-client attitudes, lawyer-centric behavior and bad client service than WAC? will ever do. Thanks, Sir Jeremy. Fondly, J. Daniel Hull.
Posted by JD Hull at 08:52 PM | Comments (0)