Practice Management

Does client service mean "being nice" to clients?

By Dan Hull

Bad clients still call. They deserve respect--but they're stone nightmares over time. I'll refer them to you. Have fun.

The answer to the question is no. "Being nice" to clients is not the goal or point of client service.

We didn't launch WAC? because yours truly is loved by all, and wanted to show you the utility of his famous charm or Alan Alda- and Mr. Rogers-like skills with those we pitch or represent. We started it because even the better and higher-end lawyers have remained "lawyer-centric", haven't a clue about what good clients think about, and treat even to-die-for clients like troublesome peasants. We started WAC? because no one in the global legal or business community, other than Chicago's Patrick Lamb and the Canadian Bar Association, was talking about CS compellingly by (a) actually putting clients first, and (b) explaining just how to do that.

Marrying substantive skills to the Art of Client Service is the way to get and keep good and great clients. Not all clients. We at WAC? believe we know what CS is: it's thinking about and acting on the obvious client service aspects presented by everything you do for those clients in your services firm (but no one else thinks about), and disciplining everyone around you in your firm to do it with you. You build a service culture from the ground up from which all else flows, right down to that last opinion letter or Rule 12(b)(6) motion your firm wrote, client by client. Everyone around you must buy into it--or leave.

But unsophisticated clients are legion, "evil" and hold you back. The truth: most clients are not worth the trouble of representing. A client with a real legal problem to be solved--and money in hand to cover your labors--is not enough. A "good client" to my law firm and to this blog is a business, preferably a publicly-traded one, or at least large and experienced enough to be a sophisticated user of legal services. If the would-be client does not have a General Counsel (i.e, at least one in-house counsel), that's almost always a bad sign. We are not as

Full post as published by What About Clients? on July 06, 2008 (boomark / email).