Practice Management

Redux: What About Small or Unsophisticated Business Clients?

By Dan Hull

If you have talented lawyers and staff, are good at what you do, seek interesting work, and want to be appreciated and paid, stick with General Counsel.

This blog is about to-die for business clients--not about all of them. Unless you have the soul of a social worker, or like me once had a summer job working at a camp for handicapped children who wore specially-padded helmets (and fully accept what you are getting into), we recommend that you do not represent them. Consider getting rid of small business clients if they are still in your shop. Possible exceptions: "legacy" clients, your first client, or the Fortune 500 CEO's son with a colorful but sensitive history of DUIs up at Dartmouth. But if you have talented lawyers and staff, are good at what you do, seek interesting work, and want to be appreciated and paid, stick with General Counsel. In-house counsel know "it" when they see it--and the secure and good ones will get you and love you. Smaller business clients, even successful ones, are rarely sophisticated users of legal services, and it shows. And by all means consider taking yourself out of the Yellow Pages; they attract the dregs.

Full post as published by What About Clients? on August 12, 2008 (boomark / email).