What do clients want and how can lawyers deliver?

John Giles, one of the partners over at Michalsons, published a post every lawyer should read. His post is titled "What clients want" and it certainly got my attention:

I recently used an attorney to evict one of my tenants and recover rent that they had not paid. It was really interesting to be on the other side of the fence for once. Rather than being an attorney providing a service to a client, I was the client receiving the service from an attorney. I must say it was not a good experience. But I learnt a lot from it and it made me realise “what clients want“. So here are some of the things that, as a client, I wanted. I have made a promise to myself that I will always try to do the same things for my clients.

Giles sets out a number of ways attorneys can really improve their levels of service and more effectively give their clients what they really want from their advisors. I wish I could say I have been doing all these things for my clients but it is so easy to get caught up in the myriad tasks and deadlines that I too easily forget about some of the basics.

Being an attorney is a complicated occupation. There must be a dozen attorneys in a kilometre radius from my office (and just about any other street corner you may find yourself at in most major cities) and competition for some types of work is fierce. As clients become even more cost conscious attorneys are pressed to adopt a number of strategies to secure and keep their clients. Many attorneys in smaller firms will charge lower fees and attorneys in larger firms just won't do work for certain clients who can't afford their fees. Add the perennial perceived value challenge to the mix and the end result is often a land grab for as much work as you can bring in. The problem with that approach is that unless the volume of work is appropriate given the type of cases involved (volume works well for debt collections, not much variation), the danger is not dedicating enough focus to each file and the client behind that file.

At that point service quality deteriorates and clients become frustrated. Some clients will ask questions, challenge their attorneys where they are not giving enough feedback and others will keep quiet, perhaps assuming that this is normal and that something must be going on. That latter group of clients is perhaps most worrying and too easy to overlook.

I've been thinking about this quite a bit and the solution, for me at least, is probably a little counter-intuitive but I think it is the right one. My solution is to be far more selective about which clients I take on and spend more time focusing on a smaller client base and the work I am most passionate about, aiming for much improved and personal service. We all have clients who are not our ideal clients or who simply don't see the value in what we do and delay payments or simply don't pay at all. Those clients also tend to take up a lot of time which, given time's scarcity, comes from time that could be spent on the sorts of clients we'd rather focus on. That often also comes after our less than ideal clients persuade us to reduce our fees to barely break even levels.

I remember having a conversation with Richard Mulholland one night in Japan in 2008 as we walked through the streets of Sapporo to find an Italian place for dinner. We were talking about pricing professional services and, at one point in the conversation, Rich made the point (I'll paraphrase what I took away from his point) that when you start charging more for your services, whether it be to focus on better paying work or to place a higher value on your work, some clients will stop briefing you and move on to more suitable advisors. What happens in the process is that you find yourself in a position to give your clients who remain far better service without the constant worry about where the money is coming from to pay bills.

It sounds pretty cold to reduce client choice and the manner in which a business is conducted to Rands and cents but these are businesses intended to make a profit and sustain their proprietors, freeing them to focus on the important stuff - their clients' files and their objectives.

What Giles is talking about in his post is meaningful and personal service which should be every attorney's goal (well, at least those attorneys who would like to cultivate a loyal and better quality client base). These are things worth doing well.

Are digital agencies ignoring legalities at their client's expense?

Digital agencies are expanding and innovating at a rapid pace to take advantage of the increasing demand for their services. This morning's news about the Brandsh, Cambrient and Stonewall+ merger to create Native is a pretty clear sign of the local digital agency ecosystem's development and perhaps even its maturation. It also reminds me that, in this push to serve and stimulate local business' demand for digital services, agencies may be neglecting the unpleasant legalities that impact on their campaigns, possibly at their clients' expense.

The social Web is an exciting space to work in and it changes pretty quickly. Campaigns designed to take advantage of its dynamics are often innovative and push the envelope both from a marketing and legal perspective. These campaigns often introduce novel legal issues which both underpin the campaigns themselves and must be sufficiently addressed or risk a wasted investment in the campaign's development, potential litigation for rights infringements and unwanted reputational harm.

So what should digital agencies be doing? My recommendation has always been that digital agencies incorporate a legal component into their campaign conception, planning, development and implementation. Think of it as a matter of prevention very possibly being better than the cure. Introducing a lawyer at an early stage and keeping that lawyer in the loop as the campaign is developed and implemented gives digital agencies the ability to identify and address any legal issues which may interfere with or even scuttle the campaign. Just as the agency's planning process is designed to lay a good foundation for the campaign's execution, incorporating legal advice from inception is intended to lay a sound legal foundation for the campaign. It is common sense from a legal perspective and while this approach is not a guarantee that legal challenges won't arise down the line, it is a way to reduce the likelihood of a sustainable claim arising.

Some agencies are very much aware of the need to cater for legalities and they develop their own frameworks to cater for possible legal issues. Unfortunately this DIY-style process often involves copying terms and conditions from other websites and developing frameworks based on other campaigns. The problem with this is that the "templates" used to develop the agency's legal framework are often poor copies of other templates or similarly drafted by well-meaning people who lack any meaningful legal training or competence. This is a recipe for disaster.

As self serving as this post sounds, the simple fact is that the legalities that impact on these remarkable campaigns are frequently not settled and require insight into both the law and the digital and social space these campaigns operate in to adequately anticipate and cater for possible challenges. DIY approaches or not taking adequate steps to cater for these legalities at all will only expose clients to a degree of risk they didn't anticipate and have negative consequences for the clients, their agencies and perceptions of these campaigns generally.

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Image credit: Richard Lovett, Creative Artists Agency by Robert Scoble, licensed CC BY 2.0

Speaking plainly about what we do

My post the other day got me thinking about how lawyers explain what they do to clients. I realised that we, as lawyers, have this tendency to speak in terms of legal disciplines and categories rather than in terms of what we can do for clients in real terms. We don't even use standard legal categories either. A typical law firm will explain that its many lawyers practice:

• contract law;


• banking and finance law;


• employment law;


• intellectual property law;


• technology law; etc

As much as we, the lawyers, may think this is a pretty clear indication of what we can do for our clients, I wonder how many of our clients wake up and say the following to themselves:

"Hmm, I need a lawyer who can handle a technology law thing with a little contract law and an element of employment law for that project ..."

I don't imagine that is how many of our clients conceptualise their legal requirements. Instead I can see a client thinking about her requirements in more practical terms. She may be working on an advertising campaign or about to sign a lease agreement and needs a lawyer to prepare the documents necessary to make that possible or even review an existing set of documents and advise her about their adequacy.



There is a disconnect between how lawyers think and talk and how our clients think and talk (unless, of course, our clients are former lawyers in which case we simply speak different dialects). We, the lawyers, need to speak using less jargon and legalese if we have any hopes of connecting with our clients in real terms. A good place to start is the "what we do" pages on our websites. I think dealing with lawyers can be an intimidating enough prospect and still having to decipher what "what we do" page is just a frustrating experience.

When I looked at how we describe what we do I saw some of the same language issues. I then started thinking that a better way to describe what we do is to approach the question from a client's perspective. Two analogies for legal services came to mind: building a house and developing a software application. Creating a solid legal framework is a little like building a house. As lawyers, we incorporate a number of features into an agreement or policy document that should give a client the equivalent of a solid foundation, four walls and a roof. We also furnish that house and even add a coat of paint. The end result is a legal framework that is functional and aesthetically pleasing. In other words, it accurately describes the legal relationship it is intended to govern and it is intelligible.

In software terms, the law is a bit like a programming language. To borrow from Professor Lawrence Lessig's book title (I still need to read Code 2.0 myself so don't take this as indicative of what the book is about), the law is code and the language we use can be used to create a variety of legal frameworks, both simple and complex. The end result is a sort of legal software application which should achieve a result or set of results.

Whether we, the lawyers, use a construction, software development or other analogy, legal services and how those services are described should be framed in more helpful terms if they are to be relevant to clients. Exactly how we present what can be a dizzying array of legal services in plain terms is a challenge and an ongoing one at that. As a starting point, take a look at how we are doing it at this firm. I edited our "Services" page this morning.