It’s important for lawyers to make the connection between their paychecks and the clients who pay for legal services. Some lawyers believe that legal careers are an odyssey of self-satisfaction and an opportunity to do things that interest them. Perhaps. But that interesting career requires that a client has asked us to perform legal services.
Clients are more than meal tickets. They are really a gift. They must be cherished, cared for, and wisely counseled. I am astonished at all the attention law firms pay to lawyers, particularly associates. Of course, lawyers are important—someone has to do the work. But even greater effort should be put into cosseting our clients and giving the best client service possible.
I am sharing a few thoughts on the care and feeding of clients. These thoughts are directed mostly toward those in law firm practice rather than to those in public service or the government sector. That said, everyone has a client, whether a person, a company, or a government agency, and there is always someone to answer to.
The practice of law is extremely competitive. There are many lawyers vying for the same clients. Marriages don’t always last forever despite promises to the contrary, and client relationships are even more fragile. Never take for granted that you will have a client forever. Too many unreturned phone calls, work product that takes too long to turn around or is billed too heavy on the pencil, and the client is gone. And, of course, an unanticipated bad result can send even a longtime client elsewhere.
Clients mostly hire lawyers, not law firms. Obviously, there are exceptions to that—some law firms are known for doing certain kinds of work or having geographical reach. Be the lawyer that clients want to go to and with if you choose to leave your firm. It’s called portable business because you can take it with you.
Clients often interview several lawyers before deciding on who is the best choice to represent them. Sometimes it’s the lawyer who offers the lowest price. Note to clients—like most things in life, you often get what you pay for. An “el cheapo” lawyer may be appealing, but a lawyer charging a low hourly rate may make up for it by billing an inordinate amount of hours. However, I have worked with lawyers from mega-big firms who charge shockingly high hourly rates, and I have found that a high hourly rate does not necessarily correlate with superb skills and service.
Clients are sometimes looking for a skill set, but often they are looking for chemistry. Do they want to spend time with you, think you are compatible with them, have a similar worldview, and—let’s face it—do they like you?
Clients who are individuals, more so than corporate clients, want to have a feel for you and know that you get them, get their problem, and probably can sort things out. After all, isn’t that what we do, solve clients’ problems?
Good client care is about relationships as well as the work. Be the advisor that gives clients good counsel. Legal work must be impeccable, but clients who are not lawyers are looking for solutions to their problems. They want answers fast, and they want someone to explain what’s going on and what may or may not happen. We all have the temptation to “silver polish” things, but sometimes you need to give clients a down and dirty assessment of the situation, with the caveat that you still need to dig deeper.
A word here about honesty: While it may be tempting to promise the sun, the moon, and the stars, be realistic with clients. Manage expectations and tell them the reality of the situation. It’s better to under-promise and over-deliver. A much beloved client of mine, who is a lawyer, told me, “I want meaningful, up-front, and unfiltered dialogue.” Who doesn’t?
Delicacy can be called for—if a client is distraught, a discussion of the horrible truth of the situation may have to be explained in stages, but it must be explained. The possibility of a bad result, while unpleasant, must at some point be discussed. This approach also spares you from giving the client a dreaded, unanticipated surprise in the future. Clients, like all of us, do not like bad surprises.
Do not give clients “homework” assignments. Of course, they need to assemble documents for discovery and to be available for consultation, but don’t ask them to do scut work. I have a client who means the world to me. A junior partner asked a first-year associate to answer interrogatories in one of the client’s cases. I was not told of this delegation of duties. Not surprisingly, the first-year didn’t have a clue what to do and probably didn’t know what an interrogatory is. Either he or the junior partner took it upon themselves to send the “homework” project directly to the client and asked her to answer the interrogatories. She is a very busy person. She called me and asked why she was being asked to do legal work. I thought that was an excellent question and one that I did not know the answer to. There was no good reason other than no one felt like doing the work or didn’t know how to answer interrogatories. I remedied the situation and made sure we handled the discovery. Luckily, she is not only a great client; she is a dear friend.
When you first meet a client, unless it’s some sort of emergency that happens on a day when you are dressed in casual clothes, dress like a professional. Considering what we charge clients, don’t look like a ragamuffin. During the early days of COVID, I would go to visit a cherished client who is in the spice manufacturing business. The company kept production going throughout the pandemic. Dress there was always casual, and it was not uncommon to see the owner of the company and his top executives in jeans. Not me. I always wore a lawyer outfit—suit, jewelry—dressed to the nines. They would kid me about being dressed up, but I think they liked that I showed them that respect, and it made me feel like a lawyer to be dressed up and out and about.
Back to when you first meet a client—don’t charge for the preliminary meet and greet. It’s a visit, a sort of “Let’s do lunch” before we go on a date.
When you get hired, know who your client is. Is it the owner of the business, the general counsel, or someone else? It’s important to know who is calling the shots and who makes the decisions.
Businesses are generally hierarchical. In some organizations, top executives, general counsels, and decision-makers don’t want to be bothered with annoying litigation unless they must give direct input. They have people who deal with day-to-day issues. Other clients want to be in the loop and like frequent communication. Make sure you know the lay of the land and who is your best contact person.
Many clients are themselves lawyers, which is both a blessing and a curse. I have a client who is quite wealthy. His representative is a lawyer—a wonderful, brilliant man. He has decades of former private practice experience. He’s such a good lawyer that I find myself asking him for his input on legal issues. However, I realize they hired me to give them legal advice, not to ask them for it.
General counsel have bosses. Public companies have expectations. They have people to answer to. Don’t make them look bad—help them look wise for hiring you to resolve their issues.
A word to associates: Partners worry incessantly about their clients. You should too. But also remember that partners are your clients, and you should apply some of this advice about clients to how you treat partners. We are the people who give you work.
Give value to your clients. We are a service industry. I realized at some point that lawyers are glorified, highly paid help. For all of our occasional pompousness and self-satisfaction, we are mostly working for someone—our client.
From time to time, I have had the fantasy of becoming a client, but then I realize that I like lawyering too much to learn how to do something else. I am the trustee for my Aunt Marge’s estate, and in that role, I am a client. I can’t say that I like it very much, and I am not overly impressed with some of the lawyers I deal with. It has been good for me to be on the other side and to see how irritating it is not to have calls returned, to get advice that I know is subpar, and to be overbilled for stupid stuff.
That brings us to the topic of billing, something that can make or break your relationship with your client.
I cannot emphasize how important it is to put your time in daily, something I sometimes honor in the breach. You won’t remember what you did in a few days, and someone is going to be cheated, the client or the firm.
On the topic of time, have a sense of urgency. When you receive a call or email from a client or partner, try to respond right away, even if you don’t have an immediate answer or time at the moment to look. In that situation, tell your client you’ll get back to them, and tell your client when you will do so. By doing that, you demonstrate that you know your client is important and you help manage your client’s expectations.
Some may take issue with my next point, but here goes. When you bill one-tenth of an hour (.1) for a call with the client, it is annoying and contributes to a client’s impression that we are money-grubbers who care more about dollars than them. Ask yourself, “Was it really a six-minute conversation?”
There are at least three schools of thought. Some people don’t write down the .1 or .2 for anything. It’s the “don’t sweat the small stuff” school of thought. Clients don’t like to have a quick call with you monetized and somewhat trivialized by a .1. That you stop and write down that you had a two-minute conversation with the client and are charging for six minutes may make a client feel that the relationship is overly commercial.
The second school of thought is to write down the .1 or .2, then write it off so the client is reminded that you spoke but didn’t charge for a little chat. This also has the benefit of making a written record that you did in fact communicate with the client about important advice or an important development in the case.
Of course, the third option is to write the time down and bill for it. Sometimes a million-dollar solution can be explained in two or three minutes.
I do all three, depending on the situation. Associates should enter all of their time, and the billing partner can decide whether to write the time off.
Send out monthly bills, and try to collect with regularity. Our chief operating officer, Fred O’Malley, calls this having “good financial hygiene,” which for some reason cracks me up. It is such a delicate way of dealing with being a bill collector.
Don’t wait until the case is over to bill. In criminal cases, and sometimes in civil cases, if you get a good result, the client will tell you, “See, I told you I didn’t do anything.” If the case has an unsatisfactory result, a nice way of saying the case was lost, some clients may not be inclined to pay a large, accumulated bill.
Put sufficient detail in the bill so that the client knows what you are billing for. Avoid block billing such as “prepare for depo” or “strategize with team.”
This is obvious, but a gentle reminder: Do not put privileged information in your billing description. You never know in whose hands these bills might wind up.
On the topic of time, have a sense of urgency, something that has become increasingly rare. Clients want answers and they don’t want to wait a day or two for you to get back to them.
When you receive an assignment and you know the client is anxious for a response, get to it. It doesn’t matter if there are no court-imposed deadlines and if it doesn’t really require immediate attention—a client wants to know, and it’s your job to follow through. Clients appreciate “Charlie Hustle.”
Client care is more than a good product; there must be good client service as well. I try to be as full service as possible. I handled work for an extremely wealthy Colombian family who were captains of industry in their country. One of the young adult kids got a traffic ticket in Miami, and I went to traffic court. The family was very grateful because they were comfortable with me, and they appreciated the courtesy of me going to court to handle the ticket. Oddly, once I got to traffic court, I wasn’t quite sure what to do, but the bailiff explained the procedure to me, and it was smooth sailing from there.
Weed out bad clients. It’s tough, but bad news doesn’t get better with age. If they want you to do something sketchy, out they go. If they have a habit of not paying, ditch them. It is not fair to your firm and the other lawyers you work with to carry a bad client. You don’t need to hear this from me; someone in your firm will remind you that law firms are for-profit businesses.
Clients expect to make money, and they must understand that we do too. Don’t let clients get too far ahead of you on the bill.
When a potential client starts haggling at the beginning of the relationship or suggests the work can be done cheaper elsewhere, that can be a warning sign.
Sometimes, though, a client you know to be a good egg is going through a rough patch—work with the client. They will be grateful that you didn’t turn your back on them when they most needed you.
I once did that, though, and it backfired on me in the worst possible way. Many years ago, a real estate developer client was trying to stay afloat. It was a terrible time in the market, and the client was truly hurting. I say without bragging that I kept the company from closing its doors during a horrendous time. I knew the owner through a mutual friend. He and I sat on the same charitable board. I stayed up late, I worried, and I worked extremely hard for many months. There were multiple cases, and they were resolved with great results.
It was the end of the firm’s fiscal year, and like many lawyers, I was dialing for dollars. I had sent out monthly bills and talked to the client, but the guy hadn’t paid. My bad. He stiffed me for an incredible amount of money and paid a fraction of what he owed. To this day, I am furious with myself. My intentions were good; his weren’t. Lesson learned.
Sophisticated clients have auditors to check bills. This isn’t their first rodeo, and you aren’t their first cowboy or cowgirl. They know what things cost and how much time it takes to complete a task.
Both sides need to think the legal fees are fair. If you overbill, it is not only dishonest; frankly, it is stealing. Don’t do it.
If you get a bad result, for whatever reason, even if it’s due to a client’s actions, not your lack of legal acumen, cut the client some slack on the bill. You want to keep them as clients if they are generally good clients.
While we are supposed to have the clients’ backs, sometimes they have ours.
I used to write a college football blog. Howard Gutman, one of the most fun people I know, is a huge Gator fan and he knows just about everything there is to know about college football. Howard saw a minor error I had made (I mixed up University of Washington with Washington State) and announced that he could not have his lawyer making those kinds of mistakes. Howard is a big-time developer in Naples, Florida, with projects all over the country. The cases I do with the company are big-deal litigation matters. Nevertheless, Howard became the editor of my college football blog and read it carefully each week before it went out. It was a better product after his attention, and I was touched beyond words that he took the time to do this, week after week, until the National Championship game. This is a very busy guy.
I am pleased to say that while I charged him for my services, he did not charge me for his! As best as I can tell, Howard’s major requirement for the company’s litigation counsel is to win. I give it the old college try.
While many things have changed in the legal profession—online research, work from home, casual clothes, and Zoom meetings—client expectations have remained the same. Clients want lawyers who will figure out the best way to deal with their issue, they would like to win, and they want fair billing and a lawyer who cares about them. They deserve nothing less.
