Like it or not, everyone in your shop has to buy into client service like a cult, like a religion--like an angry sermon that lifted them out of their pews at The Church of the Final Thunder.

Real client service--i.e., know-how consistently delivered as an experience and skills the customer likes and wants more of--is now a global cliché. And maybe that's the problem.

Apart from those of us who regard CS as a joke, or as obligatory rhetoric, do most of us really know what client service is, or should be, in our own shops for our best longstanding clients? And if we do "know", do we even have a clue on how difficult client service regimes are to establish, maintain and enforce?

See our December 18, 2009 post or almost any post on your left under Clients--Keeping Them.

The Dialect. First, what about the accent you hear there? That regal way of speech? You're in South Carolina, of course--but the speech you hear is barely "Southern". Most likely, experts say, it's a blend: of Gullah spoken by African Americans, and of English spoken by Europeans, over 300 years ago. Linguists love it, and you still hear it in the streets, especially "South of Broad".

The Dance. It was popularized by a song and its accompanying footwork, "The Charleston," by James P. Johnson in the Broadway musical "Runnin' Wild" in 1923. Like the unique Charleston dialect, the Dance goes way back, too. It's been traced to descendants of slaves who lived on islands off the coast of Charleston and in the city itself. Thought to have been first performed locally around 1903.

Why use deposition time to learn things you can learn quickly and inexpensively from phone calls, libraries and even the most rudimentary Google search?

Before you schedule a deposition, do some informal investigation. Next time a new case begins, resist rushing into written discovery and depositions. Step back from the discovery routine--you'll get into that bubble soon enough--and learn a few things on your own.

Twenty years ago, James McElhaney, a gifted lawyer, writer and teacher of trial tactics, and the ABA Litigation Section, first published McElhaney's Trial Notebook, now in its fourth edition. Discovery, McElhaney noted, is a good way to learn what a witness will say, or to bind a party or witness to a particular version of the facts.

But it is also "a very inefficient way to get information."

Let us add to that:

Formal discovery can be--and often is--an unimaginative, cookie-cutter, dumb-ass, straight-up lazy, wasteful, and client-unfriendly way to learn much of the background information, and many of the facts, that will frame and flesh out your case.

This is especially true of depositions, and (for that matter) any other live sworn testimony. If you really don't have to "wing it", don't.

This is slavery: not to speak one's thought.

Euripides, non-lawyer (480-406 B.C.)

Be serious. The 10-day post-trial deadline is now 28 days? While the work of the Judicial Conference's five Advisory Committees never really stops, big changes to federal court rules, including the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), don't occur that often. The newest amendments are "technical amendments"--but the changes are anything but technical.

Two years in the making, the changes were signed into law (H.R. 1626) by the President on May 7, 2009, and became effective December 1, 2009. There are also significant changes to some of the time triggers in the appellate, criminal and bankruptcy rules. All are part of the Judicial Conference's "Time-Computation Project".

They're picking up prisoners and putting 'em in a pen. And all she wants to do is dance.

--Danny Kortchmar/WB Music Corp. ASCAP (1984)

Rent "Party Girl" (1995) and watch her dance in the last scene. Parker Posey is her own World: picaresque, funny and eccentric, all without being contrived. This is the intensely pretty Bohemian girl next door. Playing the floundering Manhattan girl-turned-librarian, Posey has you convinced by the end of the movie that, when she's nervous or uncomfortable in her real non-actress life, she automatically just starts to dance. It's like having Katharine Hepburn, Neal Cassady and François Villon in one person.

In 2006, I met Posey in the Newark Airport when I was on the way to Manchester, and would have been happy to miss my plane. She was headed to New Mexico to work. When she speaks, she has the slightest trace of an American southern accent, having grown up in both Maryland and Louisiana. She is unassuming and subtle, only fleetingly hip and ironic, and looks you in the eye. What surprised me about her in person the most was this: her authenticity and smarts cannot hide how gorgeous she is.

So there's lots going on here. It's easier to understand why for years Posey has turned down money and type-casting in favor of brave, odd and "forward" roles. She's an actress first, and a celebrity somewhat reluctantly. And only then if it doesn't get in the way.

Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.

--W.B. Yeats (1865–1939)

Here's a gem we would like to have worked up and written ourselves: "Toward Better Client Service: A Few Questions for Outside Counsel " at John DeGroote's Settlement Perspectives. The in-house counsel/GC questions come from P.H. Glatfelter's General Counsel Thom Jackson. Whether or not you agree with the dozen questions Jackson and DeGroote outlined, or whether they precisely fit your firm's business model, these, at a minimum, serve as a very fine first draft. Bravo.

During his watch, however, P&G doubled it sales, and grew its line of billion-dollar brands from 10 to 23. Some say the even-keeled and reflective Lafley elevated P&G's "art of the customer" to new levels.

What is brand loyalty? What "moments of truth" lead a housewife, grocery chain, or government buyer to prefer Tide, Pampers, Crest or Pringles over competing brands? Who, exactly, are our customers? Why do they buy from us? When is price not so important?

In May of 2009, and just before he stepped down as CEO, Lafley wrote "What Only the CEO Can Do" in the Harvard Business Review. Here's an excerpt, in which Lafley quotes the consultant-writer Peter Drucker (1909-2005) in comments Drucker made in 2004:

"Inside there are only costs. Results are only on the outside."

The CEO alone experiences the meaningful outside at an enterprise level and is responsible for understanding it, interpreting it, advocating for it, and presenting it so that the company can respond in a way that enables sustainable sales, profit, and total shareholder return growth.

Alan George Lafley

Real time billing: invoice the client promptly twice a month. Like everyone else, we expect the "future of law" to include different billing alternatives. However, by that we mean the following: billing the same client different ways depending on the difficulty and intensity of the work.

Generally, we see flat fees for "commodity" work. And we believe hourly rates will continue to dominate for complex and novel projects--particularly where the relationships are longstanding and solid between in-house departments and outside law firms.

Case-by-case judgments about "value"--not hours, flat fees, or hybrids--will drive most engagements.

One idea comes from our Pittsburgh partner Julie McGuire, who does transactional and corporate tax work globally, and it seems to work especially well for intense or "fast-moving" projects--and when you are billing by the hour. Julie's done this successfully for transactional work, and some arbitrations, for years.

It's simple. 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 at least temporarily invoice the client every two weeks.

(That means you can't wait long to get the bills out, though. Give yourself three business days tops.)

Thompson had a way of keeping anyone unfriendly to the very idea of him beyond even mere curiosity. In that case, you were a nice person doing the best you could. You didn't need "it"--anymore than you needed to become good friends with Andy Warhol, Ralph Nader, Harry Dean Stanton, or Dr. John the Night Tripper, whoever they were.

--What About Clients?, 2007

WAC? misses HST. Thompson put some of his best and funniest stuff in personal letters--and he wrote volumes and volumes of them. See the Charlie Rose interview, undated, but likely about 1997.