SHOULD YOU MAXIMIZE, OPTIMIZE

The word maximize is used rather frequently in law performance and business circles as: maximize your potential, your performance, your profit and everything else.
You get the impression that maximize means to take it to the last drop, to use it till it drops, to go over the field again and again and again till every last sheaf has been harvested.
And that all this is to be encouraged. You are maximizing efficiency. You used up the asset until it dropped dead.
Maximize.
But is this in your own interest? Or any one else's for that matter.
The idea for looking at the goodness or lack thereof of this maximization first occurred to me from Drucker when he admonished the nonsense that was profit maximization be replaced with profit optimization where optimization means attaining a profit on the best possible sustainable terms and maximising means clearing everything regardless of use or need or future prospects.

This idea bears some thinking about has it is a long the lines of sustainable profitability of the clients your law firm has. If you have decided you want a long term repeat business relationship then you begin to see insider the amount of revenue you extract and the emotional capital you use up in doing it.

My current view is do you have to squeeze the last drop of productivity and efficiency from the asset so that when you are done all that is left is for the asset to be consigned to the junk heap? How about profits? Do you seek to get whatever the market can bear and as much as your firm can get away with?

FIRING THE D****D CLIENT

Have you ever seen a dollar of revenue you did not want , ever seen a client that you did not pursue or continue to take crap from? Well then, you need to fire the lady and fast.

The basic idea is this, if a client is costing you more than she is bringing in what do you do? And before you answer this question or as part of the process of answering this question you have to carefully assess the entire business relationship and what you want going forward.

Then you can consider whether you are the problem. Little value, lack of concern and lots of apathy e.t.c Maybe your expectations or ideas of how the relationship should be are skewed or off.

In the final analysis, here are three options:

1. Irrevocably get rid of the client as in fire the lady, her business and her drama.
2. Set up a Client Management system that turns bad clients into good ones.
3. Pick your clients according to a set of criteria.

A lot of tales are abuzz on the grapevine about excellent client service and how you have to make that a part of your law firm's services offering but remember, the client is a major part of this relationship. If she is a permanent anchor, your efforts will be stymied and you will have to summon up your courage to let the relationship go, on as amicable terms as possible.

Just make sure that the client is d****d before you let her go.

GOLDMAN SACHS FOR LAW FIRMS

Goldman is a hard place to be hired, a hard place to be promoted and a hard place to stay
- Hank Paulson, CEO Goldman Sachs.

Over here at The IBARU-McKENZIE BLAWG, we offer you insight on generating business for your law firm and other things that help to inform the decisions that you make at your firm. Well, here's one:

Force yourself to hold on to higher standards.

In the opening quote from the Goldman Sachs CEO, we are directing your attention to some of the things that happen at the said investment bank that make it THE bank to be in. Like everyone is fleeing to the bank. From young law school grads to MBA's etc, etc.
So for example, to be hired a vice president went through 150 interviews before he got his position at the bank and every once in a while someone who is a star in the bank is asked to leave. This is a very important part of Mr Paulson's role.

Here is what it kind of boils down to: we understand the days of slavery, monarchies and serfdom's are over and your law firm is not the military but all these institutions had something going for them. For those who were able to rise above the hardships, they were tougher and better for it.
These institutions created environments of such hardship and impoverishment that you had to be kind of super human to become good at what you did and do more than just survive. And even if you were not the mere fact that you survived through the system meant you were tough enough to be useful.

Fast forward to today, to our democratic times with our extra hours and enlightened view of management and business, the hardship seems to be discouraged or papered over. What makes it even worse is that you have dumb bosses who try to go back to slavery but it is not working.
What works is a system that forces you to stretch. If it cannot do this for you and keep you fully engaged then you can build your own platform.

We used the idea of force yourself to hold on to higher standards because this is what you need and we do not refer to some sham meeting or board or pointing at what other shops are doing so you can let yourself off the hook. Yes, we know a few of the tricks.
Instead, think along the lines of Winston Churchill having a secret information group during WWII to give him just the facts, absent of the intrigues of court or FDR having his wife give him direct information from the American people about the things his government was up to absent the intrigues of the civil service through her national tours.
Where you will find the courage for this is up to you but if your system has no bite it will feel shallow and your people will respond accordingly.
There is a reason the Olympic Gold Medal class is for the elite, you cannot smell the area unless you hold on to superhuman standards. We're just saying.

Since you are running a law firm and you need human beings to bring magic to the office check out the Economist article on Goldman Sachs and see if it doesn't give you some ideas on the example you have to set.
Yes you, if you were hoping to pass it off to the boys and continue lounging on your Managing Partner Chair or yelling directions from behind? Forget it.

SUPPORT STAFF

Have you sent out letters by hand before as part of your business development or RFPs before? If you have you are aware of the thought coordination, time and sweat you need to get it done effectively. This is why you have support people to do it for you so that you can have your resources (that big brain + your time) to tackle the higher value fee earning work.
The measure of your support staff therefore is how much of your time they are able to save and not how busy they are. You would be uncomfortable having them lounge but what is their core function? To look busy or to make you most productive?
The difficulty with going with the productivity answer is that it places you directly on the spot for being productive at your firm since then the strategic high level legal work is fairly in front of you and the administrative stuff is out the way. You, my friend are without excuse.

Here's a gem: you always want to have excess capacity of your cheapest resource so your expensive resources do not spend their time doing low-value tasks. Q.E.D.

YOU NEED A MENTOR

This business of mentorship from senior lawyers to junior lawyers does raise a question, how do you create great lawyers? Is it like raising kids where you let out the slack a little then crack the whip when the kid gets out of line or is it like military training where you are passed through a terrible ordeal that makes you tougher with a different mind or is it like the ancient Spartan society which had the Igoge which put their own warrior ethos into the young or is it like today's mentorship movement that says you need a mentor, you need a mentor?

Listening to Sheryl Sandberg in Lean In, she lays the case as Succeed and you will find a mentor. Perhaps beginning at the beginning with who is a mentor why a mentor what to do with for a mentor e.t.c. will suffice. Let's not forget the difference between mentorship and sponsorship.

What even is the ideal analogy, is it father and son, mother daughter, kind boss and employee, benefactor and orphan?

Then there is the all time favourite: the throw him into the deep end and see if he comes out school.
This essentially is you as a young lawyer struggle on your own mainly and if any injustice comes your way or you are daft enough to whine then you are told that 'We had no such help and we made it why can't you? (and this is a fair point).

In many ways mentorship seems like do it for me make it easier for me give me the benefits of what you have laboured for years for and it is apparent that lots of lawyers are willing to offer this. You just have to earn ticket by your love for the law. This is not a simple as it sounds.

I guess in some ways it boils down to giving. The giver gives what he wants to or what he can or what he is able to and the taker has to receive it with as much grace and with full moral feel good pay to the giver.
And that's all there is to it.

THE MEANING OF WORDS OR RULES OF INTERPRETATION

Your law firm life literally depends on the meaning of the words you use and the meaning you take from the words other people use in conversations with you and in communications meant for you.
This is why the agreed upon definition of a word, phrase or buzzword is so so important. Its meaning is literally what we are talking about.
Words convey meaning and they let you know what can be achieved and what cannot be. They also show you how to navigate from Point A to Point B.

For example, Focus. Should your law firm focus on a few manor clients or industries or should it diversify and spread its risk? You probably have an obvious answer one way or another but that is beside the point. We first have to have a clear and comprehensive meaning of the words focus and diversify that will leave no room for clauses and justifications.
So what is focus? Is it putting 50% on one industry and then what is diversification? Is it about reducing your personal appetite for risk or preempting covering your behind in case there is a reverse up in the future. Then there is the business reality that making bet the company decisions are necessary to living long and great as a business. And all bet the company decisions are totally irrational.

For your law firm, all the above on what meaning you take from words matters very much because your law firm is a business and if you do not accept that it is a business then you will close yourself off from all the beneficial aspects of the business world which will make your firm grow and such.
If you accept that you are a business person, you will hang out a bit more with the pure play business folk, see life as they do and speak their language. This will necessarily help you see why businesses respond to you the way they do and will also carry over into the way you run your law firm.

Or just take the word responsibility. There is no such word, what exists is responsibility + authority so if you have one you have the other and if you imply one then you imply the other. Imagine assuming only one portion of the meaning of this word and all the drama this mismeaning will bring into your affairs, your planning and your putting ideas into play.

But then, it's just the meaning of words. But then again the words express meaning, what you consider possible, what can be done and what cannot be done and how to go about it.

FRESH EYES

A young one was in a game of Truth or Dare with an old one and the young one asked the old one a Truth question 'If you could do anything with me what would you do? The old one replied 'I would take out your eyes and place them in my head and use them to see the world'. The young one replied 'how awful' to which the old one replied 'I would give anything to see the world through your eyes being as young as you are, being able to see the world with fresh eyes.

In a field as solid as law which is filled with knowledgeable, rational, heavy weight types, it has to be said. The limits of what you can do or achieve are defined by your mind.

This is not mindbending or voodoo and neither is it unscientific claptrap. It is reality as validated by human experience and what we see everyday.
For example, the local Nigerian economy is said to be tough and such and such cannot be done yet Chinese and Indian Nationals flood into the country and within few years are living well.
This just underscores the need to bring a fresh pair of eyes to look at your law firm's current reality because you reason and feel and think with your experiences and knowledge and the way you see the world.
Everyone does this so whenever some chap who is outside your field of expertise or knowledge makes a comment or observation, it would be better if you thought it through before shutting it down.
Now do not even pretend that this is not difficult or that you embrace this idea fully. You have your ego to contend with and if you flippantly dismiss that reason, you have your years at the bar under your belt and if you push that to the side in this case then you have your years of success and failures which have been ingrained into your memory.

Now the usual excuses will be how can an outsider tell me about how to move my business forward? Have you ever had the experience of looking for something and found that the harder you searched the more difficult it seemed to locate it and then what do you do? You put in more intense effort and go through everything again. It is at this point that you ought to pause a minute take a step back and just casually look over the entire area and then surprisingly the missing item just comes into your field of vision. Right in front of you, just there.

This is what a fresh pair of eyes offers. It is human nature to celebrate the already successful and point it out as a model to embrace but it is more difficult to point this out when the would be successful is testing and failing forward. Just like the Apple company is celebrated as innovating across music, movies, computers, merchandising etc where it did not belong.
The single thread of connection for Apple is technology and Apple thinks it can do it better. That's all. No lengthy talk about this is my industry or not.

The reason we have mirrors is so we can have a vague idea of what we look like but even this benefit is reduced by looking at the mirror for so long that we see what is in our heads not what is in the mirror. Scientific fact.
So keep this in mind when next you are feeling overly protective of the final authority of legal and what should or should not be done.

GET YOUR MIND RIGHT

Legal marketing is not for duzoids and it is definitely not scheming to push a crappy product on the customer. It is about investing for optimal returns which of course are sustainable. Maximal returns are not.

Legal marketing boils down to the following proposition:
If you had real estate that you could POTENTIALLY sell for $100 million dollars but you had to invest $5million to fix it up, to put it on the right footing and do the right marketing for one full year, would you do it?

There's some quote by Donald Trump in Midas Touch about a guy putting up a For Sale sign on a dirty car being a dumb salesman. The Donald went, why on earth would you try to get people to buy a dirty car?

And this is what legal marketing is at its core. If the word, marketing, gets you down then forget about it and all the deceptive, ridiculous pictures and associations that come to your mind because of the ways others have gone at it.
Both within and outside legal.
Putting the word out about your law firm is about getting to the customers and letting them know of ways that you can assist in their work.

Now for that $5 million dollar investment.
What you will actually spend the money on and how you will spend it depends on what you want for your law firm and where you are headed. It would probably include setting up a Client Management Function which is where most of the value with your clients will be found because you can offer/receive more value from current clients.
You also set up a database, war chest on specific industries that is made relevant by conversations you have with people in said industries and with your clients from that industry so your information aligns with reality as the client sees it. A good model for this War Chest is to think of it as the first block of a global pharmaceutical company's R & D function (Merck, Swipha, Genentech).

It would also include finding out what inactive clients are up to.
But my personal favourite is Idea Development. This is because you can really do something with this from all the information and data you have about the customer, her industry, what others are coming up with in all sorts of companies all across the globe.
You marinate in and soak up this information and you try to come up with a nifty idea or plan or strategy to increase the size of the pie or transaction.
This is the work where you get to sit down and to think, to make connections between what you digest everyday and to come up with solutions to intractable and difficult matters.

Then the fun part begins. You put your ideas into play. You meet heavy resistance, rejection, excuses, outright failures and resounding triumphs.
You talk with colleagues, people from other industries and all and share your work.

This is the work of legal marketing and there is intellectual challenge to it, especially for the idea development portion of it.

Sounds like fun right?

BEING LET GO

On Monday morning you are back from a restful weekend and looking to give it a 110% and by Thursday you are out of a job.
This matter of being fired, for whatever reasons, is rather traumatic. You are thinking of the rent, the bills, the holidays in Tuscany and more to the point you are feeling in the dumps on account of the rejection.
The usual advice would be to become the sort of employee that doesn't ever get let go or if this doesn't happen you get over the hump. Many other great lawyers have been let go of and moved on to better things so you take it in your stride.
All of this is true and in addition, building business development skills and learning to be a proper law firm rainmaker will come in handy.

Building is the word because it takes some time to get your own mix right. Whether it is letters, speaking, idea development, volunteering or pushing initiatives no one else wants. You have to work at these to find out how you will use each of them and in what mix to bring out your own true talents for building a book of business, attracting clients to your law firm.

And there is the economy. In 2013, the law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manages (handled Lehman brothers bankruptcy) had to let go of about sixty junior lawyers, half its secretaries and reduced the profits of its 300 partners. All of this came about because of the reduction in legal work at that time.
This one is on the economy so sometimes if this comes your way, dust yourself off and try again.

THE CLIENT EXPERIENCE

What do you want a client to feel from the moment she decides to engage with you, to hire you, to come to your offices and to do work with you? This is the breakdown of what a client experience means. What do you expect the client to go away with in terms of the way she feels about your legal work. In short, what is your intention towards my daughter? as father's are wont to ask.

This matters because it is a crucial part of your pricing regime. Now for certain commoditised legal work, it is easy to adopt the take it or leave it approach where if the client goes for your price or not it makes no major difference. She can go hang but you cannot put across that attitude for heavier matters and so the client experience that you decide to create can give you a decided edge from the beginning and if you are in the running with other law firms.

Here is where life now gets unfair. If you feel you can be nice to the big client and not so nice to the small client you will eventually be not so nice to the big client. This is human behaviour and is just like the slave masters in the American South who by treating slaves like animals lost a lot of their humanity, inner strength and ability to work.
Sometimes it feels like you are running this big machine but who are you running it for?

What ideas do you put in the client's head about what legal services cost, what the marketplace is currently paying for the particular transaction and as usual how do you put this across?
Again, in a take it or leave it market you can decide to let the client go hang and a lot of businesses do so. You just have to decide how you will handle such cases at your own shop.

The good news about making the client experience a major part of your law firm pricing model is that you will have little competition. Everyone else may talk about it and use the words but they probably will not do it.
When last did you go to any shop where you left feeling really good specifically because of how they treated you?

And when the chips threaten to be down, the first thing to be shafted will be the client experience.
An example is how you look at the client, is she a source of your advancement ( fees, prestige etc) or not. One can just imagine the righteous outrage the reader is expressing 'me? Never' Only your behaviour will tell and it is no defence that everyone else is getting away with it.

Client service is about watching the client and paying attention just a bit beyond the forms and schedules you fill out. Using your mind and intelligence to see how, with the constraints you labour under, you can offer something.
In closing, note that client service is not about saying yes to everything and being an o yes member. It is way more difficult than that. It is about making your interests and that of your client come together profitably for both of you.

And that is the crux of the matter.

HOW THE MIGHTY FALL

A brief insight into why the great companies of yesterday held on to their strengths and were crushed by the new changes and the different direction that the world was taking.

The business that invested heavily in physical traditional stores would be the King because off the massive outlay and now this same business is expected to give up this competitive advantage because of fear mongers and predictions of the future? The business did not get to be King of the Hill by listening to such twaddle.

Imagine the Dangote group being told that manufacturing is going to be virtual and the consumer will produce the product at his own building site for use while all Dangote will do is provide the information of the right chemical mix and composition.
This has effectively killed all the vast factories and trucks and assets of this nature that make the group a killer in the marketplace.
If the company then uses this data to plan its future and does away with all its factories and trucks, do you know what kind of risk this is. More likely it will try to stave of this impending virtualization, by lobbying and legislation and a massive media campaign in the evils of virtualization and hedge its bets by keeping one foot in the present infrastructure and monitoring the new process, if it takes the process seriously at all.
The question boils down to this: why should the incumbent surrender his large castle when he is told that some engineer has invented gunpowder which will make his castle a sitting target in time of war? No one has ever used anything but bows and arrows for hundreds of years.

And that, dear reader, is how great law firms and business get left behind and run over.

LOOKING FORWARD

Part of your work as a legal practitioner is looking at the future and preparing yourself for it. The ideal of course is that you are in the vanguard of crafting it and determining how the law will be practiced and how the clients will relate with the law services businesses as a whole.

A related analogy to what this will look like is the global development agenda the developed world has created for itself in which it has optimal access to the resources on the entire earth, the international trading system and the most freedom possible to put its ideas and way of life into place.

The law firm of tomorrow or the legal services industry of tomorrow, no one can bet his next meal on.
Nothing is that certain so you should take future predictions seriously but don't go running around as if the sky is falling.
Stand your ground and use your head.
What you should do is to become a student of history, a learner of how other jurisdictions are rolling and most importantly think through all the changes and ideas that are predicted to happen so you can see how to position yourself for tomorrow.

For example during the formation of the EU, there were a lot of preparations from the Rome Treaty till when the physical structures and political establishments were out on the ground. Now during this time, your law firm would have been paying attention to what is on the ground and on how the new institutions would be interacting with the rest of the world and businesses.
This entire period would have been about twenty years in total but if you are going to be around for 1000 years what is twenty.
More to the point, the information and insight you could have offered from your close marking of developments and offering your contributions to the process would have led to insights you could have offered in the present and would have helped you make informed decisions for your practice and your clients.

Its just like paying attention the the National Budget and deciding what portions of it to tackle.

And do remember, you will be required to squeeze the lemon for today's book of business AND dream for tommorow's daily bread.

Get to it.

BUILDING THE RELATIONSHIP

Building the law firm/client relationship means:

1. Increasing the amount of people and places you make contact with at the client organization. For example if you live in the same neighbourhood and your kids go to the same schools you have more places to connect, share and things to promote in common than if you met at the association convention at International Bar Association meets in Spain once a year. Therefore in a client if you had access all across the client organization in different contexts it would be more helpful than if you had just one: the legal department.

2. Get more partners meaningfully involved with the client: When three partners are paying attention to a clients business on all levels it will show in response time, the quality of work and advice the firm produces and the way the client feels whenever issues that involve the law firm come up. It is like courting a lady devotedly, she will know that something is going on.

3. Get more service areas paying attention to the needs and potential wants of the client: Each practice area has something to contribute to the clients business goals and can put forward ideas to address different parts of the client business such as its VAT with tax, its international contracts with vetting and regulatory bodies and its local projects to put the right foot forward.

SHUT UP AND DRIVE

There is almost no correlation between feel good inspirational books and genuine insight. Stay with me now... Feel good generally harps on the be positive without offering how to turn positive thinking into tangibles you can hold and do actual stuff with. If you were positive enough you would have made it happen. It's empty once you are done with the feel good high, very similar to a drug high. Very similar.

Genuine insight gets to the core of the problem and offers you a tangible solution. Feel good says use your personality and positive attitude to get it done but as Mr Covey says you might be so positive that you might not care that you are positively lost.

The way this pans out will be illustrated by the story of Monsieur Hector Berlioz, a creator of music. To conclude his musical education and to push off his musical career he had to win the prize at his school which would then give him the money reputation and connection to produce and promote his work.
He believed the way the music was assessed was wrong, the way he was compelled to write his music was wrong and finally he was right in his creative direction and his examiners knew nothing on the subject of his music, largely on account of them being artists not musical composer types.
He proceeded to stick to his creative direction and was failed for this by the examiners. He still felt his creative direction was right but again attempted the prize and followed the rule and duly received the prize.

While mulling over his first attempt he knew his argument was valid but he felt that if he protested too loudly he would be branded a bad loser because he failed to clinch the prize so he waited till he had won the prize then used the very same creative direction for which he had been denied the prize to create his opera to the massive acclaim of the public and famous artists.

MORAL: Getting the job done is your priority especially when you are right. So do your work and stay out of the way of the inspirational quacks until you are ready to roll

WHAT DO YOU SEE

This business of what motivates you and yours at your law firm and what you think you are doing everyday at the office really counts. This is not a 'Come to Jesus', fluffy sentimental twiddle. It is simply a fact.

What on earth entered into the mind of Edward IV when he began dating Wallace Simpson (twice divorced), then married her and then went on to become King of England and then to abdicate?
How did Starbucks coffee conceive of selling expensive coffee in hundreds of flavours across the entire world? Common coffee!

Truth be told, for every business and law firm that you admire or you think is doing great they just happen to see whatever they do differently they have some how been able to see the beauty in their work to see their industry as glorious and that is all there is to it.
Look at the football club Real Madrid, they call themselves 'Los Galacticos' suggesting intergalactic ambitions, space stuff! Who is ever going to play ball in space? You never know.
A direct application to law firms, have you considered that your firm could be as powerful as General Electric, ever even considered it? You say how...

In this world there is no room for normal people, only insane, mad and obsessed people ever get along. Look well at all the 'great' people and businesses, they seem to be normal but in times of competition whatever they believe comes out and you begin to hear tales of driving colleagues really hard or setting impossible targets. Happens all the time.

For a start you have to respect the law, its place in society, your role in it.

CPD

On account of nothing staying the same for too long and being on the up and up with your law practice needs and client needs,CPD is made mandatory for the following reasons and more:

Training keeps you on top of your game
Training and developing your people helps you avoid churn and attracts people who are long termers and keen on honing their edge.
Training keeps you compliant with CPD.
Training helps you hold on to existing business by demonstrating your commitment to serging them by being up to speed.

Doing CPD is all the more trying because it is one of those things that happen to be good for you but is vaguely measurable in our ROI society and it only yields fruits or results down the line when you have already committed. It is like belief, unless you believe in a doctrine you cannot possibly derive any benefit from it

We all know we should have a personal library and read and watch little or no TV and exercise but what happens? Hustle from morning to night, go to her and do it all over again in the morning.
The forms CPD will take vary and aside from the courses offered by the local bar association, you can come up with ways to sharpen your edge
You should read a lot, share what you've come up with and you think you can contribute through writing, you can set up a YouTube Channel to talk about issues relevant to the profession or the client and you can send informed opinions on public issues.
At the core of all these activities is the focused use of your mind and the current realities of the field of play.
Keeps you sharp all the time, which is what CPD is all about.

CHANGE

A word on change, innovation and opportunity.
Its a canard that the only permanent thing in the practice of the law and in the world of business, is change.
And we have responded to this how? A few well intentioned people have made it their lives' work to push the change/innovate or die message which sounds well but really is just fear mongering and due to an excess of zeal. The ardent desire to put out their message has led to this school.

I offer another tack: if you cannot take advantage of an opportunity because it is not in line with the direction of your law firm and the type of law firm you want to become then it is not an opportunity for you.
Change is great and will always be accompanied by the sky is falling predictions. However, the thing about change is that you must see how your own law firm or legal services space can benefit from this change. How can you use the change to advance your cause and that of your law firm? How will any of this change become your own personal capital?
If you cannot figure this out then the change is really of no benefit to you.

WE NEED A NEEDS ASSESSMENT

Railing is ineffective and you can be accused of having sour grapes and yet, it still has to be said.
There is now a fundamental and structural failure of the Nigerian Legal Education system. So we need to do a needs assessment of what we want, where the Legal Education System is going and where we are going to tell our legal history to come off.
We of course need to do what we need for our time and our day with a frankness and candour that heals wounds and gets rid of resentments.

Survival of the fittest will always be the law of human nature however else we try to push but that is in the realm of private affairs. The public education system is built to be useful not useless and while we all will hustle no matter what it is a mean indicator of our way of life that we encourage or leave such a system in place

This is 2015: what does the World want from us and what do local clients want from us? What do we think we need?

It just seems like once the system has been designed the next move is to force everyone through it ? How about redesigning the deficient aspects of the system and producing more winners?

In closing it is not that the Nigerian Legal Education System is useless from birth. It's just that it doesn't seem to be addressing the needs of the individual lawyer, the law firm, the client and the Nigerian state.

THE BENEFICIAL EFFECTS OF EVERYONE ELSE

Former US president Jimmy Carter was making a commendation on the activities of Al Waleed Bin Talal, a member of the Saudi Arabian Royal family who has been vocal in calling for direct elections in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
The words used were in part ' the beneficial parts of western democracy' can be applied in the Monarchy that is Saudi Arabia.

Now law firms in some parts of the world (UK Legal Services Act 2007) have recently been given the alternative to have ownership by, from and with non-lawyers ( accounting firms, tech firms now own law firms and compete directly with regular law firms) and the 'beneficial aspects of this 'innovation ' come up to the following:

1. Having non-legal financing leads to better and deeper financed law firms.
2. This brings in diverse skill sets and opens the thinking on what can be possible such as R & D for law firms.
3. Law firms can now offer different combinations of services mixes previously unavailable.
4. The curtain of opaqueness in legal will be put asunder so that the general consuming public will be in a more equal relationship with legal professionals.

These things are potentially good things but whenever one lets the windows open some flies may come in with the breeze. This is the price paid for every step towards growth. You open the airwaves to foreign media and entertainment so you will be part of the global community and you also open up your people to foreign values and ways of thinking, both beneficial and harmful.

Having access to the best practices of other professionals and their different ways of approaching a problem and using these different approaches to enhance the practice of law will mean adopting investment strategies like R and D which is a regular medical expense and measuring law firm performance along more competitive levels of productivity like Turnover standards from Manufacturing companies.

Please note you may encounter the usual resistance to the current levels of operations in law firms i.e. the status quo being accepted as permanent and even the only way of operating.

In summary, great ideas come from everywhere and looking at the beneficial portions of the method of other types of businesses may not be such a bad idea.
Go and do it. Now.

R & D FOR LAW FIRMS

The idea behind R & D is to search for new solutions or just solutions to the problems that we face everyday in life and business. And from this basic meaning every business can and must be involved in it.
But here is the snag, traditionally only product businesses and research intensive industries like medicine, science, engineering tend to use it because if they do not they will literally die out.
Another snag is that taking out money to invest for the future is just too much. It requires a particular way of looking at the work that you do and seeing it as more.
For example, Boeing the aircraft maker and Merck the medicine maker spend $1 Billion dollars to design the Dreamliner and $1 Billion dollars to produce Viagra. These sums of money are not a special investment, they are a regular part of doing business like spending $200 million to design a jet engine. These industries aerospace and medicine have well developed pipelines of drugs, medical procedures and flying experiences lined up for years to come for the consumer.

Now legal has traditionally not done anything remotely along these lines and it really should. This is one way to create the future and to think wider about the role of legal as a business, in society and in relation to other businesses.
The feeling you get from bringing something new into existence the effort you put into it and the rewards you get all urge you to set up R & D for your law firm

First, understand that a lot of your own R & D will mean thinking. Actual thinking, examining the way things are, the impossible to change aspects of the biz, the approaches you use to tackle them problems.

Then understand that you will have the very strong urge to rationalize not changing current direction. This will be the biggest obstacle to coming up with a neat way of cracking your 'cold fusion'. Don't underestimate the ability of your rationalizations to stop you in your tracks. Really, don't.

You can also look at how other jurisdictions are practicing the law for what ever you can adapt. This is called boundarylessness, getting good ideas from everywhere. Look at other service businesses like the hotels, financial services and adapt.

MAKING IT PAY

How can legal profitably address the market that has difficulty paying for legal services?
How can a business serve its customers and make money doing it?
What about charging what the market can bear and the laws of supply and demand?
How to provide diamonds to those that cannot afford them? So if you cannot pay for a diamond you go without?

This line of questions reminds me of a blog post I read the other day by a guy on how to make the most of your time and use better business processes. In listing all the things that he refrained from doing because they 'wasted' his time, he included responding personally to comments made by readers of the said blog.
Now, note that without people reading and coming to the blog there really isn't a marketable blog and responding is a, 'waste'?

This is the dilemma the firm is in. You want clients of course but you want profitable clients you can make money doing work for. You aren't a charity. But for so many reasons you cannot say this when you are starting out or in a position that is shaky so you push the 'we care' message. However the moment you have some breathing room you throw the unprofitable clients under the bus. Literally or in attitude.
Don't feel guilt, most businesses do it.

Businesses only do things that they can do profitably and if not then they do not do it.
Now great business find ways to do what they cannot do profitably, profitably: its that simple. Getting legal services to startups who cannot pay, providing complex legal services to midsized companies, looking for ways to get your legal services out there in an affordable package.
This is the difficult work but you have it better than say the construction people who have to first invest in massive infrastructure and capacity. They still make a profit.

And always remember, the client can always walk away or flee the moment she has a viable competitive option which is some other law firm being bigger, stronger, faster, loving the game more making it a better player and then placing its focus on handicapping its competition.

You.

CLIENT MANAGEMENT

The idea is that it is okay for you to go all out to get the girl and once you get her it is now 'difficult' to go all out to keep her. Like taking her to Paris, to Royal Albert Hall, to some Bahamian Island all are regarded as part of the fare when the chase is on but once the marriage is in place these things taper off.
Me thought the idea was to use all that as a prelude and then the marriage would be significantly better if not in quantity then at least in quality.

As it concerns law firm business, this opening analogy refers to the focus on getting the client but once the client is gotten there is no elaborate, special even insane plan to manage the relationship to move it from point A to point B. So the client feels uncared for, which is even worse after being sped into the firm's book of business.

Reminds me of a conversation I overheard the other day on the bus when traders were talking about the finance people who want their business.

'Wo n so wipe 'Open an account with us and you will never regret it' nnkan ton ma n so ni yen but ti a ba ti si account yen won ni je ka wo inu office won'

This is loosely translated as: when they come to us they tell us that 'just open the account with us and you will never regret it'. When we open it, to get to see them in their office is almost impossible.
So it's a business problem, not just a law firm one and all sorts of marketing research and data have shown that it is more expensive to get one new client (seven times more) than it is to get more business from the clients that you have.

And yet. Is it that we do not know or we do not believe or that client service is seen as a luxury only our top 15% deserve? Little wonder them clients and customers respond in kind by fleeing and looking at your protestations of 'we care' as the claptrap that it is and they send less and less business your way.

There is a way out. Look at the sales process as a two step process: the first is getting the client and the next is making the relationship profitable for both you and the client or look at it as searching for oil on the offshore, onshore fields and then refining the oil into many many products.
You cannot search for oil and not process it at the refinery.
Either way getting the client is the first step, a heady thrilling first step but only a first step and if this 'client refining business' was easy all other law firms would be at it. It is not.
You need an enlightened business conscience, an open mind, a belief in investing in the necessary processes at your law firm to help you manage the client relationship.
But really you just have to have some respect. Not only for your firm and for the client but for the process itself.

Nobody ever did well at something he had no regard for. Nobody.

WINNERS MUST ALWAYS BE BLOODTHIRSTY KILLERS

In form or in spirit.
Spirit is better as you can get away with more without vile hatred laying on your door.

So you are practicing the law and the client cannot pay. If it were up to you, shaft the guy and go for a client that can but you currently need the money so you go on about how you want to help out and then accept the financial offer like an Emperor talking to a supplicant.
This post is about the paradox of getting ahead or climbing the ladder of legal and the choices you will have to make which will of course leave an indelible mark on your soul.

If you are outwardly aggressive and ruthless that may not be too good for business and if you work with a Pollyanna view you may just get laughed off the adults table so what to do?
What ruthless choices must be made and how to address the necessary Pollyanna portions of the biz? Welcome to the paradox that is life, real and new.

So get to it. Keep us posted on how you do....

P.S. if you decide to be a Pollyanna you have your work cut out for you and if you decide to be a ruthless bloodthirsty killer all you really have to be bothered about is how to hide the bodies and get rid of the traces of blood on your hands.
You can also create a third alternative.

FAMILY, MARRIAGE OR SPORTS TEAM

We are looking for the most useful analogy to describe the law firm's people dynamics so we can utter some positive contribution as to how to get the best out of your people.

The Russian writer Tolstoy said all happy families are alike. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
In bringing people into your firm does personality sway your decision materially? How do you search for features such as initiative, lone individualistic mentality, leadership?

In the happy event that you have an idea of the kind of people you want and you then get the right team on your bus there is still the drama of getting different people to go in the same direction.
The obvious answer is cash but how many teams are working on 100% and are thriving at work? It is very distressing when a chap can perform at Olympic gold level if he punches it and all he ever does is lounge all over the firm every month.
Since you have a great law firm to build this is your problem and one way to solve it is to carefully define who should be on the bus and who to invite off the bus.

You may say you want team players and for people to cooperate but what if this is just an association of chaps who cannot get stuff done and use the teamwork as a cover.
Putting it plainly, would you rather have one star team member who pulls a sizable book of business and produces ideas and pushes them through to success with the other guys basically tagging along?

Disruption

There is a new way of doing things and whoever uses the new way will beat whoever uses the old way. This is what disruption and innovation boil down to. Avoiding the use of those two words helps you to understand the sense in which they are being used here since the words are really commonplace so no two people agree on what they mean.

When you are offered an innovation you rightly ask why should we leave what we are doing now that is obviously working, what are you offering us as a certainty that the new one will be better than this?
No one can offer you that. You can only be offered potential probability or else what is the level of risk you are taking that will justify your rewards?

If you believe you are so open to change and innovation address this poser: Bill Gates says he has seen the new direction that the world is going in and that technology is going to die and be replaced with farming. He goes further to sell Microsoft and related assets to his closest competitors and washes his hand off the company totally.
Can you imagine the pandemonium, the media storm?

What is more who will follow him and sell off, everyone will try to take advantage of this and build up strength in tech but IF Bill Gates' Theory turns out to be true then they have lost out and are not innovative or keen on disruption

One can imagine that your law firm will offer any excuse for it to keep the status quo: it has been working for.years and if you are Wong you will loom like tools, weirdos, crazy people.

Well Commodore Vanderbuikt at the he ivht of his wealth sold Hus entire fleet of ships and move I to railroads. Hdid not get to build buggers ships, he left the entire industry and move I tit the railroads.

At this point a discussion in the ficnancal co felt of risk.appetite comes into determine how much youncsn embrace after usj g spreadsheets and ROI to make every investment I your law firm client and business direction. How much do you this k you should take o I your law practice for new business I terms of direction and approach and side of investment co.oared to what the figures saybtou can make.
A kick and follow approach has always been an aspects f buiofingnsolif assets such as the Boeing Jets, its Dreamliner and the Apple iPhone design project.

YOU CANNOT KNOW UNTIL YOU GO

You cannot know until you go and everything else is an exercise in laziness, procrastination and leaving your law firm mired in all sorts of statistics. And the beautiful, beautiful thing is that you will always have valid reasons for the current reality, hell you can even mouth the platitudes of innovation, stepping outside your comfort zone some and show how you are different from everyone else.

If it were all swell answer this question. If mobile phone makers had been told about a new design just like the iPhone touchscreen and asked to put it into play with the requisite effort and drive to make it the new industry standard would they have done so?
But now every phone is a touchscreen.
In your firm's defence you can say that it is the job of the promoter and champion to make you see reason or else why should you bother about it? Just shows no innovation.
How can you tell you are a dinosaur about to be vapourised or that you are stuck in your NIH zone or that your law firm is backward? At least when you know this you can decide what to do with the information.

The only solution is to do it for its own sake and be prepared for eggs on Your faces.

CATTLE AND EGRETS

For the purposes of this explanation let us assume that your law firm is the Egret and client businesses are the Cows. Let us further assume that you fully agree with this assumption though it is not100% correct to the end of the line, we just need your agreement to silence all the reasons you will use to fault this explanation going forward.

The Egret follows the Cattle because it eats the ticks that try to suck the blood off the cow by lodging in its hide..The cows will not really die out if the Egrets take a break but the Egrets literally need to feed off the cows.

What happens to the Egrets when the Cows die out or are so starved that even the ticks flee and begin to drop off?

WHAT IS STOPPING YOU ADVICE

There really is no new market trick under the sun and if you have one it was expensive for you to design develop and put into play. If it were not so every other bleeding law firm in the street would be doing it.

So we suggest that after the solid and working ideas on this blog for you to get a move on with attracting clients to your law firm it matters that we address the what is stopping you.

Why do you roll out endless excuses and then get in line once another law firm does it? Why do you give a nice head fake and mental assent but get back to the same old shite on Monday?

What is stopping you?

LAW FIRM TEAMS

A word on 'it is my client or it is our client or it is the firms client'.

There is being strong, being weak and being truly strong.

The first is where the partner yells blue murder and says 'it is my client' when cross selling is attempted and when he hoards access to and holds on to the relationship and passes it on, not.

The second is where team player is heavily promoted with a large component of 'we really do not feel up to doing it alone or can't push the lone ranger in this culture plus the 'be nice' mantra will not let us.
The weak seems like the team but why would you willingly give up what you have? Unless you had solid chaps who appreciated and reciprocated this position. In a sense the Prisoners dilemma.

The third is what John D Rockefeller and the men at Standard Oil achieved where each man was a killer and lone rugged fellow and they decided to come into the boat to cooperate. It was a cooperation of killers where CEO was merely a title and you had to convince the men of your twaddle and even be subservient to them or else your idea failed. Here, it was most important to convince the men, there was no other way.

UNDER WHAT CIRCUMSTANCES WILL YOU LET YOUR WIFE SLEEP WITH SOMEONE ELSE?

In your law firm you must have minimum, nonnegotiable standards- some things you will not do and things you will say no to. When the bills are piling up, when the world is laughing at you, when you lose money, you still say no.

This is difficult and this is easy in certain senses. Difficult because everybody is cashing in on the easy money and you will look like a fool and if you eventually fail they may be right, difficult because to justify your stance you must work really hard to provide a viable alternative or the consequences will be dire (and we all know how much we 'love' to do this kind of work).

It's easy in the sense that you don't have many choices to confuse you and that you have a lot of focus. Just stick to your plan: no speeches or second guesses or doubting. The Christian bible has some advice to offer along the lines of 'Wide is the way that leads to death and Narrow is the way that leads to life'.

Now get this: you can follow the wide way, cash in with the boys and you will get appointments, promotions, contracts and good assignments but you will be a scoundrel. So do not expect your narrow way view to be always validated by the business community and the legal services space. If this happens more power to your elbow and if not, you are still where you were previously :on the narrow road.

Saying no and walking away are strong sources of growth for your law firm because you have a reputation, you are forced to depend on your ingenuity to thrive and human nature is really funny: when people see you on have picked a position and you have reconciled yourself to your position, they give you what you want.

DOING THE WORK

Doing stuff to put your law firm ahead and on the path to international domination is not that hard because the information is out there, the models to adapt from are out there and your current disappointing reality cannot be traduced.
So clearly the actual doing of the 'it' is the problem, the courage to put your hand to the plough and navigate the inner dragons/battles that stand in the way of the law firm.

Of course it helps and is important to keep yourself abreast of current knowledge and important happenings in legal and other parts of the economy BUT at the end of it all, you just have to do the work.
You have to go for the meetings, accept your current mediocrity/failures, accept that you need to change direction and set up that joint venture with Dacheng in China or dump that client.

It is just like smoking, losing weight or going on a date: the how to information is available almost in overload but it only counts if you actually DO what the programme says.

Dominique Strauss Kahn (former head of IMF and one-time French Presidential candidate) once said that if we do not implement the solution, it is as if we did nothing.
Advice matters only if you take the action. If you are sick, you must take your pills.

WOULD YOU TAKE YOUR OWN ADVICE

We all currently practice the law in a culture that is full of hype fakery and lots of cynism where the motto seems to be, do as I say not as I do. This logically follows that if what you are saying is so great why on Gods green earth are you not doing it yourself?

Applying this idea directly to the world of business it means do bankers do want they want customers to pay them for, do investment advisers give advice that they would take and more pointedly do law firms give advise that they would take?

Taking your own advice in a capitalist system is extremely difficult because you can get people to pay for stuff once you can swing a good line and you can legally corner the market for your service or product (a monopoly) if you phrase it rightly.

A classic example is the advertising industry which designs ads and all, have you ever seen an ad company place an ad in a paper or on a billboard, then how on earth do they have the gall to tell companies to place ads all the time? If you find this train of thought a bit irksome all you have to do is to think it through. You will also find that it has wide application.

The theme here is... You got it: Practice what you preach. It will be difficult, you can hide behind a thousand legitimate reasons (this is not how business is done etc) but if you do practice what you preach you will be a breath of fresh air and always 'new' to your business partners, clients.

WHAT IS IN IT FOR ME

It is clear that the best way to get things done is with the full support and active participation of the people at your firm. Two heads are better than one, you can not do everything yourself etc.
However, the members of your team are individuals with different ideas of where your firm is headed and more to the point how to get there.

What to do? Rally the troops and issue the command: this is where we are headed and how we are going to get there so you better fall in line. This comes easier and naturally because of the pressure from work and the authority in your possession as manager or leader.

Another tack is the sneaky underhanded method in which you give off the impression of being open to change your direction and approach if presented with a viable approach and when the beginnings of one come up you shut it down.
This is understandable because it scares you or you don't fully get it or you disagree with it but in the final analysis you are asking your team to do the same, to work with an idea or direction because you said so.

A third approach is where you allow ideas to flow and give support to the proponents of the idea as well as making them its champions.
This means that everybody has the view that if you bring an idea you will make it happen and when we call you in a week or a month you better have something tangible to offer.

A fourth approach is an alignment of interests, that is, what is in it for me. As far as a nigger slave on the plantation is concerned, he does whatsoever the master says and when his 8 year life expectancy is expired he is thrown off the plantation and replaced with a younger nigger slave. Hardly any alignment of interests here.

However a law firm depends on the intelligence, imagination and drive of its people so the problem of merging the interests of the law firm and the employees does matter.
When last did any of your people show any initiative or imagination, or bring any ideas to you?
About the what's in it for me part, it may sound less noble and a bit crass but eventually each person will search his own soul and if there is no meaningful answer you have a deadweight or upset member on the team. What a drag!

GRESHAM'S LAW

The bad drives away the good. This is the essence of Gresham's Law. In every field of human activity where the bad is allowed to thrive the good is driven off.

For example, in financial services it is a notorious fact that the release of fake currency automatically leads to the hoarding of the genuine stuff.
Or when false assets and paper money is flooded into the system to curb inflation, assets that actually have value flee the market to protect their value and the market is usually left with worthless assets.
In car sales the abundance of the lemon peddler tars everyone else whether false or genuine with the same brush and leaves the genuine salesman fighting to prove he is legit first before then making the sale.

Think upon it as you go about your work. Gresham's Law.

CUSTOMER SERVICE RANT

We live in an age where no one wants to have authority for anything. This really means that no one wants to be responsible for anything whatsoever or at least he just wants to get by with as little authority as possible. This is because there so no such thing as authority, there is only authority + responsibility.

Of course in this age there are all sorts of valid reasons for this attitude but what seems to underlie it is the something for nothing ideology where you get the perks but you avoid the payment in personal accountability, sweat and all what not.

A simple 'if you are not happy return the product with no hassles' is largely absent in public and private institutions and what is more we seem to think that this is the way to be.

You see it in the banks where officers in response say to customers ' it is not my department'

Well, wide is the way to destruction and narrow is the way to law firm Valhalla.

GETTING PAID FOR WHAT?

Getting paid according to time you spend on a matter rather on the value of the matter to the client is just like diversifying your investments portfolio. It makes very little sense if you know what you are doing.

If you buy shares in a good business, you buy enough to have a decisive impact on your portfolio perhaps 70%, if you are confident of your research and the ability of the business to thrive through business cycles and all what not. Spreading your risk is actually protection against your lack of expertise or knowledge or whatever else.

In the same way if a letter is worth 20 million naira and it took you 4 hours to do will you issue a bill for four hours or 20 million naira?

LAW FIRMS CSR

Since we have all bought the idea that we must do something to 'give back' to society, let's share a few thoughts on this CSR business. If you have not bought into the idea of CSR then this post is not really for you but of course you can follow.

The idea seems to be that you are doing so well, how can you just leave everyone and everything else to go to the pits? Yes, you have paid taxes, yes it is the governments responsibility, yes you will be accused of trying to sanitise your greedy ways but you still have to do it.
Oh, did I mention that you will also be accused of getting cheap publicity for your petty altruisms?

As a law office, what kind of stuff should you get into to scratch your CSR itch? Your people have interests in all sorts of stuff so you have to pick a direction or activity to invest your CSR fund in and it will help.
If you let the decision rise naturally i.e. your guys tend to love basketball so you set up the tournament for them street kids with your people as coaches, food vendors, career counsellors and buddies.

About publicising your CSR work, since it is a business expense you have to get some return on investment and the current trend on that is positive publicity so the public will think well of you during rough times or just plain think you are the salt of the earth.
But it has to be discreet, really discreet in fact no one should even be aware that you are orchestrating it because this tends to corrupt the spirit in which the work is done.
The ideal is to do the tourney in such a way that it generates a legitimate buzz that then drives the publicity. Think of it as running a solid eatery where everybody goes to after work at five with lines that go down the blocks. Everyone then asks ' what is going on'

In summary, if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it fall, did the tree fall?

NEGATIVE TRUTHS

In this business of getting along with the client, doing great work, doing well by your people there are certain facts that are always working in the background. They are assumed to be known by all parties involved and invoked at all times so here are a few.

1. As an associate, your boss is primarily interested in what you can bring to the firm. All else is secondary.

2. You cannot build a relationship with a client on your own.You can do things to make this possible, probable but the client must pull her own weight.

3. As a Principal Partner / Managing Partner there will always be valid reasons for you to shut down new ideas and the valid reasons will be right. Don't do it.

4. You cannot get any meaningful edge or plans of action without making a significant investment of thought or time or material resources. How do you think great work comes about?

5. Where the spirit of an agreement is missing or the necessary level of effort to make a programme or deal happen, is lacking, you can expect failure and blame-throwing down the road.

YOUR FIRM OR YOUR CLIENT

The work of managing and growing the relationship your law firm has with its clients without which the business will wither, has to be done.
If not, then opportunities will fall through the cracks, delays will be met, clients' problems will be left to fester and generally a bad time will be had by all.

This role will involve answering the following questions, which has troubled all relationships: do we have a conflict of interests?
This should be obvious after some thought. For example, does a record label have any interest in investing in an artiste to give her a long profitable career or is it interested in extracting the highest value for the cheapest investment in the artiste?
Is it better for the law firm to churn legal work, to draw it out, to engage in complex expensive manoeuvres or for it to advocate for the client in the firm's internal meetings? What happens when the fees are threatened?

The drama is this: if you do all the good stuff for your client what will you have for yourself at the end of the day? If you are following the line of reasoning in this question, you will have noticed that it is implicitly assumed that your law firm's interests and your clients interests are mutually exclusive. It is not so.

The reality is this: if you meet your client's needs, your needs will be met. You just have to get ready to fight the illusion of losses and the waiting time for this idea to pay off.
Just like marriages or relationships, men will sell their souls for the wives/girlfriends who are sold out for them. And it works the other way.

A major difference between business and personal relationships in this case is that businesses really need business partners and not so much friends.

BUSINESS PARTNERS

You are not a law firm doing work for or 'advising' clients, you are business partners plain and simple.
Here are some things clients expect from you and reconsider your approach.

1. We want you to think through our business problems and offer us advice that is specific to us.
2. We want you to lead our thinking and offer us advice for our business that will be valid 5 years out.
3. We want you to be actually useful to us not just coming to collect our legal business.
4. We want you to understand us and our business: send your people here, participate in our meetings, give us your ideas on new information in our line of work, initiate projects that will enhance our competitive position.

The summary of all the above is: spend seriously on understanding the clients' business and industry and have belly to belly contact with her and her business

GIVE CLIENTS WHAT THEY WANT

The main idea behind this post is to replace the tendency to give the clients what you want to offer or provide with the aim of convincing her to accept it, with the idea of giving her what she wants, what she needs. Using your knowledge, your expertise and your insight to do for her.
Is this not what client service is about?

Paying attention to a client account is about the impression you convey and the way you treat her.
Basically you treat higher paying clients better than lower paying clients because in your mind whenever a knotty issue comes up and gives you drama you say 'all these troublesome people who pay less then they contribute'
This shouldn't trouble you if this is what you do unless you don't know that you treat your law firms clients this way.

The way you think about a particular client is the way you will treat her and this treatment will come out in subtle ways: your response time to queries, the quality of ideas that you offer, the depth of thought you put in streamlining an initiative..

There is a marked tendency in the market place for businesses to give what they want and kindly convince the customer to go along with it, a feature of the mass society, take it or leave it dynamic going on.
This is all well and good but law firms do not do mass work, they usually work with individuals and executives to coordinate the work so a specific plan of actively managing the client as an asset the same way you would manage an oil bloc or the reputation of an actor, is always being used in one form or another by the law firm.

Usually it is unconscious but there is one.

WHAT CLIENTS GO THROUGH AT YOUR LAW FIRM

For whatever reason it seems giving the customer a good experience is difficult for entities to consistently deliver or is it that the customers are asking for too much and are causing too much trouble for the value they add to the business?

Well, for the law firm it also matters the type of interaction your clients experience at your offices.
For example General counsel and In house counsel have said it over and over and are still saying it in 2015: they are not in business to serve you and give you legal business.
They want you to ask about their own businesses and get into the details with them. Not as a prelude to making the pitch.
This is called customer service.

They are not particularly concerned with your need to have their business and would like you to put your massive brainpower to make life better for them.
Please do.
If you run away from this in fear that the client will take this opportunity to aggressively reduce your fees, it really is a chance for you to make a case for your good work and why you deserve and should receive much more.
And if you aren't delivering then take it as a chance to get better.

Get it straight, there is no free money any where, only thievers get money for doing nothing. Are you a thiever?

All the above is the expected. Now for the bells and whistles.

Ever been to really nice places where you spend actual money? Everyone seems nicer, perhaps your money bought this niceness for you but my point is that places like this are better behaved and they seem to want you around and are grateful that you are here and they want you to come back e.t.c.

The reduction is this: the customer feels that you should give him a bit extra for doing business with you or the businesses that do great seem to understand this about the customer and use it in their business.
To clarify, this is not about being nice. It is first about doing your work plus the way that you do it.
All companies are the same but the way they do it is what makes one firm different from another.. That's it.
So put on thy thinking cap and decide how you want them to be treated and what they want to go away with.
Kind of like an excuse for you to give the client a reason to come back.

BAD IDEAS ABOUT MARKETING YOUR LEGAL SERVICE

1 . MARKETING IS REALLY ABOUT PUSHING PRODUCT: Too many marketing campaigns are massive exercises in pushing the product without the involvement of the marketing people in the planning process. It's as though the product is designed and then as an afterthought the marketing people are called in at the tail end.
You, my friend, do not have this option you are the product and the marketing people.

2. I COULD HAVE DONE THAT: Looking back at any sound marketing campaign it occurs to thousands of professionals that 'I could have done that' so the depth of thought and investment in the intangibles of an effective programme are discounted. Even worse the 'I could have done that ' chap actually goes on to tackle the matter with the result that the whole thing goes to bits.
Why? According to Drucker, no one ever does well in a business she does not respect and also a lawyer who dabbles in marketing in her spare time or between spells of boredom is doomed to suck at it. Fact.

3. Marketing is really about the intangibles such as perception, credibility which are secondary results of the acts that you perform. If you do not perform the acts to the right portion, you are screwed.

HOW YOU ARE GOING TO DO IT

The Breitling Navitimer costs $11,200.00 as at 2013.
This is a premium priced merchandise and it comes with a 5 year guarantee. In the horology market it occupies the highest price point.

The BMW is a premium priced vehicle that occupies the high end portion of the automobile marketplace in terms of its price and its target market: luxury.
The Toyota Corola, Hyundai Elantra are cheap cars for the masses.

The market competition formula for the Breitling and the BMW is 'we make expensive, extremely high quality stuff for the luxury customer and that of the Toyota company is 'we are democratising vehicle ownership for all'

These two competition strategies seem to work better when they are kept disparate e.g. the BMW tried to dilute its premium strategy by acquiring the Rover and marketing it for the middle class but it's genetic structure of creating premium products and premium services made sure the enterprise failed and Rover was divested.

On the other hand, the Toyota company acquired Lexus and lo and behold the Lexus became an outsider to the premium motor vehicles category which it had formerly inhabited( Audi, BMW & MERCEDES, ROLLS ROYCE, ASTON MARTIN)

The question for you is where does your law firm fit here? Do you produce your services cheaper than other law firms using a very lean structure (a massive competitive advantage) or do you produce a premium service (read service that has MNCs giving a blank cheque) for which its value commands a premium price (read Ex.Pen.Sive like Abhu Dhabi Money)?

This is about how you want to roll in the marketplace and the kind of investments you have to make. For example the BMW company has the FIZ research programme which has about 8,900 engineers coming up with the new standards of luxury and perfection. You will need a legal equivalent of the FIZ to justify your pricing.

To lock it down, whatever you pick you must give it what it needs, ergo following it to it's logical conclusion. As Dominique Strauss Kahn rightly pointed out, if we do not implement the solution to its logical conclusion we might well as not do anything.

Or think of it this way, stretching a clothes line from one end to the other means one side has to be secured firmly and the other end must stretch out and be hooked or tied down at the other end. If the second part is not hooked or tied down firmly, for whatever reason (lack of resources, laziness, wrong timing) there is no clothes line and you can hang no clothes on it.
Q.E.D.

THE BAD NEWS ABOUT LEGAL MARKETING

Return on Investment. Give me percentages. How many clients will this programme bring in. These statements from lawyers looking for guarantees of safety and ignorant about the realities of how a specifically designed marketing program for law firms will pan out.

Here are the facts that must first be addressed before you go on to what you can expect from your marketing plan.

1. You must know your market.
2. You must have the ability to serve that market.
3. You must be able to compete.

If you have these then you can expect the following DEPENDING on the drive and imagination with which you put your plan into action.

1. Your target market will know the name of your law firm, your reputation and what you can help them with. This means they know you are alive and your firm will come to mind when things you can help them with come onto their plate.

2. The market will know a lot about your firm and what you are able to do and you receive inquiries about your services.

3. Your law firm will identify the markets problem and needs that you can address realistically.

4. Your marketing will bring you to the client and you must close the sale. When you meet the CFO of a major bank through your marketing effort, it is then up to you to convince her to give you her legal business.

All the above is written , in addition to offering understanding on the process of legal marketing, to make the following point: Marketing for law firms brings you to the attention of the client and you must convince the client to hire you for each engagement.

SPARE TIME ACTIVITIES

You are a legal practitioner and your work is to study the law, go to court and practice the law and everything else may seem like health and happiness activities.

Chief financial officer, Client Relations officer, Business Development Officer, Hiring Executive to mention a few are all functions that you must carry out as fully and with as much thought and effort as you prepare for the case. Hell, you need a full time dedication to these things and if you are a solo law firm you have a Monday morning meeting with yourself and share out these duties to each office and do them. No choice in the matter.

If you consider that this is excessive, here is what your life will probably look like: you will try to cram these roles into the 10 mins left after in depth research into the law or some such move because you do not think they matter enough for you to reflect a change in your actions so your legal work will have limited reach.

You will not get as much value for the work and eventually the drama from neglecting them will cram into and stifle your legal work.

In the Christian bible there is a tale of 12 disciples whose major work was propagating the Gospel (read practicing the law) and they had to administer to the church organization (read CFO, CRO, BDO) which they had not done until the cry of the neglected threatened to stop their propagating work and then they appointed people to officially do so which left them to engage fully in their propagating work.

If a client has prepared for 7 days to rip your bills or performance to shreds and invites you over for a casual meeting and you have not, you will come out with eggs on your face.
You need a full-time focus on the role to be able to explain your position and not on your way back from court you receive the client meeting and fill it with empty protests.

You know all of this and it does make sense as you think it through.
So go do it.

LAW FIRM EXAMINATIONS

A long time ago, the global banking giant UBS launched a global review of its legal advisers in a bid to reduce its costs and be more competitive. Its total legal spend for the year in issues was $400 million. This review meant that whichever fees were not traceable to meaningful value in the bank's view would be cut and the law firm would be invited off the law firm panel.

Every year or retreat period your clients will review your legal services and if it doesn't make sense to them...

The Oando integrated energy services company also had to pass a severe string of tests to qualify as a foreign company listing on the Jo'burg and Toronto stock exchanges in its bid to raise global financing and a deep enough war chest to compete with in the hugely capital intensive (you need a lot of money to play in) oilfields of energy services.

These two examples concern your law firm because they represent the idea of your fees being valuable to the client and the idea of exams the marketplace will demand that you pass.

EXPLAINING YOUR LAW FIRMS FEES

The explaining of costs, fees and bills role in your law firm will always be very important. This is how you will get your client on your page as to your billing and fee philosophy and how you will manage their expectations and hold the line on what you consider to be effective billing for services provided.

It can be the means through which you can demonstrate innovation by using this role as your R and D unit to study global billing processes both near and far and work to create a formula that will work for both you and your client.

Your client's travel and meet people and even if they do not the internet is there, they have a social circle. It would be a pleasant surprise for you to wow them in the areas of billing and this will help you address the effects of inflation on your law firm's revenues .

Your R and D will help you through the myths of client billing and give you actual, factual data you can think with and plan with for better fees for better service. If you were a client would you stay if you had a choice?
The goal is not to get cheaper fees or convince the client to accept your bill with the usual industry arguments. It is to place a correct value on your firm and offer this to your clients.

SOMETIMES IT IS NOT YOUR FAULT

Sometimes the truth just has to be told. The reason your law firm is going this way is that you have failed to give this project the money time and drive you need to make it happen.

Or to a client: the reason you are in this mess is that you changed the deal after we made it happen and you should put up and shut up.

Or to the boss: you pay badly and want to use a job offer to sanction slavery and mediocre work. Plus you hoard all the information and assets to yourself and allow no one else to participate in working with clients.

These are hard facts you might have come up against yourself.

THE LAW FIRM CHIEF BDO.

A position like marketing or selling may be perceived to lack mental or intellectual depth or may be seen as a position for party animals or people who lack intellectual weight and come up with all sorts of shenanigans to sell the law firms services.
It may even be seen to be undeserving of a seat at the law firm's management level.
Now this where the marketing people need to acquire the needed weight, thought and intellectual depth to communicate their work, what they do and never lose sight of their invaluable contribution to the wheels of legal.

Why are Mergers and Acquisition as a practice area more sought after or looked up to than marketing legal services? I mean is M and A not largely about dating and getting companies to say I do. While it is because of the sexiness of M&A, it is also because people who have a modicum of seriousness, do not go to marketing and those who are in it, present it as gimmickry and quackery and are unable to disguise their weightlessness.
I mean acting and singing was for the weak and wastrels but even then there were those among them who took it for the Christopher Wren Cathedral they saw it as and that attitude has led to the $10 Billion dollars in tickets that Hollywood did in 2006.

This one is for the marketers of legal services. Lawyers and their ilk are a knowledgeable breed who read a lot and are thoughtful people if a tad arrogant but you will not get through to them if you lack depth if you cannot bring any TRANSFORMATIVE results to your work for them.
Your work levels must match theirs, your obsession with your marketing services must surpass theirs and the connection between what you do and what they do must be a tool you build on and exploit.

Imagine the effect on legal if a notable legal partner became a full time marketing professional for legal services and brought the weight of his drive, intellect and exposure to making it the next phase of his career? That is the kind of weight legal services marketers are looking to attain.

When chaps say marketing a certain image comes to mind and you will be looked upon in that way so you cannot help that. But you can stand as an independent bulwark by the level of thought and individual ingenuity you bring to the way that you do your own work and the answers you proffer for the accusations your fellow marketing brethren have brought your way by the way they do their work.

LAWYER SALARIES

Yours truly has been paying some attention to management faddists and a gem has been unearthed and it is about pay levels at your firm and what you are doing. Three points.

1. Where you pay above livable wage to great salaries, the people you have will not leave. On some level the amount of money is a really sticky factor and it keeps your people sticking to your firm unless they get a significantly better offer elsewhere that trumps yours on every level.
MORAL: PAY UP.

2. Lawyers who are paid well, tend to work hard, harder and avoid shirking.
MORAL: PAY UP WELL.

3. You get what you pay for: This one is really tricky because the assumption is that a 1st class is higher quality than a 3rd class or a Harvard Law is a higher quality than an Abia State University. Jack Welch has trumped this notion by saying that great people come from all places and so, with that in mind the general rule is that if you are paying starting associates fresh from law school 300,000.00 you can attract sharp people who would otherwise go to financial services in a year or two, because the finance houses can pay livable wages.
On one level you are paying for the environment the chap will bring to your place and so on.

YOU ARE LUCKY TO BE PRACTICING IN NIGERIA

Boo! You say. Well let's lay it out for you

Legal education is not so expensive because if you were in the US of A you would be saddled with a debt burden of $150,000.00 before you got your first job. You would have this debt for the next ten years plus interest rates. This is modern slavery as it is sometimes euphemistically called.

If you got in at an AM LAW 100 or 200 you are looking forward to the CRAVATH system. Eight full yours of the HUNGER GAMES or the IGOGE (think ruthless work at all times of the day) with the aim of proving whether you are worthy of the Partnership on offer.
It is an up or out strategy, a winner take all world where if you win it is great and if you do not, you are out.

It gets better. There is a slight possibility that your partnership will not last forever and the juicy prize of the bonus and partner perks and huge salaries will be withdrawn when the market calls for your firm's head but as a consolation there is risk everywhere.

All the above are mere facts, not good or bad and truth be told many local lawyers would love to do this here.

SO YOU WANNA MAKE A MILLION

Here is a financial calculation of what some bosses are thinking about when they pay their lawyers.

If an associate clocks 2,200 hours at 250 per hour that is 550,000.00 in earnings for the firm of which he is paid 145,000.00. Now if you add extras bonuses, allowances, DC plans or health, is this associate not a drain in the firm?
A closer example is just load out a single figure for it all such as 70,000.00 and leave story.

My point is this: you have to understand what your boss is tracking as she makes payments raises. For your own peace of mind, so you know if you are dead weight or you are being screwed.
Speaking with Managing Partners, their niceness and humaneness never ceases to contrast with the dragon tales one hears on the grapevine, so you wonder is there some Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde going on here?
Not really, just that most of us work with a flexible morality when it comes time to advance or protect our interests ergo your boss wants to get the most out of the producing asset i.e. the associate.

Now, about that million: no doubt about it the salary won't cut it. You gotta become a star and attempt to solve the problems your boss is responsible for.
You may fail or suck at it but you show mainly to yourself that you are willing to put in the effort to create your own equity.

AS YOU MAKE IT RAIN

Here are some background facts that you must grab to be any good at generating business for your law firm.

1. You are an expensively and well trained legal professional. Extremely knowledgeable and keen to practice the law in all its beauty so you did not train to sell or market.

2. The skills and way of thinking that make you a good lawyer do not obviously translate to skills that make you a rainmaker with the ability to bring in the business through the door.

3. You probably disdain the bit of marketing and assume that the substantive fee generating portions of your work must take precedence over all else.

4. As a lawyer, marketing is unethical and for shysters. Those who do it, God will soon catch them plus If you do great work the clients will come. No need to market.

5. If you actively or basically accept all the above its okay so do many others, in fact yours truly held these beliefs at some time in the past but you cannot hold onto them any longer.

The five things just listed will demoralize and make your sales efforts ineffective to the point of impotence.

Now let's move on to more productive alternatives:

1. Learning and making time to sell your legal services as you practice is as important as building your technical legal skills and knowledge.
You must come to believe this.

2. Marketing is a numbers game so the more times you do it the better you get at it BUT sometimes you will fail to close the deal. Be ready for this.

3. Marketing is important because if you do not bring in the business through the door using all the selling tools at your disposal you cannot learn the law and if you do it badly it will be a disaster for your legal reputation as a law firm. (The Reputation!)

4. It is up to you to develop the time, contacts, issues and resources needed to market your firm's legal services. Do not expect much slack from your superiors. (The Cold Cold World!)

5. It is very ethical to market, advertise and promote your law firm, your legal services and everything else, even aggressively.
You just have to do so creatively, within the bounds of what legal professionals are allowed to do.

Go get 'em Tiger.

WRITING THE ARTICLE

There is a fact that lawyers who consistently put out articles know that those who aspire to , who hope to or who dismiss article writing as useless and ineffective.

The hard part is not the actual writing, the transmitting of your ideas , your opinions and your expertise onto the paper or MS Word. The hard part is actually sitting down to do it.

Don't believe me? Examine your day and tell me what specific time and place you set for writing about by your expertise or whatever issue matters to your client. Probably nothing.
And this is why you do not regularly think about your expertise or how it can be applied cleverly, its level of development or what direction you are headed. The drama of practice is conspiring against you and you allow it.

THE SCHEDULE IS THE SYSTEM

You make appearances in court because there is a fixed time and place so it always happens. Following from this anything that has no fixed time and place will not get done frequently enough for you to get good at it or become expert at it.

Let's say you have a 1hr commute to the office because of traffic, decide to fit your writing onto that 1hr, five days a week and you will produce a lot of lousy writing at first but as you get to the end of the fourth week you will begin to get reasonably passable at it and see ways your ideas can help out your practice and your client industry, its regulators.

Ideas are very interesting.

They expand with use and are limited only by the mind that applies them.
This idea of a schedule works for almost everything else because anything will give way to a consistent attack.

Writing articles is on one level about practice development without a doubt, even blatant self promotion. On other levels it is about trying to offer your explanation on how things work in legal and for your client's industry, it is about making a contribution that takes legal services one step closer to being useful to your clients industry and it is very much about exploring your intellectual capital: the resource you sell as a legal professional.

So , get to it.

Check out James Clear on THE SCHEDULE IS THE SYSTEM and STEVEN PRESSFIELD'S WAR OF ART on SITTING DOWN TO DO THE WORK.

INNOVATION IS DATING, NOT WAR

Since we are all very interested in innovation and everywhere it is being touted and touted as innovate or be left behind, let's have a word.

First of all stop the talk about innovation. Not another word. If you observe chaos or entities that go on and on about innovation, they tend to be focused on their own performance, on doing better for their profit or competitive edge, usually something about how 'we are the most innovative' whatever.

This is all wrong and there is no focus on the client. This matters because the best thing about innovation is that the chaps who do it never set out to innovate and they do not even know they are innovating. It is after the fact that they look back, after doing all the work that the word innovation can be applied to them.

Focusing on how to solve the drama of the client, whether non-legal or legal, is a surer way to innovate, if you are so inclined. Coming up with some time out to sharpen the client's competitive edge and focus, forces you to get out of the me zone, our law firm and how we are doing while paying lip service to the client by claiming we are doing it all for her.

With all the noise from the competition, you can easily shift the focus on building your relationship with the client or you can throw it under the bus because of competition.

Think of practicing the business of law as dating where you are focused primarily on building a relationship with and not as competition where you are focused on crushing, on winning. This will determine the spirit with which you will make and implement decisions at your law firm.

Innovation requires inspirations and the only inspirations that have worked so far are problems. Some regular lawyer is stumped by a problem at work, with the client and has no help so he goes at it and comes out with a solution, an innovation.

Obviously the most innovative get the most paid and the law firms that are focused on talking to the clients and customers by solving their problems are the most innovative.

So get rid of the buzzwords and get to work.

GOOD THINKING, GOOD PRODUCT

A better way to go about the what type of law firm you are or do you want to be is to ask what kind of market do you want to serve. This does two things: it describes your capacity and focuses you on the market NOT on your law firm.

Focusing on the marketplace is the first place to start when planning to put out the word about your law firm. Where are the clients, what kind of problems do they have, what trends are pushing their industry and in what direction, how can your law firm assist?

Next to knowing your market, the most relevant knowledge is to know your services offering, the things that you can do and offer the clients and the various ways you can mix, adapt these services and deliver them. Knowing your services helps you to describe them in a manner that is clear and persuasive.

You should then have marketing objectives, things that you expect your plan to accomplish for you. Some of them can be based on numbers and others on other criteria that can be realistically achieved by a marketing plan. The idea being that there should be, at least, a general direction you are headed in so you can make midcourse corrections as needed.

Whatever your current reality you should have some sort of plan for industries you offer your services to so you do not overlook opportunities to be of assistance and you do not get overwhelmed with the business that begins to come in.
If your law firm is large enough, you should divvy up your work by making a plan for each practice area or more clearly by client industry so you know where a lot of your efforts are going in a certain practice direction.

To sell your legal services you must start with the marketplace needs.

A WORD ON GETTING JUICED UP

Inspirational rather than operational skills, meaning just juicing people up with no actionable intelligence or practical direction for them to take that the inspirer can be called out on and she can hang herself out to dry on. Kind of like saying 'if this does not happen I will self destruct'
This kind of acceptance of responsibility is too rare in our day and so true greatness will always be lacking because the point is you put your mouth where your money is and when the time comes to pay up the debt you pay up. This is called integrity.

You think because the law or your office or your moral authority provides corporate personality you can just coast as a pseudo legit? Good luck with that in this culture of hype and fakery.

Another aspect is that people cannot continually be fed on this motivation or inspiration business, it can become a kind of drug chaps go on and on and on taking and instead of the quackery levels being addressed some actionable intelligence is attached to the end of the inspirational worm and it is labeled as solid stuff.
Gimme a break! Look at all the chaps who get stuff done they are not masses people or such stuff. Is it an accident that the great inspirationers cannot point to any tangible work they have created? Who built our roads, our technology, who wrote the art, history poetry? Is it inspiration. Art?
The need for the motivational quacks in this world is obvious and so the practitioners abound but what solace does it offer to our affairs?

Are we throwing out the baby with the bath water and are the charlatans clouding the benefits of the motivation schools or is this school currently at a stage that must be passed, a level that can only be thrived at with a certain capacity and once that capacity is exceeded it ceases to work and to make sense.

WHAT THE RIGHT PRICE IS

Starting a price war (reducing your fees as a competitive advantage) is like the Prisoners dilemma, if you hold the line the fees will be high enough and even higher for everyone but if you fail to hold the line on fees you then horribly low prices all across the board.

A fact to help clarify your thinking is that there is such a thing as too cheap to be true. If the price is ridiculously low then quality is questionable. This is NOT a fixed rule and client's will have to learn to differentiate between quality and price, seeking if there is a connection.

Crazy as it seems, everyone suspects whether cheap stuff is the best quality available or whether it is even of high quality and since there is no objective means of assessing a lawyer's value before the service is provided, clients look to high prices , appearances and name recognition.

The low priced, non-lawyer competitor who gives questionable quality legal work and who clients go to is another factor to consider when setting the fees at your shop. Plus they will not always remain of questionable quality and will co-opt or compel lawyers into the fee levels they have set by being able to participate in the market at a cheaper price, without the regular lawyer's overhead.

The usual levers to stave off the competition include cost reduction, increasing yield, manufacturing justification for price increases and actual Innovation: creating a new product or service, NOT a line extension.. Actual research and development.

The moral here for setting the right fees is to do less with more (automate, outsource, project manage, use repeatable processes), to reduce your costs to the lowest point possible where the highest quality is guaranteed and no lower.