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.

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.

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.

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.

Bonus Your Staff Before Your Attorneys

In this great TED talk by author Dan Pink, he argues that while incentives improve people's performance on routine tasks, just the opposite is true when creativity or problem solving is involved.  Incentives not only fail to improve performance on creative tasks, they diminish it.  What's more, the larger the reward, the worse the performance.  Might be something to think about when deciding just how to motivate lawyers. 

Watch the entire talk (it is roughly 18 minutes), it is worth your time.

Want cooperation? Think reciprocation.

If you struggle to get prospects to fill out a lengthy form before meeting with you, perhaps some new research will change your mind.

In a study summarized here in the Nuromarketing blog, rearchers compared the effectiveness of two strategies often employed by websites to collect personal data from visitors: requiring the visitor's info before allowing them to access specific content (a reward strategy), or requesting it after they've already seen the content (a reciprocity strategy).  The result:

It turns out that a reciprocity strategy works better – give them the info they want, and then ask for their information. In the impressively titled Embedded Persuasive Strategies to Obtain Visitors’ Data: Comparing Reward and Reciprocity in an Amateur, Knowledge-Based Website, Gamberini et al found that twice as many visitors gave up their information if they were able to access the information first. It’s counterintuitive, perhaps, but even though these visitors were under no obligation to complete the form, they converted at double the rate of visitors seeing the “mandatory” form.

What does this mean?  Whenever you ask prospects to do something, work with reciprocity in mind.  Instead of demanding their cooperation before meeting you, ask for it after they do.  You'll likely get more cooperation and better information from them, while starting the representation off on the right foot.

Focus Wins

From Seth Godin:

When you have someone who is willing to accomplish A without worrying about B and C, they will almost always defeat you in accomplishing A.

Introduce Your Staff to Your Clients

Here's a great idea from the London Underground (subway) via the U.K.'s Creative Review.  The Underground hired photographer Maria Cox to visit each of the London Underground's 264 stations and take a picture of someone who worked there. 

The photographs are combined with some information about each person, and then displayed at the station where he or she works.  Here's the profile of John Osborne, a customer services assistant at the Shepherd's Bush Line station:



It makes me wonder how many businesses here in the states could benefit from a similar approach.  I think many clients would be more apt to hire a firm that cared enough about their employees to feature them in this way.  What do you think?