Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Legal Marketing & PR Blogs -> Legal Business Development

Legal Marketing & PR

: Legal Business Development

Do you believe that legal excellence is the most important factor in success?

By Jim Hassett

If you believe that legal excellence is the most important factor in success, I have bad news for you: Your belief is associated with failure.

A few years ago, the Brand Research Company (a division of Greenfield/Belser) published a study of the differences between law firms that succeed and those that fail. They surveyed lawyers from firms that had increased gross revenue at least five percent for two years in a row, and compared their responses to lawyers from firms that had been "dismantled or acquired under stress."

One of the biggest differences was that at the failed firms, more than four times as many lawyers reported that legal excellence was the most critical factor in success. (Among the other differences: successful firms reinvested more profits in growth, communicated the firm's vision to the entire staff, hired non-lawyer executives, and shared clients more.)

What's more, Charles Maddock has written in Law Practice Today that "according to client surveys conducted by Altman Weil, almost all clients believe their lawyers do good work, or admit that they can't really tell the difference."

So if you want to succeed in an increasingly competitive environment, you must do what Ken Blanchard recommends in the book Raving Fans: Learn what clients want, then give them more.

As Gerry Riskin explains in the book The Successful Lawyer, there was a time when a good education and good legal work were enough to guarantee success. There are many reasons that is no longer true, including: "Competitive threats from other professions, the high degree of specialization of lawyers, the advent and application of technology, and the fact that knowledge is depreciating much faster than ever before. Today it is necessary for good professionals not only to deliver excellence, but to be able to convey their value to clients and prospective clients."

If you are convinced that you must focus on satisfying clients by delivering value and conveying the message, the next question is which clients to focus on. Some experts say that you need to focus on every client. In a 1990 Harvard Business Review article called "Zero defections: Quality comes to services," Frederick Reichheld and W. Earl Strasser argued that service businesses should aim for "zero defections--keeping every customer the company can profitably serve."  I added the italics to the word "profitably" to call attention to the fact that they also believe that "There are some customers [each] company should not try to serve." My colleague and friend Tom Kane has written a number of posts on when and how to "fire clients."  If you need to consider this difficult and painful step, start with his recent piece entitled "Are Bad Clients Keeping You Up at Night?"

I am a big fan of prioritizing, so the idea of trying to please every client, or even every profitable client, does not sit well with me. 

When I wrote in this blog about Gerry Riskin's work on "bulletproofing your crown jewel clients," I began by quoting his argument that "You can't superplease everyone at the same time.  You need to discriminate."  He went on to describe how to pick the clients to focus on:  "It's really very simple. Imagine your worst nightmare: Your assistant walks in and says that a client has asked to have all their files sent to a new firm. Who do you pray it isn't?"

The only thing I would add to that is that if you come to this issue with the zeal of a convert, don't start with your biggest and most important clients first.  Practice on a few mid-level clients, and you will get even better at turning your crown jewel clients into raving fans. 

This post was adapted from my book Legal Business Development: A Step by Step Guide.

Full post as published by Legal Business Development on November 21, 2007 (boomark / email).