the [non]billable hour

Ten Rules of Law Firm Retreats

Whether your next law firm retreat takes place at a tropical location or in the firm’s conference room, there are several things to keep in mind to make it productive, useful and fun.  Here are my Ten “Rules” for law firm retreats.  Feel free to add your own in the comments.  Enjoy!

1.  When planning a retreat, the most important voice at the table should belong to your best clients.  Ask them what you need to improve upon in the coming year, and invite them if you dare.

2.  At a good retreat, firm management spends as much time listening to the lawyers as they do talking to them.  At a great retreat, that ratio is closer to 3:1.

3.  It is far more important for attorneys to think together at your next firm retreat than it is for them to golf together.

4.  If you don’t make time for lawyers to improve your firm during the retreat, they’re less likely to take time to improve your firm when the retreat is done.

5.  In big firms, the first thing you should teach lawyers is one another’s names.  Familiarity builds collegiality.  Lawyers won’t care what their colleagues do until they know who they are.

6.  “Networking” cocktail parties don’t encourage firm-wide collaboration as much as they encourage firm-wide inebriation.

7.  If the firm retreat is the only time lawyers talk about marketing, it will be the only time they think about marketing.  Same goes for client service.

8.  Your staff knows more about how to serve your clients well than your associates do.  Bring them along, value their opinions and act on their suggestions.  You’ll find that the cost of their attendance is far lower than the cost of their absence.

9.  The three questions every lawyer should be able to answer after a retreat are: “What can I do better?” “Who should I know better?” and “Why should I be better?”

10.  The two costliest items at any firm retreat are the the time and attention of the attendees.  Use them wisely.

If you'd like some help implementing some of these suggestions, check out LexThink and drop me a line.  If you'd like to see more Ten Rules posts, here they are.

Does Your Firm Know Customer Math?

Jackie Huba has a great Q and A with Jeanne Bliss, the author of "I Love You More Than My Dog": Five Decisions That Drive Extreme Customer Loyalty in Good Times and Bad."  There's a lot of meat in the interview (and probably in the book as well), but the real nugget is this reminder to pay more attention to serving existing customers than to pursuing new ones:

Q:  Do companies need to be customer-driven to grow?

A: Companies forget that customers keep them in business.  Customers who love companies grow them.  To understand this, think of customer math -- a rigorous way to track incoming customers by volume and value and then reconcile that number with the lost customers in that same period, comparing incoming and outgoing customer volume and value.  The ‘aha moment’ comes when the math reveals that company marketing dollars are spent replacing customers lost rather than growing the business with the addition of new customers.  In essence, many companies are running in place. I believe in elevating customers as the asset of the business.  That means creating a competency for rigor around a) identifying and getting rid of those things driving customers away; and then b) getting really great at specific things that create a distinct memory and impression about a company and its people.  We forget the fact that it’s the creation of those memories that we make on purpose or accidentally through our operations decisions or policy choices that connect or repel us from customers.

More on this in a few weeks...

Keep Your Clients Healthy

John Jantsch, of Duct Tape Marketing, tweeted this "killer retail traffic strategy" that could work for law firms:

hook up with RN and offer flu shots in your store or business.

Could you offer a free flu-shot to your clients?  Especially if combined with a legal check-up, too?

Ask Your Clients What Surprised Them

Paul Graham collects some sage advice from the founders of startups he's helped fund.  Preparing for a talk, he sent emails to all the founders and asked them "what surprised them about starting a startup?" According to Paul, asking what surprised them amounted to "asking what I got wrong, because if I'd explained things well enough, nothing should have surprised them."

This is a very powerful question that should be on every lawyers post-matter client survey:

What surprised you the most?

Like Paul, you're asking your clients in a polite way about the things you got wrong (or that they think you did because you didn't communicate well).  And I'm quite certain you'll get powerful, surprising and sometimes harshly critical responses -- which are just the types of feedback you can use to eliminate surprises in the future for you and for your clients.

Why Lawyers Procrastinate

Can the source of lawyer procrastination be traced to law school?  Joel Spolsky, in his always-insightful Joel on Software Blog, takes on colleges teaching computer science, and squarely blames them for turning out students poorly prepared to tackle time-based, collaborative projects. 

College students in their final year have about 16 years of experience doing short projects and leaving everything until the last minute. Until you’re a senior in college, you’re very unlikely to have ever encountered an assignment that can’t be done by staying up all night....

Students have exactly zero experience with long term, team-based schedules. Therefore, they almost always do crappy work when given a term-length project and told to manage their time themselves.

If anything productive is to come out of these kinds of projects, you have to have weekly deadlines, and you have to recognize that ALL the work for the project will be done the night before the weekly deadline. It appears to be a permanent part of the human condition that long term deadlines without short term milestones are rarely met.

Lawyers, does this sound familiar?  I'm doing some more thinking on this, but it seems to me that law students not required to meet deadlines (and work collaboratively) are ill-prepared to become good lawyers.  Your thoughts?

Motivational Interviewing for Lawyers

I'm helping facilitate a workshop later today titled "Working with Difficult Clients" for Legal Services of Eastern Missouri's annual conference.  One of the exercises we'll be doing teaches how lawyers can use Motivational Interviewing techniques to get better responses from distressed clients. 

Here's a quick way example of Motivational Interviewing questions (be sure to ask them in this order):

How important would you say it is for you to ______________?

On a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 is not at all important and 10 is extremely important, where would you say you are?

Why a 3 and not a 0?  OR: Why an 8 and not a 10?

Give this method of questioning a try next time you're talking to a client.  It is a great way to understand what they think is important, and most importantly, why they feel that way.

Twenty Ideas

Here's a handout I've been using to supplement my presentations titled Twenty Ideas.  I hope it is useful to you.

Download Twenty Ideas

Free Webinar and Kansas City Keynote This Week

If you'd like to hear (or see me) speak, you've got two opportunities this week.  The first is a (free) webinar tomorrow at 1pm Eastern and the second is in Kansas City on Thursday, where I'll be keynoting the Kansas City Solo and Small Firm Conference.

In both, I'll be sharing innovative strategies lawyers can use to build their practices, identify their ideal clients and thrive in this down economy.

The New LexThink.com

After lots of work, I'm happy to unveil my new LexThink site.  I still have lots of work to do, including some minor tweaks and major content additions, but am happy enough to release it in "beta" for now.

On a technical side, it is built in Wordpress, using the amazing Headway theme.  My friend M. Jason Robards did all the art work, but the design and content are all mine.

I'm in the Spotlight

Friend and colleague JoAnna Forshee interviewed me for InsideLegal's "Legal Innovators Spotlight" a few weeks ago.  The interview is up here, and is mostly about LexThink and the services I offer the legal industry.

However, there's one question (along with my answer) that I wanted to share here:

What do you see as the biggest challenge facing the legal industry now and in the upcoming year?

Most lawyers are focused on returning their practices to profitability -- which is a near term problem for many of us.  However, I think a far greater challenge is looming in the distance, and that is irrelevance. 

For far too long, lawyers have taken their clients and customers for granted.  Quietly, real alternatives are emerging that are making lawyers less necessary to clients.  In just the last five years, we’ve seen more and more consumers turn first to the web as they draft their will, start their LLC, etc.  This is a trend that will only continue, and lawyers must begin thinking about a day when the least valuable thing they have to offer their clients is advice.

I'd love your feedback here.

Advertise What Matters (to Clients)

If you're wondering what to put on your website (or in that next yellow pages ad), take a cue from the Central Florida Regional Hospital in Sanford, Florida.  Instead of trumpeting just how great their doctors are, they're using a nearby billboard to display a real-time statistic that lots of people care about: ER wait times.

From the Orlando Sentinel:

To find out how long the wait is in the emergency room at Central Florida Regional Hospital in Sanford, you can check its Web site, send a text, or, now, cruise past a billboard on Interstate 4.

The hospital this week started posting its ER wait times on the billboard, on the eastbound side near State Road 46. It's part of a campaign to use technology to spread the word about decreasing the wait.

"Putting our wait times to see a physician in real time on a billboard is just one more step in educating the community about our service," said Wendy Brandon, the hospital's chief executive officer. The wait times to see a physician are updated every 30 minutes and reflect an average from the previous four hours.

What do your clients want to know about you?  Do they see the answer in your advertising?  They should.

LexThink Labs

Here's another image from the new LexThink site (coming really soon).  It will be on the "LexThink Labs" page, which will include lots of fun, interesting and unique exercises, retreat ideas, and more.

Sell Me This Pencil

Here's a list of 100 Great Interview Questions, that includes most of the obvious ones, such as "What are your weaknesses?" and "What's your ideal company?" etc. 

However, there was one "question" that stood out to me above all others:

Sell me this pencil.

Think about that for a moment.  The question doesn't require an answer, it requires a performance.  I wonder how it might impact hiring by law firms if their interviewers asked it just once in a while...

Prepare Better for High-Stakes Meetings

Here's a checklist from The Eloquent Woman that she uses to prepare herself for every presentation she gives.  As I was reading it, I realized that her list isn't just for presenters.  Instead, it is the perfect preparation for nearly every client meeting, negotiation and court appearance. 

My favorite section are the questions about intent:

1. Do I know what the audience wants from me?


2. Is that what I'm going to give them? Do my goals match theirs? If not, why am I speaking to them? How will I reach them?


3. What do I want to get out of this speaking experience?


4. What do I need to learn from the audience? How will I find out?


5. Do I intend to engage the audience? Do I just want them to listen? Do I intend to get them to act on something?

Before your next high-stakes meeting, answer each question, first replacing "Audience" with Client, Judge or even Opposing Counsel.  I suspect you'll gain answers that make asking the questions worthwhile. 

Test for Toxic Clients

Not sure whether to take that client?  Here's a great test from Milton Glaser he uses to avoid toxic people:

[T]here is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.

Perhaps something to think about after every initial consultation?

(via Kareem Mayan's Weblog)