Is Your Firm Organized Around Your Clients or Around Your Firm?

Your firm is dedicated to client service as one of its pre-eminent goals, if not the absolutely highest priority, right?

Not so fast.  Do you have a lawyer serving full-time as "Client Services Advisor," serving as an ombudsman on behalf of the firm's clients and responsible for creating and overseeing more than 60 "client service teams" (and counting)?  Akin-Gump does, in the person of Iris Jones. 

Swell:  What's a "client service team?," you're asking.

Essentially, it's a tool for formalizing and institutionalizing collaboration among the various lawyers serving Important Client X.   An example will aid understanding even better than a description.  Here's how the "Technology-Copyright-Internet" group works:

"The TCI attorneys participate in client service teams with Akin Gump’s patent attorneys, litigation attorneys and other practice groups. This collaborative commitment to client service enables Akin Gump to assist in providing clients with comprehensive counseling in all areas of IP and overlapping areas of the law."

The goal is to approach the client relationship from the perspective of the client's business (and its concomitant legal needs) rather than from the perspective of the firm's legal expertise (which may or may not be germane to the client's business).    My friend Bruce Marcus also describes this approach.

The latter approach—starting from the perspective of the firm rather than the client—is conceptually just plain mistaken. 

In practice, what does this really mean? 

• First, as noted, it requires genuine collaboration.  Teams need to be assembled and re-assembled as the client's business and legal posture changes.  Now the team may need some focused litigators; next quarter an offshore tax expert; and the quarter after that an employment maven.  Iris Jones' job is to stay on top of all this and make sure that today's "A Team" doesn't become tomorrow's "Irrelevant Team." 
  Does this mean partners need to "buy in" with their heart and soul?  Check.
  Yes, this can be the hard part:  We all know that collaboration is not in the law school curriculum.  But never underestimate the power of self-interest to trump training.  As one Akin-Gump partner put it:  "In an increasingly competitive environment, the client service team has been invaluable in [strengthening] our relationship."
• Second, it requires plain old information-tracking.  Call it "Client Relationship Management" if you like, but lawyers must have one centralized repository for everything germane about the client's legal needs and the history of its relationship with the firm.  We've all had the experience of phoning (say) the cable company to ask a service-related question or inquire about a bill, only to find ourselves forced to explain everything from square one with a succession of several different people.  As uninspiring as this is with the cable company, it leaves a positively ghastly impression coming from a supposedly sophisticated law firm.
• Lastly, it means the client service team has to have a vision of where the client fits within the firm's strategic plan—a vision which is both clear and nuanced.  Lest I be accused of throwing around the phrase "strategic plan" loosely, I'll try to define it:  "Strategic plan" in the sense I mean it is not the 3- or 5-year document delivered from the mountaintop and promptly shelved for terminal verboseness or immediate irrelevancy (the latter fate being nicely described by the epithet "OBE," or "overtaken by events").  Rather, a strategic plan in this sense is a continuously evolving awareness of the fit between (i) the marketplace's specific demands; (ii) the firm's ability (or short-term lack thereof) to meet those demands; and (iii) how the firm can develop to most closely align its capabilities and offerings with the evolving market.

Note the focus throughout is on "the client" and "the market" rather than "the firm" or "the lawyer."

We have all known in our heads for some time, even if we have not acted on it with our hearts, that excellent legal skills are merely the price of admission in today's globally competitive market.  That means they cannot pretend to be your distinctive calling card; they're table stakes.

What could provide an enduring distinction, on the other hand, is responding to your clients' business (and, as a follow-on thereto, legal) needs with the same alacrity and professional focus the client itself would apply internally.  Client service teams may not be the only route there, but they surely start at the right end of the service spectrum.