A Haven For Straight Talk: <b>Invite The Audience Into The Tent</b>

I heard this horror story from an associate in a large, corporate firm a year or so ago. He was at the table with five or six other attorneys from his firm and ten or so people from one of their largest client companies. My friend hadn't been on this assignment long, and was there as back up, and was mostly keeping quiet, taking notes and trying not to screw up. SOP for a young associate attending such a conclave.

At one point in the meeting, a particular legal issue came up, and the partner in charge of this client, the one leading the meeting, said: “You know, we don't handle that type of law at our firm. But I'm familiar with a few good people here in town who do. I'll make a couple calls and get you a good choice of referrals.”

One of the lawyers from the corporate counsel's office spoke up at that point, though, and asked: “Excuse me, but isn't Mr. Jingleheimer-Schmidt a partner at your firm?”

“Yes,” replied the partner in charge. “Why do you ask?”

“Because,” replied the client, “He happens to be one of the most respect experts in the state in that particular area of the law. I worked with him on several such cases when I was still with the Attorney General's office.”

As my dad would have said, “Gleep.”

Hot is Bad, Cool is Good

I teach marketing and advertising at a local liberal arts college here in Columbus. Tons of fun for me. And it helps the kids get a little sleep once a week. One of the areas we cover is the work of Marshall McLuhan. I won't go into all the details of his important contributions to communications studies, but one area that is vitally important to marketing is the idea of “hot” vs. “cool” media. In a nutshell, “hot” media are those that resist interaction, and “cool” media invite interaction. Remember is like fire vs. pina colada.

You want your marketing to be as “cool” as possible. Why? Because people like cool. They don't like to be put off, burned, held-at-arm's-length, stymied, kept out, etc. Study after study shows that marketing with any kind of interactivity built into it will vastly outperform “one-way” media. That's one of the reasons that the Internet has taken off and spread as quickly as it has. The possibilities for interactivity on the Web are insanely apparent, even to people who aren't particularly creative.

Marketing history and intelligence on this goes back to the early 1900's. Free samples, test-drives, in store displays, etc., were all ways of getting customers to interact with products. They all work. So do surveys. Many surveys are, in fact, nothing more than advertising disguised as surveys. By getting you to invest your time in filling out a form, the company knows that you will think more favorably about their product.

Client Teams ' Being Good and Getting Better

What do the above anecdotes have to do with each other? Well, the first is about how a firm's lack of self-knowledge can be cripplingly stupid when it comes to managing client relationships. The other is about how interactivity is an important way to improve marketing. The best vehicle for combating the first and enhancing the second is through the formation and proper use of client service teams.

What is a client service team? It's a group of people whose purpose is to improve the service you provide to a particular client. Most law firms who form client service teams do so only for their larger clients with long-term, multi-practice needs, and that makes sense. You probably don't need a client service team for a one-off matter, even if it will bring in a huge retainer. You may need a good matter management system … but that's another article.

Why do you need a client service team? Because managing your best clients' work over a long period of time is different than just doing the individual pieces of work that come along. This is another one of those tricky “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts” things that law firms need to come to grips with. Doing 100 pieces of work for the same client is qualitatively different than doing 1 piece of work each for 100 different clients.

Why is it different? I'll start you off with three issues and let you take it from there:

1. Billing: If you screw up a bill for a one-off client, that's no big deal. He's not coming back. Let's say you have an error rate of 5% on your bills. Still no big deal, even for clients that you see once every couple of years. But for your top clients? The ones you bill $10,000+ a month to? That becomes a big deal.

2. Associate churn: New faces every year will mean nothing to clients you only see once every ten years. They will expect it. But if you're not holding on to your associates, your long-term, top clients will notice.

3. Administrative consistency: If one of your attorneys is still using letterhead from 1979, and one likes to print everything on goldenrod colored paper, and one uses spiral binding instead of three-hole punch, and one uses Word Perfect, and one uses green fonts in e-mail… this will seem (maybe) cute and eccentric to those clients you only see once in awhile. To the big clients? It will seem unprofessional and bizarre.

Big law departments are narrowing the field of law firms they use. Why? Partly to save money. But partly to work with firms that do things more efficiently and in a more “business-like” manner. When you're at home, I don't give a tin-whistle what word processor you use. At work, using Word Perfect communicates a complete lack of respect for your clients' world view (unless they are in the 1% of the business world that's still using Word Perfect).

So, the job of the client service team is to work towards improving service to the firms' best clients over long periods of time. To do so across all practice groups and levels of the firm, and to make sure that all firm functions ' from administrative to finance, marketing to personnel, billing to the actual delivery of service ' are done in a consistent and appropriate manner.

What Does a Client Service Team Look Like?

Ask your clients.

I'm absolutely amazed at the number of firms who take on the task of forming client service teams without asking their clients to participate in the activity. That's like trying to have your suit tailored by phone. It just doesn't work that way. I would start with this very simple statement to whoever is in charge of purchasing your services:

“We're thinking about putting together a team to help manage your account. Simply put, we do so much work for you now that we think it's important for us to look at your legal needs as a whole, rather than just in pieces. We'd like your help in designing the team and figuring out the logistics of what it will look like, how often it will meet and what metrics we'll use to manage the team's processes and progress. We'd also like your help in choosing a manager for the team. The manager's role will be to make sure that our service improves over time and is responsive to your input and criticism. Please be assured that none of the time taken by any of our attorneys or staff on this team will be billed to you in any way. Our goals here are to make sure that we are fully meeting your needs, anticipating new issues before they become troublesome, and responding as quickly as possible to your feedback.”

Something like that. Now… from a client's standpoint, doesn't a client service team sound pretty “cool?”

Yes… but what's marketing got to do with it?

First of all, I'm a marketing guy and you're reading about it here and I'm the one bringing up all the McLuhan stuff about “coolness” and getting into your clients' space and all that. Marketers are all about understanding relationships above and beyond the nuts-and-bolts of doing the work.

Second of all, everyone in your marketing department probably knows more about your firm's overall operations than any individual attorney you've got. Hopefully. If not, well… They should. By involving them in the client services team, you can make sure you don't suffer an embarrassing blunder like the one mentioned at the beginning of this piece. You'll also be able to lean on your marketing people to understand which other attorneys to bring into the discussion when your client asks for help in areas of the firm's practice you're not as familiar with.

Third of all, once you've got the client services team formed, you've got a huge opportunity for subtle cross-selling.

And on this point, I want to preach to my brethren in the marketing department for a moment. I cannot overstate my emphasis on the word “subtle” in the above sentence. Do NOT turn client services meetings into an excuse for other practice group's “show-and-tell.” Do NOT turn the meetings into a round-robin of “what great verdicts we got” discussions. Do NOT hand out brochures. Do NOT hand out newsletters.

What Can You Do?

Invite a new lawyer from a different practice group to attend and listen at every meeting. Just listen. Introduce them. Explain that they are here to learn.

Invite employees from the client's organization to attend the meetings.

Ask the client if you can visit their office and other operations.

Invite an outside speaker that's of interest to your firm and your clients

Invite people from your client's other service providers – accountants, architects, ad agencies, etc. ' to attend a meeting where no legally sensitive information will be discussed, to learn more about what they do, and so they can learn more about the legal side of the business

The whole point is to make yourself more a part of your client's business, rather than an adjunct to it. The mercenary term for this is “getting your hooks into a customer.” I prefer to think of it as doing well by doing good. Enlightened self interest and all that.

If done right, you'll save your client money and grief, and actually get more work. How is that possible? Because you'll end up with a larger “share of wallet.” Wouldn't you rather have 100% of a client's $200,000 legal budget than 25% of his $400,000 one?

I know which answer you client would choose. A client services team will help you get there.

---

Andy Havens www.sanestorm.com [email protected] http://legalmarketing.typepad.com/blog

I heard this horror story from an associate in a large, corporate firm a year or so ago. He was at the table with five or six other attorneys from his firm and ten or so people from one of their largest client companies. My friend hadn't been on this assignment long, and was there as back up, and was mostly keeping quiet, taking notes and trying not to screw up. SOP for a young associate attending such a conclave.

At one point in the meeting, a particular legal issue came up, and the partner in charge of this client, the one leading the meeting, said: “You know, we don't handle that type of law at our firm. But I'm familiar with a few good people here in town who do. I'll make a couple calls and get you a good choice of referrals.”

One of the lawyers from the corporate counsel's office spoke up at that point, though, and asked: “Excuse me, but isn't Mr. Jingleheimer-Schmidt a partner at your firm?”

“Yes,” replied the partner in charge. “Why do you ask?”

“Because,” replied the client, “He happens to be one of the most respect experts in the state in that particular area of the law. I worked with him on several such cases when I was still with the Attorney General's office.”

As my dad would have said, “Gleep.”

Hot is Bad, Cool is Good

I teach marketing and advertising at a local liberal arts college here in Columbus. Tons of fun for me. And it helps the kids get a little sleep once a week. One of the areas we cover is the work of Marshall McLuhan. I won't go into all the details of his important contributions to communications studies, but one area that is vitally important to marketing is the idea of “hot” vs. “cool” media. In a nutshell, “hot” media are those that resist interaction, and “cool” media invite interaction. Remember is like fire vs. pina colada.

You want your marketing to be as “cool” as possible. Why? Because people like cool. They don't like to be put off, burned, held-at-arm's-length, stymied, kept out, etc. Study after study shows that marketing with any kind of interactivity built into it will vastly outperform “one-way” media. That's one of the reasons that the Internet has taken off and spread as quickly as it has. The possibilities for interactivity on the Web are insanely apparent, even to people who aren't particularly creative.

Marketing history and intelligence on this goes back to the early 1900's. Free samples, test-drives, in store displays, etc., were all ways of getting customers to interact with products. They all work. So do surveys. Many surveys are, in fact, nothing more than advertising disguised as surveys. By getting you to invest your time in filling out a form, the company knows that you will think more favorably about their product.

Client Teams ' Being Good and Getting Better

What do the above anecdotes have to do with each other? Well, the first is about how a firm's lack of self-knowledge can be cripplingly stupid when it comes to managing client relationships. The other is about how interactivity is an important way to improve marketing. The best vehicle for combating the first and enhancing the second is through the formation and proper use of client service teams.

What is a client service team? It's a group of people whose purpose is to improve the service you provide to a particular client. Most law firms who form client service teams do so only for their larger clients with long-term, multi-practice needs, and that makes sense. You probably don't need a client service team for a one-off matter, even if it will bring in a huge retainer. You may need a good matter management system … but that's another article.

Why do you need a client service team? Because managing your best clients' work over a long period of time is different than just doing the individual pieces of work that come along. This is another one of those tricky “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts” things that law firms need to come to grips with. Doing 100 pieces of work for the same client is qualitatively different than doing 1 piece of work each for 100 different clients.

Why is it different? I'll start you off with three issues and let you take it from there:

1. Billing: If you screw up a bill for a one-off client, that's no big deal. He's not coming back. Let's say you have an error rate of 5% on your bills. Still no big deal, even for clients that you see once every couple of years. But for your top clients? The ones you bill $10,000+ a month to? That becomes a big deal.

2. Associate churn: New faces every year will mean nothing to clients you only see once every ten years. They will expect it. But if you're not holding on to your associates, your long-term, top clients will notice.

3. Administrative consistency: If one of your attorneys is still using letterhead from 1979, and one likes to print everything on goldenrod colored paper, and one uses spiral binding instead of three-hole punch, and one uses Word Perfect, and one uses green fonts in e-mail… this will seem (maybe) cute and eccentric to those clients you only see once in awhile. To the big clients? It will seem unprofessional and bizarre.

Big law departments are narrowing the field of law firms they use. Why? Partly to save money. But partly to work with firms that do things more efficiently and in a more “business-like” manner. When you're at home, I don't give a tin-whistle what word processor you use. At work, using Word Perfect communicates a complete lack of respect for your clients' world view (unless they are in the 1% of the business world that's still using Word Perfect).

So, the job of the client service team is to work towards improving service to the firms' best clients over long periods of time. To do so across all practice groups and levels of the firm, and to make sure that all firm functions ' from administrative to finance, marketing to personnel, billing to the actual delivery of service ' are done in a consistent and appropriate manner.

What Does a Client Service Team Look Like?

Ask your clients.

I'm absolutely amazed at the number of firms who take on the task of forming client service teams without asking their clients to participate in the activity. That's like trying to have your suit tailored by phone. It just doesn't work that way. I would start with this very simple statement to whoever is in charge of purchasing your services:

“We're thinking about putting together a team to help manage your account. Simply put, we do so much work for you now that we think it's important for us to look at your legal needs as a whole, rather than just in pieces. We'd like your help in designing the team and figuring out the logistics of what it will look like, how often it will meet and what metrics we'll use to manage the team's processes and progress. We'd also like your help in choosing a manager for the team. The manager's role will be to make sure that our service improves over time and is responsive to your input and criticism. Please be assured that none of the time taken by any of our attorneys or staff on this team will be billed to you in any way. Our goals here are to make sure that we are fully meeting your needs, anticipating new issues before they become troublesome, and responding as quickly as possible to your feedback.”

Something like that. Now… from a client's standpoint, doesn't a client service team sound pretty “cool?”

Yes… but what's marketing got to do with it?

First of all, I'm a marketing guy and you're reading about it here and I'm the one bringing up all the McLuhan stuff about “coolness” and getting into your clients' space and all that. Marketers are all about understanding relationships above and beyond the nuts-and-bolts of doing the work.

Second of all, everyone in your marketing department probably knows more about your firm's overall operations than any individual attorney you've got. Hopefully. If not, well… They should. By involving them in the client services team, you can make sure you don't suffer an embarrassing blunder like the one mentioned at the beginning of this piece. You'll also be able to lean on your marketing people to understand which other attorneys to bring into the discussion when your client asks for help in areas of the firm's practice you're not as familiar with.

Third of all, once you've got the client services team formed, you've got a huge opportunity for subtle cross-selling.

And on this point, I want to preach to my brethren in the marketing department for a moment. I cannot overstate my emphasis on the word “subtle” in the above sentence. Do NOT turn client services meetings into an excuse for other practice group's “show-and-tell.” Do NOT turn the meetings into a round-robin of “what great verdicts we got” discussions. Do NOT hand out brochures. Do NOT hand out newsletters.

What Can You Do?

Invite a new lawyer from a different practice group to attend and listen at every meeting. Just listen. Introduce them. Explain that they are here to learn.

Invite employees from the client's organization to attend the meetings.

Ask the client if you can visit their office and other operations.

Invite an outside speaker that's of interest to your firm and your clients

Invite people from your client's other service providers – accountants, architects, ad agencies, etc. ' to attend a meeting where no legally sensitive information will be discussed, to learn more about what they do, and so they can learn more about the legal side of the business

The whole point is to make yourself more a part of your client's business, rather than an adjunct to it. The mercenary term for this is “getting your hooks into a customer.” I prefer to think of it as doing well by doing good. Enlightened self interest and all that.

If done right, you'll save your client money and grief, and actually get more work. How is that possible? Because you'll end up with a larger “share of wallet.” Wouldn't you rather have 100% of a client's $200,000 legal budget than 25% of his $400,000 one?

I know which answer you client would choose. A client services team will help you get there.

---

Andy Havens www.sanestorm.com [email protected] http://legalmarketing.typepad.com/blog