Law Firm Client Service

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clem-onojeghuo-122041Any time you pick your head up from the daily work you’re doing in the legal industry, “change” is the drumbeat that you hear.

Nowhere was that more apparent to me than at last week’s CLOC Institute – for those of you who aren’t familiar with CLOC, it’s the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium. They’re a relatively new group in the industry, bringing together legal operations professionals for networking, education, to share best practices, and really, to drive change. But they’re more than just legal ops – in fact, their mission states quite clearly that this drive for change involves working with “other core corporate legal industry players” in addition to legal operations professionals. Their goal is to “optimize the legal service delivery models needed by small, medium and large legal departments to support their clients,” and they recognize that this can only be done together. 
Continue Reading CLOC: Change is a Drumbeat

zachary-nelson-192289The final session that I’d like to share from the Legal Marketing Association’s Annual Conference this year focused on learning lessons from businesses outside of the legal industry – while there’s something to be said for understanding what your peers are doing within the industry, there’s a lot to be learned from other professionals as well. LMA brought Maggie Watkins, Chief Marketing Officer of Sedgwick LLP to moderate Lynn Skoczelas, Chief Experience Officer of Sharp HealthCare, Lilian Tomovich, Chief Experience Officer at MGM Resorts International, and Susan Letterman White, Founder and Managing Partner of Letterman White Consulting to offer their perspective on how businesses are using the client experience to up their game.

The panelists shared with us some key learning outcomes that we can adopt in our own pursuit of the excellent client experience. 
Continue Reading Using the Client Experience to Up Your Game

photo-1433650552684-d4004a945d6cRegular readers of Zen know that one thing I never miss is a good in-house counsel panel. Who can skip the opportunity to listen to the clients of our clients tell us how to do our jobs better and what matters to them at this very moment?

With some heavy hitters on this year’s panel at the Legal Marketing Association’s Annual Conference, I knew I wouldn’t be disappointed. On the panel, we had:

  • Connie Brenton, Chairman of the Board for Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) and Senior Director of Legal Operations for NetApp, Inc.
  • Jeffrey Franke, Chief of Staff to the General Counsel and Senior Director of Global Legal Operations for Yahoo, Inc.
  • Steve Harmon, Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, Legal Services at Cisco Systems, Inc.
  • George Milionis, General Counsel of Petersen-Dean, Inc.
  • Moderator: Richard Caruso, Vice President of Legal Media at ALM LLC

Continue Reading In-House Counsel Panel: The Rapidly Changing Legal Buying Cycle

Speedometer with needle racing through the words Revolution, Change, Shake it Up, Status Quo and Stagnation

“Change or die.”

How many times have you heard that over the last eight years?

A friend of mine in the legal industry pointed that out to me yesterday, along with commenting that it always sounds so dire. And it does sound dire.

But after the statistics that we covered in last week’s post (1/3 of clients are openly dissatisfied with their outside counsel, chief legal officers rank firms at a 3 on a 1 to 10 scale for commitment to change, and clients are moving their legal work to other firms or to nonfirm vendors), it would seem that we should be properly incentivized to speed up the pace of change. From the Peer Monitor/Georgetown 2016 Report on the State of the Legal Market, which cautioned BigLaw against a “Kodak moment”

[A]s in the case of Kodak, the challenge is that firms are choosing not to act in response to the threat, even though they are fully aware of its ramifications.”

So what’s holding us back? 
Continue Reading Change: What’s Holding Us Back?

iStock_000011353685_LargeThe “law firm of the future.”

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about this in recent months, not because I find it to be interesting (which I do), but because other than my “Instagram for Lawyers” post, this has been the hottest topic on Zen this year. I had a conversation with a senior partner at a law firm last week, who asked me “How do we communicate to people that the future is NOW?” His firm has been embracing these “futuristic” policies for a number of years, and recognizes that change in the industry is not happening fast enough.

In May, Altman Weil published the 8th edition of their “Law Firms in Transition” survey, which polls the managing partners and chairs at 800 US law firms with 50 or more lawyers (this year’s survey received 356 respondents from 49% of the 350 largest US law firms). If you haven’t already read at least the executive summary for this survey, I highly encourage you to take a look through it. In the midst of the second quarter of this year, Altman Weil said:

Are law firms still in transition in 2016? We think so, although the pace of change can seem modest. Despite pockets of true innovation, most firms are choosing to proceed with lawyerly caution in the midst of a market that is being reinvented around them.”

Yikes.

A bunch of a hoopla about nothing? We’ll get to that in a minute. 
Continue Reading Law Firms: The Future is NOW

photo-1461532257246-777de18cd58bThe law firm of the future continues to be a hot topic of discussion, not just here on Zen, but among lawyers around the world. Both at our recent ILN European Regional Conference and the Association of International Law Firm Network’s (AILFN) Inaugural Summit, the questions of “what comes next?” and “how do we prepare for it?” were on the tips of everyone’s tongues.

So I want to check back in on our series looking at what some of the industry’s experts had to say when asked:

What do you believe lawyers and law firms need to do to prepare for the future of legal services?”

You’ll remember that their answers were pulled together in an eBook by HighQ on Smart Law, available here.

The two thought leaders we’re looking at today both consider people to be at the center of the law firm of the future – which will be a relief to those lawyers who might be concerned that robots are about to take over their jobs. But we can all agree that while technology is still going to play a huge role in the next phase of the legal industry (and does already), the people are – and will always be – at its core. 
Continue Reading Law Firm of the Future: It’s About the People

photo-1452690700222-8a2a1a109f4cToday, I’m bringing you a guest post from my friend, Lance Godard, a Business Development Manager at Fisher & Philips. I know that “cross-selling” is often a hot (maybe too hot!) topic, and Lance delves into some candid reasons for why it may not be working – if you really want to make it work for you, take a look at his thoughts on the subject.

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Whether you call it cross-marketing or cross-targeting or some other variation on the theme, cross-selling is not a new concept for most lawyers and firms. And it’s not particularly complicated to do: align the work you actually provide a client with the services they need, and implement a program for connecting their needs with your practices. Easy-peasy, right?
Continue Reading Are Your Cross-Selling Efforts Stalling? Maybe You’re Doing It Wrong…

Redhead girl with green phone on yellow background.If you ask any of my lawyers, they’ll tell you that I have a “mad face.” I reserve it for times when I need to get them moving from one thing to the next at conferences (and they’re not hustling), or when I am actually frustrated about something that’s not running as smoothly for them as I would like.

But truth be told, it actually takes quite a lot to get me legitimately mad. It happens so seldomly that I can remember each incident quite clearly – and that means they leave an impression.

I had one such issue in advance of our recent Annual Meeting, having nothing to do with the actual conference, and it was such a frustrating example of how NOT to treat a customer that I wanted to share it here as a cautionary tale for all of us to remember how easy it is to make or break a client relationship in a single interaction.

My customer service story involves clothes – the short version of the story is: I needed a few new things in advance of the conference, and decided to order from Boden, a British company (this is important). I’d never ordered from them before, but have gotten their catalog for years and always liked the look of their styles. I placed the order late on the 16th of May, knowing I was leaving on the 25th, and paid for premium shipping (3-5 business days). 
Continue Reading How to Lose a Client in One Easy Step

I’m just back after being away for our 2015 Asia Pacific Regional Meeting in Shanghai, where we had one of the best examples of excellent client service that I’ve seen in a long time – which provides a superb learning opportunity for all of us in professional services. Our Asia Pacific conference is typically our smallest meeting, with around 20 attendees, and as such, we don’t make up a significant part of a hotel’s business in the same way that we do for our other conferences.

That generally means that while hotels will offer us good service, they don’t go out of their way to wow us – they just don’t consider it to be worth their time. But I was pleasantly surprised to see otherwise in Shanghai.

I’ve had quite a lot of experience working with hotel contacts all over the world in the last ten-plus years, and had been telling our Executive Director on the plane how pleased I was with the service that we’d gotten from our contact, Jecy, at the Grand Hyatt Pudong in Shanghai. She was efficient and responsive, whether on weekends or Chinese New Year – even at times I wasn’t expecting an immediate response from her.Continue Reading Client Service Excellence: Make Everyone Feel Like a VIP

You are in for a treat today, while I’m away at the ILN’s Regional Meeting of the Americas – we have a very special guest post! We’re welcoming Joanne Thorud, the Director of Marketing for the ILN’s Boston member, Davis, Malm & D’Agostine. She’s talking about one of my favorite subjects – client service – and shares with us an excellent post on why communication is so important in keeping clients happy. 

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Last week, I attended the Legal Marketing Association New England’s annual regional conference in Boston. The theme of this year’s conference was Simplify to Maximize. There were a dozen programs and over 30 speakers who presented topics focused on cutting through clutter and static and delivering clear and concise messages. One message that resounded in almost every program I attended was communication is key to maximizing client relationships. It is not a new or revolutionary concept, but it is extremely relevant, especially in today’s legal climate.Continue Reading Silence Isn’t Golden When it Comes to Managing Client Relationships