BEFORE IT BECOMES A REAL PROBLEM

Ever get tired of hearing about it? I mean hearing from lawyers that their clients get into the mess and then bring it to the lawyer to wave his magic wand to make the problem go away. Now while it is true that at this point there is little the lawyer can do except make the best of a bad situation, we are here talking about the great lawyer.

As impossible as it may sound, part of your work is to see around corners and keep tabs on your client so you do not have unpleasant surprises. Where it happens with a new client that is strike one for you as a professional and you have two more strikes and you are out of the realm of being considered a competent professional.
In case you are the kind of lawyer that thrives in pulling rabbits out of hats then you do not need to see anything before-hand. Just keep putting out fire after fire.

The answer we offer is a little something called CLIENT MANAGEMENT. In theory the idea is kind of simple: you have a client, you set goals for business you hope to execute for the client, the type of relationship you will have, the resources you will invest and the corners you hope to see around going forward. In short, there is a deliberate effort by the lawyer to manage the client.
In cases where things fall into the cracks or deadlines are missed and where new business goes somewhere else you can be sure there was no planning. Lots of hand wringing and regret but no plan on ground to make certain that in the next 9 months whatever newish business or new direction the client is going in, the law firm known because it has made the plan a cause celebre, a part of its service level agreement. A very good example of the Client Management Product is the proprietary Large Client Revenue Service developed by IBARU-McKENZIE (some obvious self promotion).
We cannot count the number of times when the client has told us 'We just don't know what is going on'
We knew. There was muddling through and winging it, which had always worked in the past so the need to pay attention to the care,feeding and cultivation if the client business relationship was not acute. Besides, who has the time for such &%$##.

Before the problem comes up means deliberately looking forward at the hard facts of successes and failures and predicting what the future will hold based on current facts. If a young lady and a young man are romantically involved then we should all be preparing for a wedding and kids in the not too distant future. Same way if a law firm's clients are entering new areas of business and are looking at new business partners and the law firm is blissfully unaware, you can be sure some territory will be raided very soon. Or let's look at the case of the associate who spends a lot of the time grinding and doing work. Who is going to tell him that he needs to generate business to make partner or that the faster he can do so, the faster his partner track. Plus the fact that he has no time, while unfair will not be accepted as a valid reason?

No lawyer is ever blindsided by anything that comes up in her practice, she just wasn't looking when she was crossing the street.