Talk Across Business Units

In business it is said a lot of the time that the customer is always right or that the customer is King. A soccer version could be that when the team is doing badly no one sacks the management or the team owner, it is always the team coach who gets it. What this means for your law firm is that the type of clients you have, matter. From the perspective of the level of fees they provide, their level of sophistication, their skill level, risk appetite and so on. Let's say, your law firm is young and full of cutting edge practitioners all under thirty who fast, energetic and full of push. If it so happens that you are dealing with a blue chip company your firm will learn the value of patience, due process and bureaucracy. Now compare that to another client that is as wild and feeling as your young Turks are! You will both be competing to see who stays up all night more days in the week.
The point being that unless your advice is taken, used you really will not thrive as a law firm because you are in the advice business, a global trillion dollar industry. And your client will not 'get' it, you will, so getting your client to place value on and use your advice is where your law firm is headed and this is after the 'we just offer advice, they decide whether they use it or not' phase and the box of 'we only deal with legal matters'. In point of fact the key to getting your legal advice used is demonstrating that you have value outside legal matters, that you can place issues in context with over different areas of operation because of the value you have demonstrated, that you can offer insight and mental Infrastructure to issues outside legal matters to the point where you are being asked 'are you sure you guys don't want to leave legal?'. Getting your legal expertise used is about building influence. Not political nonsense but going out of your legal sandbox to play with the other kids, to establish points of contact that mean your client reaches out to you outside of legal matters. And this idea of looking outside your sandbox doesn't just affect law land. Sir Martin Sorrell over at WPP has frequently said that one of his three pillars is getting his people within WPP to communicate with each other across different units and not remain in their silos. Marketing talks with manufacturing, R &D talks with sales etc. And let's face it most of the exciting business problems are business business problems. How to make ABC happen and not legal, litigation, litigation all the time.