THE ART OF COMMUNICATION
MAKING A CONNECTION WITH YOUR CLIENTS©
CHERYL CAREY LEONE
Chief Executive Officer
CATALYST GROUP INC.
P. O. Box 97067
Raleigh, NC 27624-7067
Telephone: 1-800-434-8911
Email: cjleone@catalystgroupinc.com

INTRODUCTION

Any lawyer worth his or her salt knows that today's lawyer is in a highly competitive market with clients. According to the Bureau of Labor & Statistics, in 2002 lawyers held approximately 695,000 jobs with three out of four lawyers practicing privately, either in law firms or in solo practices. Employment of lawyers is expected to grow about as fast as the average through 2012, due to the growth in population and the increased level of business activities.

New and varied fields are opening up such as elder law, antitrust, environmental, employment and labor law, and intellectual properties. This is dictated by the fast growing change in our culture within the United States and the various age groups that will dominate over the next ten years.

This growth will restrict the private practice lawyer because many businesses are using in-house lawyers and paralegals to perform some of the same functions previously held by a private firm. In addition, prepaid legal service programs and clinics will have an impact upon the private practice lawyer.

While there will continue to be available clients (and growing numbers) and required legal needs, the smart lawyer for the next ten years is going to have to be highly competitive, business savvy, and find a way to get the business in the door and keep it coming back. The number of self-employed lawyers is expected to decrease because of the difficulty of establishing and maintaining a profitable law practice in the face of the large firms who have the money to out-spend the small law firm in marketing. However the small law firm can overcome this with a change in thinking, particularly in the area of client relationship marketing.

Several things have happened that have changed the face of the practice of law and the way the client consumer views legal services today.

With the advent of media advertising, clients started to realize there were options. Where before you depended on knowing “who the man was” in the legal field in the community, you now had many, many lawyers telling you via television and yellow pages that they could do a better job at a cheaper price. The client consumer became more educated. The mystic of law was not that mysterious. After all, there was the Internet to guide the client. Suddenly the client could download a Will for $50.00 and figure it out themselves. They could read up on the law and have a better understanding of what the situation was.

At about the same time, lawyers as a group came under attack. Their professional image became tarnished. Suddenly, the lawyer was not the end-all answer to problems. The new client consumer entered the area of questioning the lawyer rather than accepting what the lawyer said. Lawyers reacted by moving more into an ivory tower, refusing to accept that "something was wrong." Lawyers did not and have not fought back against the massive amounts of money being poured into the market to label the "lawyer" as untrustworthy, lacking in integrity, and "out for the almighty dollar.”

Lawyers failed to "protect their own turf" and thus have failed to band together to fight back. The lack of confidence in lawyers is at an all time low and the only choice the individual lawyer or firm has is to build client confidence one-on-one. One has to ask who has the most to gain by diminishing client confidence in lawyers. With push coming to shove over the arguments of tort reform, fee bargaining, and the increased cost of doing business, the smart lawyer has to be innovative and learn to think outside the box. Times have changed and will continue to change and the successful lawyer will be the one changing. The client consumer already has.

Media advertising taught the client consumer that they could pick and chose which lawyer they wanted and suddenly saw the advent of the specialized lawyer - and it made sense to the client consumer. Why hire a lawyer who thought he knew everything when right down the road was a lawyer who did only one type of law - hence he or she must be very good.

The client consumer also realized that lawyers were competitive on prices and thus, like any smart consumer, started "checking out the competition.” Lawyers, in an effort to survive, started cutting prices and making themselves more attractive by fee reductions. The client consumer realized rather quickly, in fact far more quickly than the lawyer, that the client had the upper hand and not the lawyer. The intense competition among lawyers is now widespread. Clients are now asking lawyers to "bid" to conduct a routine procedure or for the real estate business or a divorce.

With specialized practices and competitive pricing, lawyers quickly realized that being an expert wasn’t going to pay the bills. Since the majority of clients only need a lawyer once or twice in their lifetime, repeat business was not a factor. A lawyer could jump into the fracas of media advertising. Marketing got the client in the door but more likely than not it was a one-time venture and the cost of marketing that one client became prohibitive.

You only have to look at the cost of yellow pages and media advertising to understand that marketing, once considered a small budget item, has jumped to the forefront and every dollar spent has to be spent wisely. A few firms made it over the top and committed massive amounts of money to media advertising which allowed them to dominate the market. Unfortunately, these firms had to deal in volume which, without control, leads to poor client service. This simply made the client consumer a bit angrier and they joined the lawyer bashing.

All of this coupled with a new consumer outlook for the 21st Century is forcing the lawyer to play catch-up in the psychological game of getting clients in the door and turning them out of the door as a mini-marketer for the lawyer. Over-all consumer spending is up despite the economy and over-all satisfaction with the service consumers are receiving is down. Price is not necessarily the object anymore. Consumers want to be treated right and they will go to whoever will give them the service they believe they are entitled to.
This holds true more than ever in the professional world. If lawyers want evidence of this, they only have to look at the medical profession who is aggressively touting personal care and concern to get the patient in the door.

Today's lawyer has to figure out what the client wants and then give it, whether it is in tangible or intangible services. Today’s lawyer has to let go of his or her ego and realize that to be truly of service means serving the client from beginning to end with what the client wants – not what the lawyer wants.

Sensitivity means you must be sensitive to your market place. What works in Charlotte, North Carolina might not work in Mayberry, N. C. Another survey we saw one time stated that lawyers who lose clients gave the following reasons:

• 1% die
• 3% move
• 5% dislike the probable outcome
• 24% have some dispute that does not get adjusted
• 67% feel that they were treated discourteously, indifferently, or were not given good service

Thus, you must be sensitive to your client’s needs and wants. The above survey results illustrate that good client service and being sensitive to your clients needs is one of the main ways to keep clients and get referrals from prior clients. It’s been our experience that if you do a good job and meet the needs of your client even though the results are not exactly what they anticipated or wanted, they will refer new clients to you because you care. It has often been said that a satisfied client will tell 2 to 5 people; a dissatisfied client will tell anywhere from 10 to 20 people.

Simply put, the difference in being a successful lawyer, having good financial return, low overhead, plus a sense of being valued simply is client service. And what is ironic is that you do not have to spend hard-earned dollars on expensive marketing. A referral due to good client serviced is free marketing at its finest!

Warning: Giving good client service can be beneficial to your health
professionally and personally!

WHAT IS CLIENT RELATIONSHIP MARKETING?

Client Relationship Marketing (CRM) is a new buzz word for the 21st Century. CRM with law firm is still the hidden secret to success. ALL LAWYERS TELL US THEY GIVE GOOD CLIENT SERVICE! What we have found in our years of dealing with our lawyer clients is what they believe is good client service and what the client perceives is good client service is usually two different things.

Client Relationship Marketing is a highly developed sense of how to best provide services to your client in such a manner that an ensuing relationship continues well beyond when the legal service to be rendered has been concluded. And relationships are all about communication.

Amazingly today’s clients are not about wanting the “expert”, it is about wanting an “advocate” who gives a sense of personal caring that transcends the legal issues. Our company does on-going surveys for our law firm clients. Our company will send out letters throughout the active relationship process (and after the service is concluded) to see how the client perceives the law firm and his or her lawyer. One of our law firm clients takes seriously its commitment to client service and has adjusted its staff, its business practices, and its services depending on the survey results as it grows and they haven’t been wrong. They are having a steady growth coupled with a leap in client referrals. They listened to their clients. It takes a good business person to listen to negativity and make adjustments to correct problems. By the way, client complaints for this firm average less than 1% per year (since started in 2004).

With the highly competitive nature of law today, something must make you and your firm stand out from the rest of your competitors. Without exception, once we were able to get our (Catalyst) clients to understand the principal of client relationship marketing and to learn to communicate with the client, business increased

CLIENT RELATIONSHIP MARKETING IS NOTHING MORE THAN
GOOD COMMUNICATION WITH CLIENTS!

WHAT IS COMMUNICATION?

To understand how you reach your clients on that deeply personal level while still delivering and handling their legal issues, you must first understand what communication is. Lawyers already know how to communicate in the handling of legal affairs with other lawyers, juries, mediations, and in negotiations. This is not the same as communication with clients. With clients you must develop a deep personal communication that instills in the client only one thought – you care about them personally.

Communication comes in all sorts of forms. The most common types of communication are verbal, body, and written communication. We add two more to this basic list; i.e. listening and hidden communication; these last two being the ones we believe are missed the most when dealing with clients.

VERBAL COMMUNICATION

As lawyers you would believe that you do verbal communication well. The question becomes do you do verbal communication well with your clients. If you take the position that your client wants personal attention then what you want to learn to develop is conversational communication. Conversational communication is learning to talk with your clients in a casual, direct and instant way. Conversational communication is personal. It has to be genuine. It can’t be faked. To do this, you have to take the approach that what the other person says is just as, if not more, important than what you say.

According to research psychologists, the average one year old child has a three word vocabulary. By 15 months children can speak 19 words. By age six the average child can communicate with 2562 words. The average adult speaks at a rate of 125 to 200 words per minute and up to 18,000 worlds per day. Having said this, you may not assume the messages delivered are clear.

One of our clients was a “Yankee” who transplanted to the South. He was a genuinely good lawyer who deeply cared about what he did and his clients. He told us no matter what we recommended we had to understand that “his clients came first.” We told him that we believed in client service as the product and asked him to rate his firm on client service. He gave himself an A+; after all he was working 60 to 70 hours per week to make sure he did a first rate job. We hung around for a couple of weeks talking to staff and to his clients. And we found out that his clients thought he was an outstanding lawyer but “not easy to know or talk to.” We also found out that they perceived his staff the same way. He wore his very best suit and tie to work, as soon as he sat down with the client he showed them all the work being done, he talked to them about the steps to take, and he made sure they concurred with the process.

We actually had some fun “southernizing” his firm. We use this simply to say that we have found out that clients want to make a personal connection with the lawyer and the staff. Thus we made a rule. You could not talk to a client about his or her case until you asked something personal about them. And finally, when you talked to a client you had to keep in mind “What if that was your mama you were talking to?” Then we had weekly meetings where each person in the firm had to have one client they could tell one personal fact about. The person with the most interesting story got a prize. As you can imagine, the clients and the firm became loyal to each other. And the personal referral rate doubled in six months! And we must confess! We got rid of the formal suit and tie and, unless in court or more formal matters, and he went to business casual which put him on a more equal level with his clients.

BODY LANGUAGE

As lawyers you know the importance of reading body language when selecting a jury or dealing with an adversary. How many of you know the classic “arms crossed” indicates a defensive person with a defensive position; i.e. the goal being to get the person to relax and hold their hands in their laps.

We can assure you that your clients are watching your body language a lot more closely than you think. They are dealing with the most important thing in their life right then and how you are perceived and how you act physically in front of them becomes a subconscious impact on them that dictates how well they work with you or if they eve want to hire you. Confidence comes from within and you exhibit it in every little movement you make.

Clients want a common meeting ground with their lawyer. We have found that clients very much respect the lawyers’ training and education but they still want to be on an equal common ground. Frankly the client feels he or she is paying the bill and has the right to feel this way.

You can set the tone in such simply ways. Do you come get your client and take the back to the office? Do you introduce your clients to your staff to create a familial atmosphere? Do you sit next to your client? One change we made in a law firm was to create conference rooms with round tables so that everyone was equal to everyone else. If you can’t do that then sit beside your client. Get that big desk out of the way.

Walt Disney has body language down to a science. Beside every door that enters the park from the employee sections is a large sign that says “Check your Smile, Check your Dress, You are now going on stage”. Feel free to use this Catalyst sign and put beside each phone:

STOP!
ARE YOU SMILING?
AND TREAT THE CALLER LIKE YOUR MAMA!

Clients are very perceptive about how you feel simply by watching what you do and what you say. And they can feel sincerity!

WRITTEN LANGUAGE

Our world is now the world of the internet. The art of speaking and writing “legalize” is gone forever we believe. In its place are short concise statements in the form of letters, memos and emails. You can tell when you graduated from law school by whether or not you can remember complaints that were 20 pages long. Now you are lucky if they are three pages long. Brevity works best in law.

The written word becomes much more important with the client. Recently we had one of our clients ask us to send out a written survey letter offering our services as a client advocate. The letter specifically stated that the client was not to call our number to inquire about the status of the case. Rather our services were to be an advocate if they felt services were not up to par or if they had compliments to pass on.

We were astounded to hear our special phone number ring constantly with clients wanting to know the status of their case. This was especially interesting because they had been dealing with a lawyer and a paralegal for some time. The client simply saw the words “call” and “client advocate”, which meant to them to call us about their case.

What is more interesting is to correct this and make it clearer, we redid the letters and bolded the words “DO NOT CALL THIS NUMBER, CALL (name} for an update on your case. While the calls decreased somewhat we have never been able to change this. Thus we simply take the call as a time to discuss the firm’s scorecard before we refer them back to their attorney.

We strongly encourage lawyers to mail copies of everything they can so that the client sees the firm working. But we also encourage lawyers imply to sometimes just send small notes that may enclose information of benefit to a client in general such as “How to Buy Car Insurance” and to send notes on special occasions; i.e. birthdays, graduations, etc. Frankly if you know your client you will know these events.

LISTENING COMMUNICATION

Lawyers love to talk! (Well not as much as law firm consultants but close enough). However, if there ever is a time to listen it is with your clients. Clients don’t know how to summarize situations into concise little statements. They sometimes have to talk…and talk. and talk until they feel they have stated their case. They also want you to know who they are. The lawyer who gives the client his or her undivided attention wins hands down every time.

Dale Carnegie’s famous course, How to Win Friends and Influence People, teaches you how to listen. If you listen, asking just brief questions, people usually think you talked the most. The only thing people like more than listening to themselves talk is to hear their name.

It is also a useful tool to find out what the case is really about. Having worked in law firms for a number of years, I have been continually amazed when I listen to a client outline a case that has nothing to do with the actual legal issue. It was only by allowing them to continue to talk did the lawyer find out another first rate case. If you cut the client off you are doing your firm an injustice.

We realize the most valuable tool a lawyer has is his or her time. It is easy to turn over client interviews to staff. We realize it saves time. But staff sometimes doesn’t hear it!

We did a study of our law firm clients this year on one particularly phase of our teaching, The Art of Listening (Catalyst 360 HPT Training Course). What was confirmed to us was that by listening at the first visit until the story was completely out, the client seemed to be less needy at other visits.

HIDDEN COMMUNICATION

In our opinion, hidden communication will sink the ship faster than anything. Hidden communication is what is not said but evident. The easiest example is to call a law firm, the receptionist (who you know sits no more than 15 feet from the lawyer’s office) and ask her if the lawyer is in. She replies, “I am not sure, let me check!” Of course she knows. He (or she) has to walk past her to go to the bathroom and/or leave the building). Your firm just lied to the client! And believe me the client knows it.

Would it now be better to notify the receptionist when you are unable to take calls and tell the truth! For example, the receptionist would say “Yes, Mr. Jones is here. He is working on a project and asked me to hold his calls. Can he call you back, would you like his voice mail, or could his paralegal help you?” Clients know when you are avoiding them.

Hidden Communication is making promises not kept. Hidden Communication is not telling the truth. If you tell someone you will do something, do it or call and tell the truth! Avoiding the client on the phone because you haven’t done something is sending a clear message. WE all hope to get a complaint out on a certain day but events can change the sequence. It is better to pick up the phone and explain the delay than to simply avoid the client’s call when it is not done.

Hidden Communication is also negativity in your work place. If staff are not client loyal and firm loyal their unhappiness transcends to the client. A good rule to implement today is that you will not tolerate negativity about clients or the law firm from anyone in your employ. If a client is unhappy or rude, then the staff person tells you – they don’t tell another staff person. You have created unfair bias towards the client. Teach your staff to come to you about problem clients.
Staff must know that you care about your firm work culture. Dissatisfied staff are so obvious no wonder clients sense it. Happy staff create happy clients. The frontlines (those people who deal directly with the client) form attachments to clients and they want to deliver good work product. Let them do it! Reward them for client loyalty. This makes them loyal to the firm.

RATING YOUR FIRM WITH GOOD CLIENT COMMUNICATION

We believe good communication creates personal relationships and personal relationships create personal referrals. Again, we can not stress enough that clients do not want an expert, they want an advocate. Someone who believes and speaks for the firm.

It is easy to spot the advocate lawyer and the advocate firm. When we consult with a law firms, we can easily tell those that operate as experts and those that are true advocates. We normally see the following in an advocate-based law firm:

• Clients feel free to ask for advice, both on subjects directly related to their case or in peripheral areas that happen to be of concern.
• The majority of the clients return to the firm for their legal needs. If the firm does not handle such a matter the client wants the firm to make the referral because of trust. The client will return to the firm for legal needs that are handled by the firm.
• There is a strong mutual trust, on a professional and a personal level, between the firm and the client.
• The firm collaborates with the client to determine his or her needs, becoming a partner with the client as an integral part of the solution. The client's ideas are asked for.
• The client is educated as to not only understanding the case but how it will be handled, what the anticipated results will be, and thus the client becomes much more secure.
• The firm frequently approaches the client for unsolicited ideas and suggestions.
• Clients believe the firm delivers value in excess of the fee charged.
• The firm receives positive feedback from the client.
• The firm is not afraid to ask the client to rate the firm on client satisfaction.
• The firm receives calls from clients who are friendly and not complaining.
• The firm genuinely appreciates each client and values the trust the client has with the firm.

CONCLUSION

If you want to turn your firm around and have a firm where enjoyment of the practice of law is happening, where the clients are genuinely satisfied, then you implement a client service program that demands of yourself, your partners, your associates, and your staff a learning process of communication. Our program is called “4 The Client” which is a four-part methodology. Each part is integrated into and crucial to the success of the program. The rules become non-negotiable. The attitude of the firm changes. We would encourage you to think outside the box for ideas that would make client service happen.

The Four Step Process involves the following:

Phase One is COMMITMENT. This is where you go back to the beginning and decide if you are willing to change your way of thinking and the way you view clients. It is not something you can do half-heartedly and it is not something you can change your mind on later down the road. You either will or won’t do it. Lack of sincerity and a lack of passion for the change and its concept will defeat you from the start both with the client and with your firm.

Phase Two is EXPECTATIONS between the lawyer, the firm, and the client. It is a two-way street and it is a developing of a partnership with the client. It is a public statement of what your clients can expect to receive from you and what you will expect from your clients. It is a partnership for life in the making. Once you set the expectations and everyone in the firm understands them, then the expectations are set in stone and are non-negotiable.

Phase Three is about RESOURCES to meet the commitment and the expectation. Without the right kind of tools and resources, neither you nor your law firm can meet the commitment and expectations. Again, there are suggestions and some non-negotiable resources that must be available to your firm and your clients. This phase drives the client service program and the client marketing program. Resources are even training on how to communicate with people.

Phase Four is ACCOUNTABILITY. Simply put, you and all who work with you will be held accountable for delivering the client service best suited to your firm. It is a life-long accountability program that keeps working and working and working. Each person in the firm, from the top to the bottom, is held responsible for client service. It is non-negotiable and it written in concrete. Programs are in place to verify and ensure that all aspects of the firm’s service policy are being met. Those firm members who cannot meet it will be offered tools and resources and training. If after these attempts a firm member cannot be of service to the client within the guidelines of the firm’s commitment to the client the employee will be asked to seek employment elsewhere.

CONCLUSION

Catalyst works with small law firms and gets our most enjoyment when we can see a law firm become client friendly. You can feel the synergy in a firm when you enter the door. Everyone is part of a team designed to make clients feel they are the most important people in the world. Everyone gets their strokes from happy clients. It doesn’t become a matter of who won or lost but rather who cared.

We believe that your law firm has to be a positive force where you enjoy coming to work. We believe you manage by values and you implement your values where clients can see them.

While we believe that law firms are to be run as “for profit businesses” we also believe “for profit businesses” come from happy satisfied clients who work in partnership with you.

Whether you hire a professional to help you or you do it yourself, we urge you to take the concept and be creative, think outside the box, but above all else make the change. You will never regret it – we guarantee it!

Finally, we believe that 99% of all lawyers are lawyers because they have a sense of duty and a desire for justice for their clients. We do not believe you have to be number one in your class, win the most jury trials, or successfully mediate the best cases. We have a class we teach called “The Tombstone Theory” which boils down to what do you want on your tombstone that could tell people 200 years from now what type of person were you. Let’s presume your name and occupation are on the tombstone.

What would be one to three words you would put after that? I believe the successful lawyer simply has after his or her occupation one word: FRIEND.

“Justice consists in doing no injury to men; decency in giving them no offense.”