What’s more important to you – your ego or the client’s happiness?
I recently spoke with a colleague who is one of the finest lawyers I have ever met. He’s smart, well-regarded, and quoted nationally. He’s immersed himself in his field of practice so deeply that he’s forgotten more than I’ll likely know during my career.
Anyway, this lawyer travelled over 3,000 miles and took a chunk of time out of his own busy schedule to pick in with another lawyer’s case. This is heavy lifting sort of stuff, depositions of Big Bad People who (allegedly) do Very Nasty Things. My colleague is one of the only people in the country with the skill set needed to tackle the deposition testimony.
So my colleague battles TSA, gets on a plane, lugs his stuff through the airport and leaves his family and office behind in the hopes of helping to get some litigant a fair shake at things. And when he walks into the courtroom the judge promptly tells him that he can’t take the deposition testimony.
In other words, this learned colleague schlepped across the country at great cost to himself and his practice only to be thrown to the curb.
What would YOU do if this happened to you? If it were me there would be steam coming out of my ears.
Not my colleague. He went back to his hotel room to finish preparing for the deposition. When he was done, he gave his notes and guides to one of the other lawyers on the case.
It takes a lot to leave your ego at the door. Yet this is exactly what we as lawyers must do in service to our clients.
Our clients routinely make demands on our time. They ask repetitive questions, seem to forget the most basic of instructions, and present information in a way that is disorganized at best and chaotic at worst. We have set up processes that make it easier for us to do business without regard to whether it’s easier for our clients to do business with us. And that’s the problem.
We let ego get in the way of making our client happy. We use our own constructs to retain order in the office, to facilitate our control over the situation and to fit within our worldview of how things should be done.
But we forgot to ask our clients how they need us to work in order to make their lives easier. To help them get to the end of the process easily and happily, we need to learn what they need and how they need the office to function. We need to reconstruct our businesses (yes, our law firms are businesses) in a way that comports with their reality rather than merely considering our own.
In other words – we need to check our ego at the door. There’s no place for our ego because it creates roadblocks to productivity, and barriers to client satisfaction.
I’m not saying that productivity goes out the windows in favor of doing everything the client wants. What I am proposing, however, is that we look through our client’s eyes to see their reality in formulating our processes. There’s a middle ground here, a way for it to make sense for them as well as for us.
In so doing, we create a client-centric firm that is productive, effective and more efficient in all respects.
Photo courtesy of HazelCoffee.
