Amazing Firms, Amazing Practices

What is your initial reaction to the title of this blog post?  I thought it was daft… until I read the complete post by Susan Cramm on June 25, 2008 on her Harvard Business Blog: Having IT Your Way.

Here is an excerpt from her blog post:

Over the past decade, IT organizations have worked hard to improve services and in turn increase IT’s impact on the business. But in the quest to deliver great service, IT actually may have been disabling rather than enabling the enterprise.

How? In two ways. First, continual hand-holding leads to a loss of precious time that could be devoted to more important activities. Second, helping others who can help themselves circumvents learning. It lets them off the hook and alleviates their sense of responsibility. And ultimately it slows down progress as communication is constantly being run through an intermediary. In delegation lingo, this is called taking on someone else’s monkey.

PUNCHLINE:   Based on my observations in the firms I serve around the world, I would say that too many lawyers pride themselves on their IT incompetencies believing that it makes them somehow charming and brilliant.  I say they might as well be sneaking into the firm at night and taking cash out of the safe.  The costs associated with that attitude include:

• poorer client service by failing to capitalize on the efficiencies technology offers
• competitive disadvantage (clients do not find incompetency charming ever)
• wasted IT personnel time
• distracting and therefore delaying or discouraging the latest IT initiatives
• <I’ll bet the IT folks out there can add lots to this list>

Allow me to transpose one of Susan’s comments for Managing Partners and CIO’s in the legal profession:

Pleasing partners shouldn't be IT’s ultimate goal (or that of the Managing Partner). Rather, the ultimate goal of the Managing Partner and the CIO is to ensure the success of the firm. Help IT serve you and the firm by making sure that IT isn’t doing anything for individuals that they can, and should, do for themselves.

Posted In Knowledge Management , Law Firm Innovation , Law Firm Technology , Law Firm Training , , , ,
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If you want existing clients to like you as much as possible and even more so prospective clients then use proper names in conversation.  Now there's PROOF if you need it.  

Most probable reasons you may not be using proper names in conversations:

• You are not completely certain you remember (or pronounce) the name right so why risk it
• There is a group and you can’t remember all their names so feel you shouldn't use any
• You are afraid of sounding patronizing
• It’s a discipline you simply have not mastered.

PROOF:  A new study by Dr. Amit Almor of the University of South Carolina used MRI brain scans to show the different responses when a subject hears a proper name or a pronoun referring to a previously named person. 

“The brain lit up with activity when proper names were used, including areas that are not associated with language,” Almor said. “We saw considerable activity in areas of the parietal lobe that involve spatial processing that was absent when pronouns were used.”

Read the full story “Names Disrupt The Brain”.

Winners:

• touch parts of their clients brains that others ignore
• are liked and remembered much much better than their competitors

How:

• Write the names down (if a group – make a seating chart – at least first names)
• If hard to pronounce, ask and practice (they will love you for it)
• Practice using the names (starting right now)

PUNCHLINE:  Perhaps in a perfect world you would simply be appreciated for the skilled genius you are.  I don’t disagree.  However, if competitive advantage is important to you in this imperfect world, put this post into action.  (Thinking about it, alone, will yield nothing.)

WARNING:  My post above may lack veracity according to Stephanie Allen West's post "Anatomy of a telephone game applied to a neuroscience study" in her "Brains on Purpose" blog - I respect her enough to reference her post here - Stephanie's admonition is deserving of consideration and reflection.  Thank you, Stephanie.

Posted In Law Firm Marketing , Law Firm Training , Up Close and Personal , ,
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I am asked frequently why some lawyers create such amazing rapport with their clients.  Much of this stems from the art of the first impression .  The first client interaction is more about not making a bad impression than it is making a good one.

Here are 7 first client interaction blunders that virtually guarantee you won’t develop healthy client rapport:

1. Talking only about yourself
2. Revealing too much
3. Not listening
4. Not looking your best
5. Trying to be cool or aloof
6. Not being yourself
7. Not listening to your gut

CONFESSION:  I stole these! …from genius (he denies it) Brad Isaac who invented Achieve-IT software, known as the Breakthrough Goal Setting Method.

He actually posted 10 First Date Blunders That Blow It Every Time on his Achieve-IT blog and I thought, hmmm, can we learn (transpose from one context to another).

You will note that there were 10 in his post and seven in mine –  as for the three I left out, I thought two were not relevant and thought better of including the third, they were:

1. Going someplace where you can’t talk
2. Bringing friends along
3. Having sex or being too sexual

FOOD FOR THOUGHT:  Why would unappealing behavior in social situations be any more appealing in professional situations.

By the way, Brad's blog has some very interesting posts - check it out!

Posted In Law Firm Marketing , Synergies (with other disciplines) ,
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(Click on image to see original enlarged version)

I was fascinated by this piece at the Consumerist:   How To Beat The Stock Market: Buy Companies With High Customer Satisfaction Scores

If the same phenomenon occurs in the legal profession, there would be a tremendous return on investment from enhancing client satisfaction.

The story is that a portfolio comprised of “companies at the top 20% of the the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI)... greatly outperformed the stock market, generating a 40% return.

“From 1996-2003, the portfolio outperformed the Dow Jones Industrial Average by 93%, the S&P 500 by 201%, and NASDAQ by 335%.”

How would you like to out perform the average law firm by somewhere between 93% and 335%?  More importantly, how much should you invest in order to reap a return of that nature?

Don’t bother disseminating this information to your people in order to encourage them to focus on enhancing client satisfaction.  Their consequential improved knowledge on the subject will do little.  It takes results (client satisfaction) to get results (improved profitability).  SKILLS rather than knowledge with be essential to achieve the desired outcome.

PUNCHLINE:  In my opinion, there is an overabundance of information in law firms and a dearth of client-relations training.  If you are a Managing Partner, you may want to balance this disparity.

Note:  I admit that this post is an act of unbridled extrapolation.  I cannot prove that the empirical research referenced would apply to the legal profession per se but my view is that it probably would.

(Thank you to my son, Daniel, for bringing this to my attention.  Daniel (Riskin) is a PhD and a renowned expert on bats - he discovered Vampire bats run - check out his site.)

Posted In Law Firm Economics , Law Firm Management , Law Firm Marketing , Law Firm Training , , , , , , , ,
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