Above: Holden Oliver’s squeeze-of-the-week takes liberties with The Only Nice New Yorker.
So it’s a Recession. Fine. Still, get up off your knees. Quit bottom-feeding. Stick with sophisticated users of legal services. Don’t lower your rates. And think about Value.
The answer to the question is no. “Being nice” to clients is not the goal or point of client service. We didn’t launch What About Clients? in August 2005 because yours truly is loved by all, and wanted to show you the utility of charm, niceness, or Mr. Rogers-like skills, with those we pitch or represent.
We started it because even the better and higher-end lawyers have remained “lawyer-centric“, haven’t a clue about what good clients think about, and treat even to-die-for clients like troublesome peasants.
And because, at the time, no one in the global legal or business community, other than Chicago’s Patrick Lamb and the Canadian Bar Association, was talking about CS compellingly by (a) actually putting clients first, and (b) explaining just how to do that.
Marrying substantive skills to the Art of Client Service is the way to get and keep good and great clients. Not all clients.
We at WAC? (now of course WAP?) believe we know what CS is: it’s thinking about and acting on the obvious client service aspects presented by everything you do for those clients in your services firm (but no one else thinks about), and disciplining everyone around you in your firm to do it with you. You build a service culture from the ground up from which all else flows, right down to that last opinion letter or Rule 12(b)(6) motion your firm wrote, client by client.
Everyone around you must buy into it–or leave, and leave quickly. Period. I am not even sure you can teach it.
The truth, though: most clients are not worth the trouble of representing.