client — Legal Practice Pro

7 Client Relations Tips To Wow Them Before The Consultation

June 22, 2010 By Jay Fleischman

Are there small client relations tweaks your law firm can implement right now to make for more of a WOW experience for people when they walk through your door?

Client relations are the bastard stepchild of the inner workings of a law firm. You’ve got to run your law firm and turn out the best possible product. Everyone working in the firm must do their job as well as they possibly can, often in spite of the client. You know your legal marketing efforts need to bring in business, but you usually forget that referrals come as a consequence of superior client relations and the quality of the service your law firm provides – not merely results.

So you’ve got to provide a fantastic first impression, train your employees in the art of client relations, foster independent thinking and grease the wheels to make it happen. But let’s be honest with one another – who the hell has the time to make nice-nice when opposing counsel is a jerk, the client seems to be actively working against their own interest, and the two paralegals are complaining to you about how long the other one takes for lunch each day?

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Filed Under: Law Office Management Tagged With: client, client relations, consultation, firm, law firm, tips, wow

Running A Law Firm Means Leaving Your Ego At The Door

April 20, 2010 By Jay Fleischman

Leave Your Ego At The Door

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.

Filed Under: Law Office Management Tagged With: client, client service, ethics, law firm, running a law firm

5 Reasons Why I Educate My “Competition”

March 16, 2010 By Jay Fleischman

One of my readers sent me a question a few weeks ago, asking me if I wasn’t worried that I was educating my competition on the ways of online legal marketing and the use of social media in the legal profession.

The simple answer is that I’m not concerned in the least bit. But real life is seldom simple, so here are my 5 reasons why I want my competition to know all about online legal marketing:

The Prospective Client is More Important Than The Lawyer: I want my prospective clients to walk in the door filled with the right information about bankruptcy, not some mumbo-jumbo they’ve picked up from a talking head on TV. If they’re properly educated then I don’t need to spend hours swimming upstream. In fact, a local bankruptcy lawyer on Long Island writes an excellent blog to which I refer clients all the time.
My Clients Are Different Than Yours: You read that last sentence right – I send my clients to another local lawyer for his insights when I don’t have a piece of content at the ready. Doing this isn’t a big deal to me because I know my clients, and everything I do is specifically targeted towards a single client persona. My client can read another local lawyer’s blog and think, “That’s interesting,” but it won’t connect with them to the extent that mine will. So, too, my blog won’t connect with a client who doesn’t fit my target client persona. My legal marketing efforts target my clients only, and not the people who may not fit my client profile.
There’s Enough Work To Go Around: Let’s face it – my law firm couldn’t handle every single bankruptcy case in New York if we wanted to. Impossible. I could use every legal marketing tool in my arsenal (and I often do), but I’m not so interested in filing 25,000 bankruptcy cases per quarter in New York City.
Collaboration Instead Of Competition: I’m not giving up any trade secrets on this blog or on any other for which I write. I’m discussing my thoughts on where we’re going in online legal marketing and sharing tips I’ve picked up over the years and tested for my benefit. If someone local wants to take the time to read and implement it, so much the better.
A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats: If what I do here can lift the access to quality information to consumers in New York (where I practice) and teach lawyers how to connect with people on a human level then we’ll all be able to do better – better work for our clients, a better job at being lawyers, a better outcome for the process.

Maybe it sounds hokey, maybe it’s a little too kumbaya (to borrow a term used by Sonia Simone) and perhaps it doesn’t resonate with you. If that’s the case, no problem – keep on doing what works for you.

But I urge you to take a step back and consider what I’ve said here, and whether the way the legal profession has evolved (or failed to evolve) in terms of customer service, creating real connections with the public and delivering outstanding service hasn’t been a bit … shall we say, stilted up to now. Don’t we deserve a new model, a new way to reach potential clients and delivery remarkable results?

This is exactly why I speak at conference all around the country each year, delivering value not only on the topic of legal marketing but also substantive law. It’s why I sat in a room two years ago and taught 15 of my local colleagues how to handle discharge violations in bankruptcy – a field in which I practice heavily.

If this blog is the model, then so be it. But I think you’ve all got something within you, some spark that makes you want to educate your local colleagues so that the bar is raised.

Photo of Boalt Hall lecture hall by umjanedoan.

Filed Under: Legal Marketing Tagged With: bankruptcy, bankruptcy lawyers, client, lawyers, Legal Marketing, legal profession, new york

Marketing Your Law Firm – A Signed Retainer Doesn’t Equal Success

February 26, 2009 By Jay Fleischman

Marketing your law firm is often thought to begin with an ad or some promotional piece – a blog, an article, press release, whatever. And the legal marketing ends when the client signs the retainer agreement. We breathe a sigh of relief. Game over.

Not so much.

Have you ever had a client who was just perfect? Showed up in your office with everything organized, fee in hand, patient and happy to be with you?

Maybe they brought along all the documents on CD-ROM as well as in hard copy, just in case you wanted them on your computer?

How did that make you feel about how well you were marketing your law firm – the fact that you could attract such a PERFECT client?

How much easier did that make your job?

Now . . . why couldn’t ALL bankruptcy clients be just like that? The world would be a better place, roses would smell sweeter, and you’d whistle as you walked into the office each morning.

The mantra of the consumer bankruptcy lawyer is, “If I can get ‘em in the office, I can get ‘em to sign up with me.”

Though that’s laudable, it’s only a small portion of the equation. Marketing your law firm begins here, it doesn’t end here.

Why? Because the real work starts the minute the prospect becomes a client and signs a retainer agreement. Whether $100, $200 or more changes hands it is not enough to compensate you for the work you need to do merely to get the Petition into shape for signature.

Tax returns, bank statements, bills, financial information . . . not to mention the seemingly endless barrage of phone calls from clients demanding your attention.

But that’s only the beginning. Your client is undoubtedly paying your fees in installments. So that means you’ve got to chase the client down for money. And if that money doesn’t come in fast enough you’re looking a whole new round of documents to be provided.

Round and round it goes.

If you’re lucky, the client comes back (eventually) and signs the Petition.

But we all know there’s a decent chance Mr. Debtor is gonna fall off the dark side of the moon. Someone put a bug in his ear that bankruptcy is the end of the world, or maybe he thinks his world is better merely for having hire you in the first place.

Let me ask you to do this simple exercise:

List the number of clients who have retained you in each month since June 2008;
List the number of clients from each month who have paid your fees in full as of February 25, 2009.

Is there a disparity, even a small one?

There’s a reason WHY this phenomenon occurs in the world of the consumer bankruptcy lawyer.

It’s called . . . the effective marketing of your law firm.

Ouch!

Every day I hear a bankruptcy lawyer tell me that he or she doesn’t need and legal marketing strategies . . . there are plenty of clients. The problem is in juggling the workload!

But here’s the rub. If you have solidified your marketing into a system designed solely to attract your most compliant and desirable clients then they will make your life easier.

Market like a blindfolded kid playing “Pin The Tail On The Donkey,” however, and you’re going to get people you don’t want – people who are just not a good fit for you, and who will be tougher clients to work with.

Do the exercise. Let me know how it turns out.