Something new?

I have a problem when innovation and lawyers are mentioned in the same sentence.

'Innovation' is one of those lazy words employed by lawyers (and their marketers) in the hope that it will make them look smart (another lazy word - forgive me, I spent a long time as a lawyer and then crossed to the dark side of marketing). 

In a recent article in The Lawyer, Clifford Chance’s Visser warns firms: innovate or die, Clifford Chance's head of innovation was quoted “We will see part of the work go to disruptive firms if we don’t take any action. The next generation of lawyers is crucial to achieving innovation and change."

Hmmm.   

So imagine my delight when reading Bruce MacEwen's latest article, Letter from London: Part II, in Adam Smith, Esq. In it, Bruce writes,

“Innovation,” however, represents something else entirely to most people who bring it up.  It’s invoked as a separate and unique category of human inventiveness, and the implied yardstick is that if it’s not “disruptive” it’s not real innovation.  Disruption, in turn, implies non-linear, discontinuous change, with near banishment of the old order: Cars vs. horses, iTunes vs. CDs, smartphones vs. BlackBerrys.

If disruption in this sense is the acid test for innovation, then we think Law Land is nowhere.  We are still doing basically what we’ve always been doing, using people drawn from the same backgrounds, charging clients under the same revenue model, and governing and organizing our firms using the same managerial model.

Perceptive and true.

Getting it . . . or not

I remain puzzled as to why some people who should know better don't seem to get how client relationship works.

I was recently told about a senior partner in a law firm, who was asked if he was free to meet a new client - a client whom the firm in question had been assiduously courting over a long period. The client had eventually been landed, and work was starting to flow. The partner had not been involved in the process but his department had been.

The partner's response was, "Do I have to? Now we've got the client, and the work, is it really necessary?"

You may be thinking that I have made this story up. Sadly not. 

I wonder how long that client will stay.

Why important matters

I am chair of trustees of a mental health charity in South East London. I spent part of yesterday morning with our Strategic Development Director, reviewing how we are taking our strategy forward. In the course of our discussion, I talked with her about how I see my role as chair. We agreed that a key part of it is encouraging the executive team to remain focused on the Important.

The demands of everyday management are such that it is all too easy to allow the Urgent to push the Important to the background. We all do this. There is always firefighting and the natural reaction is that the Urgent has to take priority.

Well, yes and no. Yes, because small fires have an uncanny knack of becoming bigger ones; and no, because without that focus on the Important, the risk is that the organisation stalls, and that strategic issues drift*. 

The trick is to strike that necessary balance - easier said than done, perhaps, but all the same essential. 

*And, in case you are wondering, in the charity we are all focused - trustees and executive team - on the Important. Yes, there are any number of Urgent matters - that's the nature of the services we provide - but we want to go on being able to provide them, and that means that the Important is important. 

Some thoughts about value

The end of November and we were in a hotel, a little north of London. I had booked the room online, after a fairly hurried web search (grandchildren don't arrive to a timetable). With few hotels in the area, the choice was limited. 

The hotel's website looked good: clean design, good images, and not too much guff. What I didn't do, but will in future, is look at what people said about their experiences of staying there. I did that the following day. A little too late.

What we found, within a short time of arriving, was a gap between what the website promised ("gracious country living"), and what the hotel delivered ("old, and tired, and dirty") - the language is my wife's. To some extent, there is always going to be this risk. I have learnt, over the years, to treat hotel websites with a degree of caution (a passing acquaintance with the potential deceit of marketing is useful) but what really got me this time was all about price and value.

The hotel wasn't cheap. Perhaps not quite Central London rates, but not far off - and had they delivered on the website promise, we would have felt we had had value. As it was, we felt ripped off. It is a hotel we won't be going to again, and even if we haven't posted any comment on TripAdvisor, we have told a lot of people about it.

And it made me think about how law firms and their clients look at value and price - and why when I talk with clients in the course of client feedback interviews, what they want to talk about when we talk about fees is not price but is value. For when clients are making decisions about their lawyers, and whether they are going to instruct them, or instruct them again, what the client will look at is value. And yet many lawyers are not capable of articulating what value they deliver, and, worse, many still make assumptions about what their clients value - rather than asking them.

Don't assume you know the answer, ask the question!

Client feedback is always interesting. Well, it should be, and if you are naturally curious, and allow the client time, it almost certainly will be. But be prepared for there to be resistance: the lawyer closest to the client may fear a loss of control; the client may think this is simply another box its lawyers want to tick; lawyers generally, as I have said before, rarely like questions being asked where they don't know the answers.

And it always seems easier to make assumptions about how things are going. After all, surely if the client is continuing to give you instructions, and is paying you, and if she hasn't complained, all must be well? 

Perhaps - but then again, perhaps not.

Earlier in the autumn I called a client about setting up a client feedback interview. Her immediate response: "I don't really do satisfaction surveys". We talked some more. I explained that it wasn't just about satisfaction (or dissatisfaction), but was an opportunity to talk about what really mattered to her in the relationship with her lawyers. And that we would likely be done in an hour. Two weeks later, the hour stretched to nearly two, and the insights she gave about the law firm I was asking about, and her group's approach to how they engaged with lawyers, and what they were really looking for, were useful, and are thought provoking. And they helped me make sense of some of the research I had done before I went to see the client.  

How the firm uses that knowledge is now for them to decide - but they have asked the questions.

And if you want to talk about how a client feedback programme might work for you, and what is involved, give me a call or drop me a line.