Practice Management

Why superior work alone doesn't matter.

By Dan Hull

Steve Jobs: "We have better stuff!"

Bill Gates: "You don't get it. That doesn't matter."

--1984 conversation, after an angry Jobs realized that Microsoft's Windows software borrowed some of Apple's concepts, according to 1999 movie The Pirates of Silicon Valley, likely apocryphal, and 100% instructive.

It just doesn't matter. We have a hokey saying at our firm, Hull McGuire. A good client needs to "Be Safe, Feel Safe". If a client does not feel safe, it won't fully embrace and appreciate you or your firm. Without the comfort of feeling safe, it won't impress the in-house counsel of your client that the last memo you sent it by you and your ex-U.S. Supreme Court clerk was dead-on, groundbreaking, brilliant, or that your firm is expertly implementing the suggested strategy. The client won't care--and it shouldn't care. (It is paying for that.) To feel safe, and to stay as a client with your firm, it must believe that you and that associate genuinely care about and look out for that client like a parent would for a child 24/7. It's personal--based on a trust that transcends legal and ethical concepts.

Full post as published by What About Clients? on January 24, 2008 (boomark / email).