Solo In Chicago…Grow Your Practice!

I just wanted to follow-up on Thursday’s post regarding Total Customer Experience.

The September 2006 Entrepreneur Magazine had a piece about C & M Moving and Storage, “white-glove movers.” They’re a Houston-based company offering specialty moving services to customers with artwork or high-priced furniture.

If movers can go “upscale,” aren’t there ways to make your legal services more upscale (and profit greatly from it)?

A quote from the piece, “luxury consumers are not lacking in material goods, and they also frequently look for what I call luxury experiences.” I think this is applicable to the practice of law. Clearly not all aspects of a practice. Some legal work is hard slug-it-out stuff where a client needs to be in the trenches with you. However, the example I go back to is the boring/bland real estate closing. I think some clients want to make one phone call telling you they want to sell their home and that’s it. They want to be hands-off. They want a nice package of documents post-closing not just some slip-shop old envelope of things. They want more than the correct result. Great customer service feels good, right?

I know I often miss this point being cheap and almost too logical. I’m overly analytical and just see some of these extras as “fluff.” But a lot of people want to pay for the fluff. I was just down at a conference at the Ritz-Carlton in Naples, FL…nice place. I think the subject of this post is analogous to the turn-down service at the Ritz. I think it’s “fluff” and I’d never pay for it myself. But lots of people want to pay for those little chocolates and vases of flowers!

Chuck Newton has a great post here about working from home (I just discovered his blog…home office attorney from Texas). He lists seven points and writes extensively.

I know our office expense is by far our largest monthly expense and we’re strongly considering going home office or attempting some office-sharing set-up where the rent would be split between multiple persons.

Saw a free conference call here put on by Cisco Systems with this title…it got me thinking. My law firm is very deficient in this area. Is yours?

I think it’s somewhat of a mindset change and/or a management issue. We as lawyers are very much tailored toward finding solutions to “legal” problems. It’s an important part of what we do. However, if you are at a smaller firm or in a managing type position at a large firm, isn’t this “Total Customer/Client Experience” idea vital too?

Everyone knows that when you buy a product/service, it’s not only about the end product or service, right? I can play one round of golf at a great course with no starter, no range balls, no free balls in the cart, no water on the course, ect. versus the place with the friendly starter, free range balls, bottles of water and free balls…it’s a huge difference in experience.

Unless you’re one of these elite trial lawyers where every case is win/lose for all the marbles, I think a lot of what we do the result might be similar with another lawyer. But, what about the Total Customer Experience? I think right now it’s mostly a staffing issue for us.

Take a real estate closing, most lawyers will eventually get a deal closed. But it’s a major difference if you can give great and thorough information up front, your staff can expediently manage times/dates and just hold the clients’ hand, there’s great lawyer repoirte at the closing, and post-closing rather than just sending a title policy and a deed you can provide serious legal advice about a myriad of real estate options going forward.

How’s your total client experience??

Got my weekly e-zine from How to make it rain.com…a couple real usable tidbits:

Be A Problem Solver

One of the best Rainmakers I know, a man who has sold literally hundreds of millions of dollars worth of legal services in his career calls this philosophy for selling legal services “Problem Solving Selling”. He even carries around a baseball glove to remind himself that “. . . when I’m sitting with a prospective client, my job is to focus on what they are saying so that I can catch the problems that person is struggling with, and help them find relief.” What could possibly be more professional and ethical than helping people with important problems, to find solutions to those problems?

1. Does it seek to help your prospective client solve their problem or maximize their opportunity?
2. Is there a call to action, or is it just “image building” ?
3. Is there a logical “next step”?

I especically like the baseball mit analogy of “catching problems!!”

Here’s a link to a story regarding Judge Jordan Kaplan’s recent decision granting a father’s request to stop circumcision on his 9-year-old son. I didn’t find the decision too suprising…purely a “best interests” analysis I imagine. Kaplan’s a solid jurist.

What’s up with waiting until 9-years-old for this sort of thing?

I’m on a couple email lists from Technolawyer.com which had an interesting post lately about how to “do” technology in one’s law firm. The lawyer writing on the issue was balancing using an outside consultant versus doing it himself. This particular guy came down on the side of doing it himself saying it saved time and just saying it was too important to be relient on someone outside to get this sort of thing done. Is he right?

For the fairly minimal tech support I’ve needed since I went solo I’ve used an outside consultant…haven’t really had the emergency breakdown where the systems crashed just as we needed to get some pleadings or something out the door. It’s hard for me to think that a lawyer doing their own tech support is the most cost-efficient way to do things. Perhaps in your earliest stages where you don’t have any employees, yes, but once you start to have administrative staff don’t these people need to take over these functions? And then for the bigger projects use the outside “consultant”? What’s the experience out there?

Bigger question that I’m personally dealing with right now, what tasks should be delegated to support staff and in what priority order? My current set-up is I have a law clerk who essentially does some court filing and legal research. Additionally, there’s clerical support as part of our office suite that I’ll use when big clerical projects need more support. I’m in the process of interviewing for another slot. What should this persons role be? In my mind, issue one is accounting/bookeeping. Our bookeeping isn’t what it should be and doing billing and billing follow-up each month sure takes a lot of time. Second, I want to get some of the repetive legal tasks off my plate…basic estate planning, real estate closings. Third, just general phone/email follow-up when I get swamped with court/meetings.

Are my thoughts in line with your experience? I suppose how and when to delegate is somewhat related to practice area(s).

Here’s a nice profile of California attorney Jeff Hughes of Legal Grind. I’ve seen his story before very interesting…combining legal services and coffee shops. I see he now has two locations…only one the last time I saw him discussed.

It’s a good reminder about cultivating the entrepreneurial mind-set. I don’t think this is encouraged much in law schools. Some of the bar associations have been doing a little better of late on the law practice management stuff. Are there non-traditional income streams that your firm can be tapping? Buy an office condo? Blogging revenue? Paid writing?

If the above is something you’re considering, grab an issue of the October 2006 Chicago Lawyer (sorry it doesn’t link to the piece). It includes a very extensive piece that profiles three big firm attorneys that have gone solo. I’ve never been big firm, save one summer job during law school, so this is a very eye-opening viewpoint and simply new to me. One of the lawyers profiled had left McDermott, Will & Emery and another Sidley Austin.

What’s changed for them…their perspectives:

Although they still have some Fortune 500 clients, mainly the transition to solo meant serving smaller businesses. One’s comment was that big companies hire big firms for “comfort level.”

Cost efficieny. One of the lawyers mentioned billing at about 40% of his big firm rate, but, since he keeps 80% of his revenue versus the 30% he used to keep, he’s a better deal for clients.

Be able to tell clients that you can put a team together. One of the lawyers interviewed talked about the fact that for 90% of cases one lawyer is enough, but for those 10% of cases where you’re getting papered to death and need greater breadth, he knows the players/experts well-enough to get a team together to compete with the big firm.

Just a quick shout-out regarding Time:59, a fairly new tech company offering online time-keeping and invoicing tools. I’m just in the process of reviewing the software but the price is right for $19.95 per year. It’s produced by a local, Chicago-based company. Here’s a blurb from their press release…

Time59 is a new system for self-employed lawyers, accountants, consultants and others who need to manage their billable hours. It operates completely within a computer’s web browser, so there is no software to install. Users may access their account from any computer with internet access. They can then input, analyze and bill their time, confident that the information will be stored securely in a state-of-the-art data center.

Rjon Robins has a nice little online presentation regarding trust account management here over at How to make it rain. I just reviewed it for my first time (they’ve got a bunch of good free resources including an eBook, e-mail list, and blog if you haven’t been to the site before). I think us lawyers tend to give this issue short shirk as too easy or just plain boring (I know I’m guilty of these mindsets). And in reality, trust account management isn’t difficult but I suspect many practitioners might be at a similar stage to where I’m at. My trust account(s) were set-up fine up front and I understood trust account management. But quite simply as our clientele has increased the amount of money in our trust account and the number of different clients’ money in the trust account makes simple yet critical organization and management very difficult. We’re not organized enough in our account management. My takeway points from the presentation:

• Only a lawyer or lawyers should be signatories on your Trust account. Many of the horrer stories Rjon references in the presentation involve support staff hijinks with trust accounts.
• Open a separate trust account for individual clients (when the size or importance of the client warrants such a move).
• Use individual ledger cards for each client. Simply have sort of a checking account ledger for each client for whom retained funds are being held in your trust account.
• Proper monitoring systems. Is a secretary opening your mail before you and thus able to manipulate trust funds? Again, this just goes back to many problems involving legal assistants getting lawyers in trouble due to their access to client trust accounts.
• Avoid keeping original documents. I never really thought about client original documents in this way but a clients original documents are trust property. If you have them in the file, you’ll be having to keep that file forever.