In Search of Perfect Client Service

Interesting post in Rees Morrison's Law Department Management blog. Thoughts on Why Law Departments Retain Outside Counsel discusses several theories.  First,  brains vs brawn.  This theory postulates that inside counsel handle the routine stuff but turn to outside counsel for more challenging work.  Second, the overflow theory.  Here, outside counsel are retained whenever there is too much work for inside counsel to handle.  Third, the theory of core competency.  By this theory, inside counsel concentrate on those areas where they excel and outsource the rest.  The kissing cousin of this theory is the CYA theory--use outside counsel whenever a potential scapegoat is necessary.

I am hardly in a position to argue whether there is any truth to these theories.  But I have to say that they are strangers to my personal experience.  In my experience, good inside counsel want good teammates.  They can better leverage their skills, experience and understanding of the business by working with people who view them, and treat them, as a teammate.  And I always benefit from having inside counsel as a teammate precisely because they have to know more than I do about the business and typically the dispute.  Invariably, they're great brainstroming buddies.  They already have earned the confidence of inside management and potential witnesses.  I want that confidence to rub off on me--it makes my life so much easier.  And so on.

So now we've heard from a consultant and an outside counsel.  Inside counsel, what's the answer?

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Dan Hull of What About Clients is the leader of the Good-Writing-Is-A-Necessity Bandwagon.  See some of his posts here.  But kudos to Michelle Golden of Golden Practices for keeping this critical topic front and center with her post highlighting the cost Rogers Communications, Inc. from a misplaced comma. (The cost is $2.13 million, by the way.) 

Its tempting to dismiss such stories with a dismissive "other-people-make-those mistakes-not-me" wave.  Resist that temptation.  Use the story as a reminder that a great deal rides on everything you do for your client, and your client is entitled to your very best, most-focused and concerted effort.

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Thanks to my friend Dan Hull at What About Clients for introducing (at least to me) the concept of "muscle boutiques."   Top talent, small firms, lower overhead, no deadwood.  Why should clients pay for those unprofitable offices in luxury cities? Do you get more value per person from Navy Seals or several battalions of infantry?  Most of the time, the answer is a no-brainer.

The trick, of course, is separating the muscle boutiques from the rest so clients can move from A to B with minimal effort.  There ought to be a list.

UPDATE: I was just reviewing some slides Tom Peters posted and came across this:
"Small Giants: Companies that choose to be great instead of good."

Small Giants = Muscle Boutiques.

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Check out this post by Tom Collins at morepartnerincome.  Tom refers to an article by Bob Burns at Brouse McDowell in Akron, Ohio.  Bob is a former inhouse attorney and has both selected and been selected, so he knows of what he speaks.  The article says  "I believe that a business should consider the 'Five C's': (1) competency; (2) capacity; (3) commitment; (4) communication; and (5) cost."

You can see the entirety of Bob's article here.  Thanks to Tom for sharing it.

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The Greatest American Lawyer has a very interesting post titled "Being Big Provides No Intrinsic Value To The Client At All." GAL posits this question:

 So what value is there to the client in being big? Oh sure, big law has developed a method to bill clients more hours and to drive its own internal revenue stream. There is no question that big law is the singularly perfect business model for that. But, I am talking about the client. I am talking about providing value to the client. Value defined as efficiency. Value defined as skill. Value defined as the best legal resource per dollar. I can't think of a single advantage that big law has on those issues. Can you?

Dan Hull picked up the same theme here.  I thought I might pick up on the discussion and try to answer the question, at least from my perspective.

Let me provide a bit information about me that no doubt colors my thinking.  When I left law school, I joined a firm of 70 lawyers, firmly "mid-sized" by then-existing Chicago standards.  That firm grew and grew, and by the time I left 18 years later, it was about 400 lawyers in 5 cities.  I joined a "boutique" litigation firm of 30 lawyers where I have been for the last 5 years.  I've never seen life as a solo or even a firm as small as Dan's.

I have come to believe that firms are a lot like NBA Centers.  Great teams frequently are built around great centers--Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem, Shaq, to name a few.  But not all great teams have great centers--take the Chicago Bulls of the 1990s.  Remember such luminaries as Will Perdue, Stacy King, Bill Wennington?  Probably not.  Michael and Scottie did not need a great center to have a great team. But even centers like the great ones I named have limited value in certain situations.  When North Carolina played four corners offense, who remembers their centers?  When the game is run and gun, the big guys barely have time to get up and down the floor before the game is coming back the other way.

The point of this is that "there is a season for everything."  Big firms do have their place.  When corporations have huge, immediate problems, they frequently don't have time to seek out great virtual teams or joint ventures of smaller firms.  They need highly educated, well-trained bodies immediately.  Big firms can provide that resource.  Likewise, when a corporation wants to consolidate its work in order to obtain a better overall fee, big firms have the breadth of skill to be able to offer the client what it needs.  When a transaction is complicated and involves tax, real estate, finance, benefits, labor and corporate issues, big firms tend to be the places that have people with expertise in all of those disciplines.

It used to be that people went to big firm because they had library resources unavailable to the small firm or solo.  In those days of old, big firms had the secretaries who could crank out multiple drafts of briefs, lawyers who could "cite check" and bodies who could search out answers to interrogatories while drafting similar requests so numerous that they could just overwhelm the smaller adversary.  With the advent of the computer and its ubiquity, those advantages are of historical consequence only.

One other thing remains, though it too is changing in my view, however slowly.  That is the "safety" factor.  People buy comfort.  People buy political security.  I've heard it said that no one was ever fired for hiring Skadden, at least not until the bill arrived.  But it is inescapably that where consequences matter, there is safety in size, at least if you're retaining Shaq or Kareem.  There isn't great security in retaining Will Perdue.

What does all this yammering mean? It means that there is no single right answer to GAL's question.  It means that some big firms are as worthless as a slow, uncoordinated giant who can't score, rebound or play defense.  It means that the elite big firms will continue to provide riches to their partners.  It means that sophisticated clients will look beyond size and focus on the team.  Being from Chicago, I'll stack Michael and Scottie's teams against any. 

For me, I believe that the best answer is better explained using a military metaphor.  Sometimes the number of boots on the ground matter.  That's why we have the Army and Marines.  Sometimes, and almost always for the really tough problems, you're better off with an elite Navy Seal Team or the Delta Force. Small and elite is where you get the best of the best.

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Are you really important to your law firm?  If not, might you be better off by being a premier client at a different firm?

Those are two questions raised by Rees Morrison's post "Be primary to a regional firm rather than tertiary to a national powerhouse" in his Law Department Management blog.  His conclusion:

If your revenue accounts for a significant portion of a law firm's billings, or even the largest chunk of a major partner's billings, you will be treated with respect, deference, and extra efforts. If the same amount of gold rarely gets caught in the sieve of a huge firm or a huge biller, your prospects will be much worse.

Rees doesn't answer the questions he poses.  I will, however, because this is the dirty little secret of big law firms. Not every lawyer in every large firm is an exceptional lawyer.  Some are very average.  Some associates are less than average, and some are so unconcerned with their career at the firm that they are not willing to go the extra mile.  There are times, and at times they are frequent, where limited resources have to be allocated.  Not enough associates.  Or a choice between a good associate and one who is not as good.  Same with paralegals.  A partner facing a choice between trying a case for a huge client and trying a case for a smaller client.  Who gets "handed off"?  Anyone who has worked at a large firm has countless examples where smaller clients received short shrift. Its like making sausage--if you don't talk about it, maybe you can ignore the process while you're being served.

There are great law firms that are smaller than the major firms.  There are elegant boutiques where your business would make you the dominant client.  Those are the places to be.

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