The client wants you on that wall looking after his problem and being mindful of his career. If the night is cold and rainy, and if down in the client’s bedchamber the fire is roaring and the best brandy has been opened, you are still to sit on the wall and look for the Hun.
We’re lucky that veteran patent litigator John F. Lynch is a regular reader of this blog. Born and educated in Manhattan, John moved to Texas shortly after the New York bar examination, went to work at a relatively large Texas law firm specializing in intellectual property firm, and eventually became a partner in that firm. In later years, John’s firm merged with a larger Washington, D.C. firm, where he would be a partner and chair the new firm’s IP group. John now lives in the Seattle area.
About ten years ago, the firm asked John to give a talk on lawyering–with an emphasis on developing and keeping business–to his firm’s antitrust group at a Florida retreat. He kept a copy of the talk and, last month, sent it to me as his slightly different but complementary take on this blog’s 12 Rules of Client Service. We thought his remarks were not only excellent but also took up a notch the quality of this blog’s running conversation on building enduring service cultures at corporate law firms.
In the talk, John is addressing this question: exactly how is a General Counsel, in-house lawyer or other executive at a client company likely to view the true role of outside counsel in almost every engagement–and especially in difficult ones? He answers the question in three parts which he denominates as “three rules”. So we asked John if we could print all or some of it here. He agreed. Today we’re publishing his Florida talk to his old firm–it’s entitled “Sitting on the Wall”–in its entirety. Note that except for a few punctuation changes, and my underlining the key sentence in each of three rules John mentioned in his talk that day, we’ve taken no liberties with the text:
Good afternoon.
I have been asked to speak briefly about my observations about the practice of law, and in particular about developing business: how have I done it and the guidelines that I have pursued in that effort.
At the start, I will observe that the how and why legal business gets gotten is perhaps the most mysterious phenomenon related to the practice of law. Most of us lawyers are Type A personalities which, as a corollary means we are paranoids. We wonder what we’ve done wrong. Why is it that clients will not hire us? What is it out there that is conspiring against our developing a solid client base producing repeat business year after year?
I cannot dispel the paranoia, in fact I encourage it. It’s healthy particularly if it keeps us alert and attentive to our clients’ wants and needs. But when we look at ourselves, we are looking in the wrong place to answer how to develop clients. We have to look at the clients and what they want.
From a perspective that is at least long, I can offer overarching counsel that you develop clients and client loyalty by doing what I call “sitting on the wall.” It’s kind of a parable, but I’ve never been able to explain it better than “sitting on the wall.” In that parable, the client has invited us to his or her castle for purposes of defending it in one fashion or another, and your message to the client by both words and action is simple, “You go to sleep tonight with your family and do not worry. Even though it’s cold and rainy, I will sit on the wall, and if the Huns come in the dead of night I will pour hot oil on them and drive them away…and I will try not to wake you in the process.”
