Solo In Chicago…Grow Your Practice!

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As a Chicagoan during our current election season I equate “Before it’s too Late” with the 1983 Chicago mayoral election between Bernie Epton and Harold Washington. It was one of Epton’s campaign slogans with more than a hint of racial undertones…actually a very fascinating campaign to review for you political scientists out there. But SIC is a small firm lawyer blog all about Growing Your (Our) Practice so…

I’ve had a rash of new clients lately who have retained us TOO LATE! Not too late to help them (we wouldn’t take their money if we couldn’t help them) but surely later than would be ideal. Do you have this problem too? And what’s the solution because this is more of an ‘identify a problem’ post than a ‘give readers a solution’ post.

Here are the personal examples I’m talking about, such as people who don’t have representation when dealing with parentage decisions (I don’t mean the sex). Meaning people are committing themselves to legal parentage before knowing the ramifications. Or, father’s in parentage cases who ignore the retroactive child support issue and then just “take” a $10k judgment against them that could have been avoided. Or, people who let the other parent go to another state with kids and kill their parental rights. And each of these examples involve people who became clients of ours to help with subsequent issues but HUGE ISSUES had already be given away due to their actions before I was their attorney.

Why do people consistently make this mistake & how can we help clients to stop making it?

I suppose at some level this is a general “inertia problem” like anyone with a ‘To Do’ list that gets done slowly, but, the ramifications can be far more severe in the context of legal matters. Further, this can be the downside to DIY (Do-It-Yourself) or to invoke my favorite Rumsfeldian quote there’s that category of things “we don’t know that we don’t know.”  I just retained a client who hurt his case greatly because when he was pro-se he consulted Dorothy Brown’s Website (Court Clerk of Cook County, Illinois) regarding how to serve process and 5 months later his son and the child’s mother are halfway across the country despite the fact that she “needs” to get leave of court to leave Illinois w/ the child.

And the solution?

• Client education marketing. I’m going to include a short video on this topic in the context of parentage cases in our October client newsletter as a first step.
• Summons alert. Can greater alerts be included on the summons and initial documents a litigant receives?
• Remove “case bias.” This is the public policy problem that I’d like to work to change…the bias in favor of child support obligors often at the expense of an involved and intact family. Or the defendant bias that seems to exists in mortgage and landlord-tenant cases. Note that many of my personal examples surely come from the disfavored party in Parentage Act cases.

We were recently retained by a client strictly based on the above. It felt quite good actually. This is an entity client and the point person in charge of finding an attorney happened to be an old friend of mine. Sadly (but not particularly unusual) she’d had some poor experiences with a number of attorneys they had worked with recently so they were looking elsewhere. This person had known me for several years, although we had lost touch for several years too, knew I used to practice in the area in which they needed representation and….great, we’ve got ourselves a new client.

Do you have clients like these? Do you want some? I wouldn’t mind a few more myself. I think this concept and client-type is very much at the core of Clients for Life which is a great read and something I’ve written about in the past. Because these sorts of people who just trust you and your judgment implicitly are the sorts of clients who will be your clients for like 30 years and probably refer another 30 clients to you over those thirty years. I call that cost efficient advertising.

And yet I observe many habits in lawyers too often that specifically undermine a client’s trust. Some examples:

Lawyers OVER-Promise & UNDER-Deliver. I see this most frequently in simple timing stuff…suggesting something will be done more quickly than is realistic but also in putting forth unrealistic predictions of a case result. Talk through all possible scenarios realistically.

Lawyers DON’T Tell Clients What They DON’T Want to Hear. I find that if I’m agreeing with a client too much there’s often a problem. The problem being I’m sugar-coating things instead of laying out some tough realities that may not be pleasant for a client. Good clients like good leaders want competent and strong advisers around them who are tough, smart, and are leveling with them about ALL possible scenarios.

Lawyers That Aren’t Thorough or Detail-Oriented Enough. I just spoke with a lawyer friend in the last week who called asking me about a post-divorce situation where this new client’s divorce settlement documents included 2 provisions regarding these parents’ (ex-spouses) daycare expense obligations that were wholly opposite of one another. Meaning, in one place the judgment said mom pays for all daycare expenses and in another place judgment said mom/dad split these expenses 50/50. Would you trust the lawyer scrivener of that document again in the future?

These Really ARE Clients for Life. So treat them that way! And beyond just the above, don’t be nickle-and-diming them for the occasional phone call, but rather be constantly looking out for their interests and sending them related notes/articles.

These sorts of clients are BIG. Look, I do plenty of my 1-time, quick legal representation…it’s good work sometimes and necessary. But these great clients who really like and trust you are the clients who make your practice thrive for the long term.

Or if you don’t, these are some great insights into how to better compete with other attorneys.

The headline stems from this article here, How Do Lawyers Get Away With This Stuff?, that I read recently in the NYTimes’ Small Business Blog – You’re the Boss, The Art of Running a Small Business. As an aside that blog gives some of the best, consistent small business advice that I’m aware of…most of the columnists are small business leaders.

First let me summarize and extract some quotes directly from the article. Notably, the author of the piece is Jennifer Walzer, President of Backup My Info! which I think has gotten a fair amount of publicity as a hot, up-and-coming business in the fast growing online/off-site data backup marketplace…I mention that because when you hear her complaints about lawyer service I would think she and her company would be pretty welcome clientele for 90% of lawyers out there. The background of the article is Ms. Walzer hired a lawyer to review a new lease for her company and the article describes her experience in dealing with the particular lawyer/firm. This opening ‘graph is great:

At my company, we try so hard to provide great customer service that I sometimes forget that bad customer service exists. And then I hired a lawyer.

First…

We sat down to talk, and I explained that I had a relatively straightforward sublease agreement but wanted to make sure that I was protecting myself. The lawyer said he was happy to help and asked for a $2,500 retainer fee, explaining that based on what I had told him, the total fee probably wouldn’t exceed that amount. Fair enough. I sent the check and the agreement for him to review. I had enough on my plate and wanted to trust him and his firm.

It was another lawyer from the firm who got back to me. He informed me that the agreement was relatively standard but needed a few changes. I reviewed the comments and my impression was that some of the changes he made were a bit of a stretch, but again, I wanted to trust their judgment. I let them make their changes. I had paid for $2,500 worth of service, so I figured I might as well let the lawyers do their thing. And did they ever …

Okay, sounds pretty routine, and next…

I had a few more conversations with the first lawyer in which we discussed forgoing the good guy guarantee versus providing a larger security deposit to the bank (I didn’t like the idea of having to personally guarantee the rent for four years). That prompted them to send me an additional bill — for $1,450. I wasn’t thrilled, but I figured it was O.K.  because I’d raised some more questions. At that point, the deal was pretty much done, so I paid the bill and called it a day.

And, finally the REALLY GOOD STUFF…

Imagine my surprise when a few weeks later another bill arrived. This one was for approximately $2,500. It contained a long list of itemized charges that made little sense to me. I checked my phone log to try to match the calls with the charges, and the numbers weren’t there. I assumed there must be some mistake.

I called and left a polite message for the billing manager, asking her to call me back whenever it was convenient. Instead, the two lawyers called me together on speakerphone, addressing me right off the bat in a hostile tone. They demanded to know why I had an issue with the bill, which caught me off guard. I asked if we could review the bill since it wasn’t adding up for me. They immediately became defensive and asked me to prove to them which charges were inaccurate.

I picked an e-mail from the list. I had been charged for 0.2 hours at $300 an hour ($60) for one lawyer’s reply to an e-mail I’d written letting him know that I was not going to be available and would review his comments when I was back in my office. I wrote this as a courtesy to let them know my status. It demanded no reply, but I got one anyway. It said: “I hope everything is O.K. Take your time.” I thought it was nice of him. It never occurred to me I would be charged for it.

Flabbergasted, I asked how they could charge me $60 for a courtesy e-mail. The answer left me even more flabbergasted. “Jennifer,” said the first lawyer, “your e-mail took me away from a multimillion dollar agreement I’m working on, so if I have to stop what I’m doing to view and respond to an e-mail, then I have to charge you.”

That’s an incredible tale at one level but sadly so NOT surprising on another level. Particularly in some of my court-appointed contempt work it’s eye-opening at some of the lawyer treatment and lawyer billing I hear and see first-hand when I take my first meeting with these clients and also review the court’s case file and see huge fee petitions against former clients with very little having been accomplished.

Why does this sort of thing exist with lawyers and what to do?

There’s likely many reasons but I tend to think that older generations of lawyers say the 50+ crowd who are managing many firms these days are relics of an era where the legal field was rather immune from competition. In other words there were way fewer lawyers out there and thus less competition. The last 15 years or so has seen a huge increase in the number of practicing lawyers. Lets face it, there are surely aspects of legal services where the offerings are commodity services where there’s virtually no difference from one lawyer to the next, at least on the substance of the issue. Whether it is or not, I would suggest really competing with the mindset that the legal services you’re offering are a commodity and you’ve got to hustle, be innovative with alternative billing, and provide great customer to win business. I mean McDonalds isn’t going to get away with the crap that was described above, right? I’d just go to Wendys.

How might you compete with the sort of billing and customer service practices listed in the article above?

Billing Clarity. Surely there’s probably some “back story” to the article above but from what you read the client was quoted $2,500 flat-fee for a commercial lease review and she ended up being charged some $6,000. She seemed to be satisfied when the bill was at $3,600 since she had raised some issues that hadn’t been discussed up front. But however the client is being billed why not just be clear about an hourly rate, a specific flat-fee amount, or extra charges. If a client is unhappy with a result or your services that’s not totally unavoidable, but “billing surprises” are avoidable.

Billing Alternatives. A commercial lease review seems to me that it should be something a lawyer should charge either a flat-fee for or perhaps a combination hourly rate with a “fee cap” on the top end. I’ve done this sort of thing a few times in my career and I don’t think it’s too different than the sort of negotiation that occurs in buying a home…there’s a sort of set time for some negotiations of fairly standard things and then you get to an agreement and you’re done. So on the lawyer side it’s pretty predictable in terms of lawyer time needed. Why surprise a client if you don’t have to and create the potential for client ill will? Even with hourly billing a fair, honest thorough bill need not surprise a client…it sounded like there was some old fashioned “bill padding” going on in the example above. My firm is getting ready to start offering a flat-fee monthly billing option for even some unpredictable practice areas such as dissolution of marriages where someone will have to use an automatic payment option like a credit/debit card and then each month they’re charged somewhere in the $250-$750 range regardless of the amount of work done that month. I have a few final things I need to figure out about this before it’s a “go” but in other words we’re trading the potential for higher fees in some months for promised consistency and client won’t need to bring a big retainer in up-front and there will be no “billing surprises.”

No Charges. Do you ever use these on your bills? You should (I probably use them too much). The $60 e-mail above being a perfect example…doing work for a client and listing on your bill but not charging for it. I do it when someone calls for something like when is court tomorrow or that sort of purely logistical kind of thing where I’m not giving legal advice at all. I’d be pissed too for getting charged for the $60 e-mail listed in the article above.

There are great opportunities for lawyers to boost business big-time by focusing not on legal substance but rather customer service and billing innovations!