Practice Management

Clients v. Employees: Are we asking enough of ourselves on client service?

By Dan Hull

Here's a fine post on an important subject: Clients or Team Members - Which Comes First? at Innovative Practice Management. Obviously, for WAC?, the client is first. Employees and "team members", while key, can't ever be put ahead of the client. And I get all the Stephen Covey peace-and-love stuff about employees. My firm just believes that good employees buy into customer service in the first two weeks--or they don't--and there is rarely anything you can do to "teach" a client service mindset. Lots of very intelligent staff people and associates in the market are very happy going through business life without a client-focus. The answer is to avoid them or get rid of them right away. My question: is the standard in our proefession for client service and actual delivery of legal services high enough in the first place? And do we ever even meet it? The marketplace has become much more employee-friendly in the last 20 years. But what about clients and customers? My take is that on CS, we're still in the dark ages, and medicore is the best we can do. The key is employees. Are we asking ourselves and them to do enough--and policing it?

Full post as published by What About Clients? on March 19, 2008 (boomark / email).