Make More Rain : marketing, planning

Planning Helps Law Firms Weather A Bad Economy

Admin — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 08:00:00 GMT

Although the housing market has grabbed headlines recently as the credit issues continue to unravel, the indicators have been present for several years. The businesses who planned for this are now in a better position to adjust and prosper while other businesses close their doors.

Law firms aren't insulated to market downturns. The New York firm Thacher Proffitt & Wood "informed around 50 associates that their futures at the firm were uncertain because of the collapse of the market for mortgage-backed securities, an area where the firm had had a leading practice." New York Lawyer, 11/28/2007. CitiBank and Hildebrandt released a Client Advisory predicting the "perfect storm" of indicators hurting the legal industry.

It doesn't have to be this way. The firm can retain talent even when the marketplace shifts by planning not just for economic good times but for bad times as well. How?

Retain Earnings
Rather than distribute every dollar of profit, project into the future and if indicators suggest that there may be a drop in business in a particular practice area, allocate additional funds to maintain your marketing budget and talent retention.

Prepare for the upswing
Have associates hit the road with partners to build and maintain relationships in the industry. If your client survives the poor economy it will come back stronger. Cement those relationships while mentoring associates so that when the market comes back, your firm has already done the legwork to expand the business.

Transfer Knowledge
Forms are gold, especially in document-driven industries making up transactional practices. Have associates review all firm forms against available case law and take the opportunity to build a solid foundation of accurate and up-to-date forms. Offer an incentive to create "products" representing reproducible work.

Help with the overflow
Just because one industry is hurting that doesn’t mean other areas of the firm aren’t thriving. Give associates an opportunity to absorb work from the more active areas of law. In fact, a firm recently did this when Dechert, LLP, initially layed off 13 associates, then changed its mind and re-assigned them to other practice areas.

Some associates won't have the sufficient motivation to change. That is fine. Keep the ones who do.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris®. For information about Juris products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center:

877/377-3740, e-mail info@juris.com or go to www.Juris.com.

Managing Partners' Little Black Book on Marketing

Admin — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 08:00:00 GMT

Paula Black knows graphic design. John Remsen, Jr. knows marketing. The author of The Little Black Book on Law Firm Branding and Positioning has teamed up with Remsen to create The Little Black Book on Law Firm Marketing and Business Development.

The layout of the book has the trademark of a graphic artist - plenty of variation of font, paper type and thickness. This is no dry business book!

The content is, of course, what matters. The book takes a mixture of survey findings, anecdotes from several managing partners representing mid-sized firms, and a simple formula for marketing success:

Build a plan;
invest in the plan;
implement the plan;
measure the results.

John Remsen founded The Remsen Group in 1997 to help bring effective and cost-efficient marketing and business development programs to commercial law firms of all types and sizes. The Remsen Group provides services ranging from developing firm-wide marketing plans to helping firms plan firm retreats. The Remsen Group also organizes and presents the managing partner forum.

For more information or to purchase the book, click here.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris®. For information about Juris products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center:

877/377-3740, e-mail info@juris.com or go to www.Juris.com.

Part-Time CFOs for Law Firms

Admin — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 17:45:51 GMT

Two interesting conversations occurred recently that are worth passing along. First was a conversation about the process private equity firms go through when investing in a business. They fast track the development of a strategy and they start implementing it immediately. In short order they turn (sell) the business, earning a handsome profit. It was the same business. So what brought about the significant value increase in such a short timeframe? You have the answer; they agreed on a strategy and began implementing it with determination and without delay. Behind that process was a financial manager (a CFO type) who made it all work by keeping everyone focused and on track. They made sure goals were clear, the results were measured, and people were held accountable.

Midrange law firms don’t have the benefit of private equity people with a stake in the game. However, a midrange firm can get the same kick-up in value by adding equivalent professional management to mirror the process that private equity firms go through. Most midrange law firms do not feel they can afford to bring a full time CFO on board. Also law firms are not an attractive venue for highly qualified professional managers because of the limited opportunity to become an equity member of the firm.

The second conversation offered a solution. It dealt with the growing availability of “part-time” chief financial officers, CFOs. It is something new. Some of these seasoned managers are retirees operating as individuals. Others are significant commercial enterprises organized just to tap the available talent for the purpose of marketing their services. To get an idea of what is available, do a Google™ search on “part-time CFO” or check out the web site of B2B CFO. What is driving this trend? It is due to circumstances of our time—graying baby boomers and technology that makes it easier for flexible work arrangements.

For years the consulting community has emphasized that law firms underperform due to inadequate management, especially financial management. Many of the top performing 50 percent of midrange firms can be described as accidentally successful. Even those who go through formal planning processes find their goals illusive due to the lack of time that lawyers are willing to devote to firm management.

Renting a part-time CFO to guide the firm through a “private equity”-type makeover could close the management gap, increasing the income and wealth of law firm partners.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris®. For information about Juris products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center:

877/377-3740, e-mail info@juris.com or go to www.Juris.com.

Law Firm Planning In the Real World

Admin — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 17:40:02 GMT

Two particularly excellent and timely essays appeared in blogs last week. First Bruce MacEwen’s Strategic Planning’s Encounter with Reality, which he was inspired to write when he read How to improve Strategic Planning in The McKinsey Quarterly Premium Edition. The second was a somewhat related article titled Competitive Intelligence for Law Firms appearing on Law.com’s Legal Technology webpage written by marketing blogger Larry Bodine.

Both deserve reading. Planning and performance are closely linked. Good business and competitive intelligence are necessary components for sound planning.

The frustration of law firm leaders with the planning process stems from a basic misunderstanding about planning. The mantra of the successful planner is that the plan is to change the plan. The process is essential, but the leader must understand that while the plan influences decisions, “decisions” shape and reshape the plan. Planning is a continuous process. It requires a periodic formal structure process to make sure everyone is still on the same page, but it is a way of thinking strategically and its use in communicating the playbook to the team is what’s most important.

One of the things I tell those involved in law firm planning is to never write a paragraph when a sentence will do. Likewise, never write a sentence when a phrase will do; never use a phrase when a word will do. A planning document is too dynamic to be embodied in a legal brief. It is a list of triggers, reminders that can be easily maintained and updated as the plan evolves. Assumptions upon which plans are based are merely temporary estimates about the future and thus, objectives are temporary goals. Both have to be adjusted and refined as the future comes closer. New estimates and new objectives have to be made for the future just beyond the horizon.

Without planning, a law firm is simply adrift. It moves along in response to the currents. Success, crises and failure are mere accidents each as likely as the other. Or as others have put it, a failure to plan is to plan for failure.

Is it time to improve the planning process in your firm? If you are looking for a reason, read the post by Gerry Riskin, Doom and Gloom for the legal profession-it’s coming. Good planners can prosper in bad times; bad times for others are just bad times.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris®. For information about Juris products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center:

877/377-3740, e-mail info@juris.com or go to www.Juris.com.

Watch the Middle Space to Achieve Law Firm Objectives

Admin — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 17:25:47 GMT

One of the objectives of planning is to pick where you want to be and then lead the organization there.

The truth is few law firms ever achieve their long term objective. Law firms aren’t an exception. The same underachieved rate exists in the rest of the business world. The question is, why? What makes the difference between those firms that achieve their strategic objectives and those that can visualize but not reach theirs?

The answer is the middle space between the demands of current operations and the need to invest in the business of the future as visualized by firm leaders. You can’t get from where you are to where you want to be by doing the same things you are doing now. And you are unlikely to succeed if you take your eye off the current ball and throw all your attention and investment into the future model.

Few leaders visualize or articulate the transition process to get from here to there. Yet, that is the only road for getting there. It is the middle space between the two, the transition for getting from one to the other, which must be the attention point of the organization. It is the progress along that transition plan that has to be measured against goals and for which people have to be held accountable.

Left uncharted, the middle ground is starved by both the dominant demand of the current operation for resources and investment and the already poorly satisfied appetite for resources allocated to the end objective projects.

The work has to go into getting from here to there. The best example I can give is that you have to build a bridge before you can populate the other side of the river. It is the building of that bridge that leaders must be able to articulate. It is the bridge that must be planned. It is the bridge that must get resources and investment, all the while keeping the other side of the river as a clear objective.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris®. For information about Juris products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center:

877/377-3740, e-mail info@juris.com or go to www.Juris.com.

Reinventing Your Law Firm's Practice Area

Admin — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 17:30:44 GMT

I just finished reading an extraordinary work by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne based on years of research and collaboration with fellow faculty and students at INSEAD. The French graduate business school and research institute, INSEAD, is considered one of the world’s best. It is particularly known for its influential alumni—a global network of business intellect and power.

The book is Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant. While the book is aimed at business enterprises in general, its message should appeal to the entrepreneurial-minded law firm leader.

Law firms compete for the same clients and same work. They compete in the same ways. It is a game of one-upmanship—for one law firm to gain business another has to lose. The authors call this market space the Red Ocean. It is one where law firms ebb and flow in terms of competitive victories and losses. In the Red Ocean no law firms will consistently succeed. Leadership styles are transient. Successful strategies do not continue in perpetuity. Applauded leadership methods fail with changing circumstances. The Red Ocean is a place where victories are only marginal improvements.

A Blue Ocean Strategy (BOS) is one where you stop playing the Red Ocean game with all the other wannabes. It is a strategy where you create a new market, a blue ocean, where you are the only player. It is the notion of reinventing the business, but kicked up another notch. For example, it isn’t a matter of just reinventing how existing legal services are provided to existing consumers of legal services. Instead, it is a matter of reinventing how the needs and wants that give rise to the purchase of legal services are satisfied and inventing ways that those who currently don’t take advantage of legal services can get the benefits. With the Blue Ocean Strategy you get to reinvent the market, not just business enterprise pursuing that market. You get to break out of the box where everyone competes for the same business.

What separates this book from others it that it gives you the framework for devloping and pursuing a Blue Ocean Strategy. Yet, as great as I think this work is, I don’t expect everyone who embraces it to achieve revolutionary breakthroughs such as the invention of the overnight letter by Federal Express. It does, however, give you and your practice team a new way to look at the opportunities for a given practice area. It is an opportunity for fresh thinking that could lead to a dramatic change in what you view as your market and how the needs of that market can be met in new ways with new methods at entirely new value and price points.

Buy the book. Target an area of practice in your law firm as a candidate for radical revision. Select a team and apply the Blue Ocean framework. You just might catapult that practice class over the heads of would-be competitors to a level of success and growth unreachable through traditional one-upmanship style competition.

After reading the book, you will want to add Gabor George Burt’s blog, blueoceanstategy.typepad.com, to your favorite’s list. Gabor, also a graduate of INSEAD, is one of the apostles of BOS and his blog is a valuable supplement to the original work of Kim and Mauborgne.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris, Inc. For information about Juris® products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center: 877/377-3740, e-mail info@juris.com or go to www.Juris.com.

Law Firm Rainmaking via Phone

Admin — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 17:29:00 GMT

Joey Asher, the author of Selling & Communication Skills for Lawyers, writes about the effectiveness of a telephone call to generate business in the March issue of The American Lawyer. In “Cold Calling for Lawyers” Asher notes, “Businesspeople have long known the telephone is the most powerful business development tool ever invented. Nothing more effectively puts you in contact with people who can hire you.”

Asher isn’t suggesting that lawyers become telephone direct marketers. In fact, he doesn’t want you to ask for the prospect’s business. The key is to use the phone to begin a relationship. Asher recommends that you devote two hours each week to prospecting by phone. What are some of the reasons to call?

Extend an invitation to lunch
Invite to serve on a panel
Interview for an article you’re writing
Ask if they would like to receive the firm’s newsletter
Invite to a presentation
Invitation to a social event
Invitation to join an association
Offer to send a memo on an issue that should be of interest

Use your imagination. And use the phone to begin relationships that may untimately lead to new business for the law firm. Asher concludes“Cold-Calling For Lawyers” by saying, “These calls start professional relationships……stay in touch with your prospects, and you’ll get plenty of business.”

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris, Inc. For information about Juris® products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income, go to www.Juris.com.

Law Firm Marketing Pros in Midsized Firms

Admin — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 17:20:31 GMT

The Institute of Management & Administration, Inc. (IOMA) surveys law firm leaders each year to gain insights on their trials and triumphs. The information gleaned from the most recent survey has been published as IOMA’s Law Firm Practice Management Reference Guide 2005-2006.

A light went off when I read key survey results involving marketing. Marketing professions are on the increase in midsized firms. Nationally, 35% of all firms surveyed employ a full-time marketing professional. What was remarkable and eye opening for me was the role those professionals were playing. It is not the traditional marketing role you find in the corporate world.

As reported in the survey, a large part of the marketing pro’s job involves internal communications within the firm. Chief marketing officers (CMOs) are devoting a significant portion of their efforts toward internal communications and team building within the firm. That is in apparent recognition that legal professionals play the front line sales and customer relation role in a law firm.

According to the IOMA publication: “Internal messaging helps to define a firm’s culture, values, and mission, serving as a critical ‘staging area’ for all outbound client-facing activities.” Communication within the firm via intranets, firm wide publications, seminars, brown-bag lunches and other vehicles creates ties that bind and, in turn, translates into stability, favorable public and client perception, and greater firm momentum.

Time and time again, the experts point to a culture (a core set of beliefs) as one of the key factors that regulates the relative success of a law firm. Until reading the IOMA’s report, I had not considered the CMO as a catalyst for unifying the law firm’s culture and developing a common sense of the firm brand and value proposition. Once the team has this, it becomes contagious, spreading to the client and prospects of the law firm. Once the team is meeting and communicating, cross-selling follows. Once the team understands and values firm wide resources, they are positioned to wave the flag and communicate firm capabilities to prospects.

I would expect the CMO to then kick it up another notch by introducing individualized attorney marketing plans with associated measurement and accountability.

For a law firm’s CMO it is not all about pretty brochures, tombstone ads and direct mail announcements. It’s about educating and mobilizing the troops. It is about planning, setting goals, measuring, rewarding and holding accountable. With this job scope, adding marketing pro makes even more sense. A CMO that increases client retention, cross-selling, and the ability of the team to make new rain, will be a wise and profitable investment.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris, Inc. For information about Juris® products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income, go to www.Juris.com.

I Have a Question for You

Admin — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 18:20:39 GMT

The question is, “Do you subscribe and read publications for corporate counsels?" Periodicals like Corporate Counsel, Corporate Legal Times and Metropolitan Corporate Counsel can tell you what your clients and potential clients are thinking about and what they are looking for in a legal service provider.

The information in periodicals aimed at General Counsels and their team can give you a competitive edge by providing insight into strategies that major corporations are pursuing to control cost. They tell you what traits attract the legal service consumers and what turns them off. They tell you the shared weakness in-house counsels see among your competition. Weakness you can exploit to your competitive advantage.

Publications aimed at private law firms contain articles about trends already impacting law firms. Publications aimed at in-house counsels contain articles about trends and strategies that will impact you and your competitors down the road. Reading what your customers and prospects are reading gives you a competitive edge. Likewise, it pays to read the trade publications for the industry of important clients or prospects so that you know the legal and business issues that are important to CEOs.

Knowing yourself is important and knowing your customers is a must for client growth and retention.

Benchmarking for law Firms

Admin — Wed, 13 Jul 2005 19:04:31 GMT

A very useful set of information to have is comparatives from other law firms or other companies who do something particularly well—like collections, for example. Comparing your firm’s results and operating metrics to other businesses is known as benchmarking. Benchmark data is important because it can identify performance expectations that are unrealistic or expectations that are less ambitious than they should be. For example, it is easy to assume rates can be increased 10%, but what if a 10% increase will put you well above the rates of your competitors? What if clients are already putting you under price pressure? What if you’ve raised rates over the last few years, but haven’t achieved a matching increase in fee revenue because of decreases in realization and more instances of negotiated rates of flat fees? And why not look at non-law firms? Sometimes, you can only find great ideas by looking at other industries. What do credit card companies do so well to keep receivables low? By looking at their processes and benchmarking against their results, you can discover new ways of thinking to improve results.

Other useful information to distribute includes historical financial results and operating metrics (i.e., productivity, realization, etc.), and information about the market in which your firm competes.

Planning Moderator

Admin — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 19:19:31 GMT

I previously posted “The Structure to Structured Planning”. If you have not read that posting you might want to read it now. This posting deals with the moderator’s approach during the planning session. There are two main approaches for conducting strategic planning sessions. One is the Brainstorming approach and the other is the Consensus Process. I favor the latter. Both require someone from the outside or a planning team member to be the moderator.

The Brainstorming process during the opportunity section would go like this: “ For the next 30 to 45 minutes (and without discussion or making any judgments), let’s list on these flip charts every opportunity we can think of to improve our law firm from the standpoint of partners, employees, clients, etc.” That is done in rapid open forum. The moderator begins to reduce the list. For example, the moderator might ask the group to classify each item as one that would have a major, moderate or insignificant impact on the firm. Moderate and insignificant items would be left for another day. Attendees would then be asked to rank the impact of the remaining list, eventually reducing the list in an effort to uncover the opportunities with the most impact on the future success of the firm. Remember, one of the reasons for the planning process is to get the entire team unified behind the main things on which the firm will concentrate. That doesn’t mean they are the only things the firm will do. The organization will likely accomplish little if it doesn’t concentrate on something.

The second approach, which I prefer, works like this. I would ask each planning team member to write down what he/she think would be our best 10 opportunities for increased performance and health of the firm during the planning period ahead (a three- to five-year period). Once every team member has completed his/her task, I would ask them to number the items on their list from 1 to 10. The item given the number 1 ranking would be the best opportunity. I would then ask them to draw a line between items 5 and 6 on their list. I would go around the room asking each member for his/her number one item. If the next person's number one item had already been mentioned, they would give me their number 2 item, etc. That process would continue until the top five items for each of the participants were among the listed items on one of our flip charts. This process builds the confidence of planning members because those participating in the process discovered there is a lot of commonality among their lists. Planning is a discovery process. Sometimes it is the discovery of the obvious; sometimes a new light bulb goes on. The similarity of the list illustrates that planning is going on continually, not just when the planning team assembles off site or in a conference room. Sometimes the planning process just makes it possible for the organization to work together to go where they already thought the firm should be going.

Now, with everyone’s top 5 items listed, the moderator will ask the team to rank the entire list of items (probably 12 to 15 items). After they have done so, the moderator tallies the results. I use several methods, but the simplest is a show of hands. “Who has this item listed as their number one?” I would move to the next item and ask again, “Who has this item as number one?” Repeat the process for the planning team members' number two items, etc. Generally you need to run through the list no more than 5 times to see a clear pattern. Most midsized firms will limit its Main Thing opportunity list to 3 to 8 new main opportunities. These are the biggies: getting out of the practice area, developing a new practice area, shutting down an office, acquiring expertise in employment law, upgrading the firm’s business system, revising the firm’s compensation system, implementing a system for measuring client satisfaction, revising the compensation system to include mentoring as a part of the computation formula. Implement a program to increase the firm’s leverage from 1.1 to 2.1, implement a training program, and install a mentoring system to increase utilization of new associates in their first year, etc.

Planning is a discovery process. Sometimes it is a discovery of the obvious and sometimes it breaks new ground. The one thing you can count on is that we are far more likely to get there if we know where we are going and how we are supposed to get there. I refer to that as "I65 North". I65 North is a reminder that the law firm business is a journey and that the leadership’s job is to get all of the firm’s people traveling in the same direction.

Management Candy-- "M&Ms"

Admin — Thu, 19 May 2005 18:54:09 GMT

I have mentioned on several occasions the concept of “main things”.

I call the notion of “main things” Management Candy or "M&Ms". It is the concept that the right way to do things is to do the Main things with the Minimum resources necessary to achieve the objective. It emphasizes that effectiveness (right things) is more important than efficiency (things right).

You can’t be tops in anything without concentration. Excellent businesses practice the rule of the fewest. They concentrate on the fewest of everything at any point in time—customers, products, distribution channels, transactions, etc. Concentration is "management candy" at work, doing the main (fewest) things with the minimum (fewest) necessary resources to achieve the objective. For a law firm, that means having the fewest clients, the fewest lawyers and staff, the fewest practice areas, the fewest rates, and etc. Why? Because “things” have cost and consume resources.

Given the same level of fee revenue, less clients versus more clients will have a lower administration cost, less time and cost invested in relationship building, fewer bills to issue, fewer accounts to collect, etc. Likewise, fewer employees mean less facilities cost, less HR issues, etc. You get the idea. Per dollar of revenue, less is more! So you want to achieve your objective, but with the minimum resources necessary to achieve that objective.

This concept of M&Ms is why an essential part of planning is separating the main things from all the other things across which we could dilute our efforts. The concept of the minimum resources necessary is, also, important to convey that there is always an encore waiting in the wings. Once we have accomplished our current objectives, new objectives move up to the main thing list. Pursuing them requires some dry powder.

Is your firm overselling itself?

Admin — Fri, 13 May 2005 18:16:19 GMT

In the INTERACTION section of the May 2005 Corporate Legal Times, Nat Slavin tells readers, "Don't Be Fooled by Law Firm Hype".

Slavan writes, “…the most important question is the one that you should be asking yourself: Is the firm overselling itself? Most likely the answer is yes. Law firms of all sizes are under intense pressure to create a one-stop shop for their clients. And they will do anything to portray themselves as such.”

This is another bit of evidence that there are two certainties in life and business - change is constant and we are always judged by others. His comments also reflect a natural tendency of your competitors to develop the Maximizer Weakness that Peter Drucker anticipates. The maximizer law firm tries to specialize in so many different practice areas that its operating cost becomes too high and its expertise too low compared to more narrowly focused law firms.

It also validates the Rule of the Fewest that I will discuss in a few days. Here is the rub. You can’t try to be good at everything without becoming just competent in a lot of things. When you try to promote your firm as a “one-stop shop”, experienced consumers of legal services (corporate counsels) see right through it and your credibility takes a dive.

Slavan's basic message is that bigger isn’t better. Contrary to the one-stop shop image, law firms want to portray, there is a long history of specialization in this profession. It is the rare firm that can be the perfect fit for every need. Acquisitions and expansions aren’t always good. Don’t believe the hype! Ask concrete questions about the law firm’s experience and successes dealing in the new area of corporate need. If you can’t get the answers, then go hire the firm down the street.

Your law firm has to pick its areas of concentration and those areas have to be limited. They need to be the right areas (in demand, profitable, etc.). You can add and drop areas based on emerging opportunities and changing trends but you risk your core business if you try to be all things.

Excellent law firms concentrate. They practice the rule of the fewest. They know the practice areas where they can deliver superior value to clients and they know when to recommend other excellent law firms. You build your relationship when you place the client’s interest above those of the law firm. That is delivering superior value that will keep you in the ballgame and will have the corporate world recommending your firm.

Client Satisfaction

Admin — Wed, 04 May 2005 17:15:08 GMT

After reading a number of articles dealing with methods for measuring client satisfaction, a good friend and associate, Amy Flaherty, asked for my comments on the subject. She also mentioned that she read somewhere that 50% of law firm clients do not return to the same law firm.

If we are not hearing from a client, we tend to assume that everything is okay. Experience teaches the opposite. It is the clients that you don’t hear from that are at risk. Client satisfaction depends on communication; without communication no relationship can be built that goes beyond the immediate work you are performing for that client. Complaints can actually be good. They give you an opportunity to demonstrate how you respond to put things right, to clear up misunderstandings, to agree on expectations, etc. It is even better if you proactively ask the client how we (the law firm) are doing. What would you like us to do that we aren’t doing? What do you like least about how we are working with you as our client? What do you like best?

Attorneys like to think that the professional services rendered speak for themselves. But client satisfaction doesn’t just depend on the quality of the services provided or the results achieved. When it comes to client retention and business development, what counts most is not what you did for me but how you did it. Is working with your firm comfortable for me? Do I feel like you are focused on me and not just on the task at hand? Do you keep me informed? Do you give me options? Are you focusing on the best result for me versus just winning? When you send me a bill, is it a surprise or have you prepared me all along the way and clearly explained what you are billing me for at this time, etc.?

The fact is, existing clients are the best and lowest cost source of new business provided that those clients are happy with their experience

Larger firms measure performance through surveys and they find a way for the results to influence compensation. More and more firms are institutionalizing face to face “how are we doing” visits to the law firm’s clients. They often have a partner or attorney, other than those involved in working with the client, make that visit to determine client satisfaction.

The objective of client satisfaction measurement is client retention and development. In this case, there is no question of which comes first “the chicken or the egg”. We know that, first, you have to have a happy client! Then you have the opportunity to develop additional business from that client.

There are many books and articles dealing with measuring client satisfaction and with marketing to existing “happy” clients. I will pass along some of the better ideas in future postings. For now the message is a simple one. First you have to have happy clients!

PS: Amy Flaherty is Regional Vice President of Juris, Inc. She works with law firms in the mid-Atlantic area to increase their per partner income.

More about planning

Admin — Mon, 02 May 2005 19:50:00 GMT

Over the weekend, I was talking with an attorney about their firm’s lack of a formal planning process. I wasn’t that surprised, because we recently conducted a survey of managing partners and found that a significant percent of the surveyed firms, also, had no structured planning process.

Given the speed of change, the saying that “any road will do if you don’t know where you are going” is true today more than ever. You may not be happy with where you end up, however. You can either be surprised by the future or take advantage of it. You need to know where you are going. You need Objectives. Objectives are temporary targets based on estimates about the future in view of your capabilities and opportunities.

If planning is to work, the planning plan must be to change the plan to fit changing circumstances. Thus, the planning document is dynamic, a means of agreeing and a means of communication. Excellent firms are not guided by a bound narrative type of planning document. They are guided by a playbook using shorthand words and phrases in a form that facilitates continual updating. Planning is a dynamic process. It affects day-to-day decisions and day-to-day decisions shape the plan itself.

The excellent firm must have a structured plan for planning. Like sports, there must be a playbook that all players know if the organization is going to work together and make decisions in harmony. Typically, the planning process involves a cycle of long-term or strategic planning followed by a period of operational planning and budgeting. The plan is shaped by the formal process as well as by day-to-day decisions. Effective planning requires structure because definition is often 90% of the answer. Planning is a discovery process. Sometimes it is a search for the obvious. The major topics of a structured planning process include the following:

• The nature of our business or activity

• The Environment--labor availability, competition, government controls, etc.

• Capabilities and opportunities (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities & threats)

• Assumptions about the future

• Objectives--strategic objectives

• Policies and procedures changes needed

• Strategies and programs to achieve the objectives

• Priorities and schedules

• Organization and delegation

• Budget and resources needed