Another legal minefield (says who?)

Read Lawyers bringing blogging under control in the FT. I am not convinced (as a lawyer who blogs). Even so, it’s a good article in Digital Business Web 2.0 Strategy section. I didn’t like the closing quote from “Dave” (an anonymous blogger.

“You might think twice about sending a legal letter if you know it will be published [apparently TechCrunch publishes all its legal communications]. Lawyers have no choice but to use legal language, and that always reads so badly.”

We don’t always (and shouldn’t).

Lunch is most certainly not for wimps

I was intrigued reading the Acknowledgements at the start of Kate Atkinson’s One Good Turn, with the following

. . . Thank you also to David Lindgren for trying, and usually failing to explain corporate law to me and, more importantly, for being a lawyer who lunches.

It wasn’t the opening bit, about explaining corporate law: I know only too well that explaining the finer points of our specialisation is all but impossible. After years spent trying to tell my children what I do, they are no wiser. Perhaps it is the way I tell it. Rather, it was the lunch bit! I am known in my partnership as the partner who lunches (and also for complaining once that the dry cleaners had shrunk my suit) and I have always spent most of my business development budget taking clients, referrers, introducers and providers to lunch. Not for nothing does my Outlook Contacts have a Restaurants category.

It was therefore gratifying to read John Studzinski in the FT’s September 2008 How to Spend It last week,

In most of the world today lunch – or any meal, for that matter – is used as a basis for determining whether people trust and like each other. . . The importance of one-on-one conversation over food is still something that I do not believe has reached its pinnacle. It’s where people learn the most about each other and I don’t think we’ve found anything else as effective at this point in time. Some day maybe, but not yet.

although I was not a little disturbed by his assertion that

In the US and the UK, breakfast is the new lunch.

Not in Plymouth it isn’t!

My brother Esau . . .

There was a lovely article in the FT some months ago about beards, A hairy issue for today’s executive, explaining why today’s executive prefers a clean shave. In the legal profession it is little different. Bearded lawyers are comparatively rare (for example, of my just short of 60 partners, only one at last count was bearded).

Why this should be the case I don’t know, but I still remember the words of my principal, as we left a meeting at a very pukka Lincolns Inn law firm some 30 plus years ago.

I don’t usually trust lawyers with beards. Mr X [with whom we had just had a less than satisfactory meeting] has done nothing to dispel this prejudice.

From that you will gather that the then partnership of my firm was clean shaven to a man. During my six months off to take Law Society Finals Part II I grew what I thought was a very fine red beard. Having to go into the office to collect something, I bumped into the Senior Partner.

Been on a cruise? Quite sure we won’t see it when you are back next week.

He didn’t.

Watching the fairly recent proceedings of the General Synod, beards are clearly more acceptable in the Church of England than the law, although whether their wearers are more or less trustworthy I couldn’t say.

Not quite such a simple solution

It is all too easy to think that the solution to falling fee income in a downturn is simply to find new clients.

Well, up to a point, but this is, or may well be, a riskier strategy than you might imagine. Time may be better spent looking at ways to develop your active clients; or re-activating your dormant clients.

So, why not new clients?

For most organisations changing law firms in a downturn is going to be well down their list of priorities; and for most law firms, themselves facing the same recessionary pressures as you are, hanging on to their valued clients is going to be important. The result is that changing advisers is only likely if there is a compelling reason to do so. Certainly there will be price sensitivity and pricing pressures, but the aware law firm should be prepared to be flexible. And among the reasons for change are a couple that should give you pause for thought.

First, the incumbent law firm may be trying to “lose” the client. The client may be a bad payer, or it may be asking the law firm to do something that leaves it uncomfortable. In which case why would you want to act for the client? Client take up procedures all too often get overlooked in the bad times, but ignore risk management at your peril.

Alternatively, the incumbent law firm may have cocked up, which in turn may mean that the client has a somewhat jaundiced view of lawyers: and you may get sucked into a lot of remedial work that the client is reluctant to pay you for.

As Stefan Stern noted in his FT column Beware of fad-loving analysts

Simple solutions to complicated problems can be seductive.

And all too often such solutions fail to deliver. There are certainly going to be opportunities to find and develop new clients in this downturn; and there are going to opportunities to be burnt: as a result of taking on unsuitable clients, agreeing to do work beyond your competence, or on terms that not only devalue the work and demoralise your team, but set a precedent it may be hard to reverse later.

Thought for the week ahead

From a March 2008 Stefan Stern FT column Desperate measures for latter-day Willy Lomans, in which he quotes Neil Rackham, (in his words, ‘the author of the seminal Spin Selling and reliable deliverer of common sense’)

In hard times, people make the mistake of trying to sell to more people at less intensity,” Mr Rackham says. “But what actually works is selling to fewer people in more depth. The same approach that works in good times works in bad times.