What About Paris?™

I wound up with this philosophy about sitting on the wall as a result of making three observations that I call rules about the business of lawyering. As I said, being self centered lawyers as we are it is difficult to begin where we must begin not by looking inside ourselves, but rather by looking inside the individuals from whom we seek employment. Who are these people? What are they looking for? Are they different from us, and if so, how so? These are inquiries into customer needs, customer preferences and customer impressions and these are the core questions that must be made in any service business.

First Rule

And that is what we as lawyers do. We provide a service. So that is the first rule: To recognize and understand that lawyering is a service business. As an individual, you must get out of your head that that you are marketing a product. We are not selling the product of superior legal analysis, or the product of skillful advocacy, or even the product of artful cross-examination or eloquence before a jury. You or your firm will so advertise, but that’s of no consequence.

If you think about it, the typical client is inundated with material about the product offered by law firms, and for the most part he or she probably has concluded that there are a lot of lawyers offering good product.

Now that is not to say that there may not be in this audience a lawyer whose skills in one or another area are so extraordinary, so exceptional, that clients will flock to acquire that product. But even in those instances, I will suggest that greater success could be realized if that extraordinary talent could be repackaged and marketed as a service. And for the overwhelming majority of us, we are selling a service, and we will succeed if our service is good. The essence of service by its very nature means that you are adapting to the client’s needs and desires. You are not requiring the client to adapt to you.

Second Rule

The second rule is to recognize that clients have careers too. It has long been the case that the determination of success or failure may be much more arbitrary for an in-house lawyer or a corporate executive than it is for us as outside counsel in a law firm. After all, we all have the privilege of speaking only about our victories when in the presence of the client, since the client may not be aware of the defeats. But there is no corporate general counsel out there whose entire won-loss record is not known by the CEO who sits over him and who controls his employment. So keep in mind, that the folks who are hiring us are entrusting us with preservation of at least a part of their career. They have a problem of one type or another, and they are putting that problem in our hands for us to solve.

That’s what virtually all lawyering is: problem solving. There is a problem because the client is accused of impinging on the rights of some one else or because that someone else is perceived as intruding somehow on the rights of the client. Sometimes the problem has not yet matured, and the lawyer is asked to assure it does not mature. The client’s commission is: Make the problem go away. Sure, they want to remain informed. Sure, they want to participate. Sure, they want and need a budget that is followed. But the bottom line is that the client gave us a problem to solve, and since we aspire to represent clients in the most difficult and most important cases, what we aspire to is to represent our clients in solving the largest problems that they have. For the individual within the client responsible for hiring us, those are career shaping employments.

It is important that we remain conscious that our employer is not a faceless corporation with a lawsuit or other adversarial contest to win. Our client truly is a lawyer or executive with a career shaping problem to solve. That realization will affect how you deliver your service, and how you work to relieve the inevitable tension that can build during an employment.

Which leads to the third rule.

Third Rule

The third rule is to remain aware that, despite the requests for updates and briefings, in virtually every employment the client is trying to transfer the load that is his problem to you so the problem is no longer a burden, so it no longer inhibits the client’s activity. In short, the client wants you on that wall looking after his problem and being mindful of his career. If the night is cold and rainy, and if down in the client’s bedchamber the fire is roaring and the best brandy has been opened, you are still to sit on the wall and look for the Hun. You may get a visit out there on the wall, and you may even get a hot chocolate, but if you have the client’s ultimate trust you will never be invited into the warm bedchamber while there is a possibility of attack. It’s not ingratitude. It’s simply that you have been entrusted with this job and the job requires sitting on the wall--if you don’t do it someone else will have to. And if that someone else does it and does it well, that someone else will win the client’s trust. Only when the enemy no longer threatens can you leave that post on the wall.

I had a very talented partner who will remain nameless who seemingly had all the tools for success. He was bright, able, eloquent, charming and had an excellent understanding of the law. But if you watched closely around clients, his message was, “You go to sleep tonight with your family and don’t worry. But because it’s raining, I’m going back to my castle to enjoy the fire and perhaps the brandy. But don’t worry. I have a very fast horse, and if the Huns attack, just let me know and I will be here immediately and I will drive them off.” It didn’t sell, and you could see it. That message was communicated indirectly in many ways, but the upshot was that clients were never able to be confident that a problem had been fully offloaded to that lawyer. That lawyer seemed always to impose conditions on the service. There were inconveniences that took precedence over his rendering of service. The product was admittedly good, but the service was lacking.

When you get to the how-to of all of this, I could go on and on, but the take-away is simple. An employment is not about you or about the firm. It is about serving some individuals by solving their problems efficiently as possible. So the hallmarks of a lawyer giving good service are timeliness, reliability, accessibility, and making sure that the best surprise is no surprise, all in the context of a tacit acknowledgement that you as outside counsel are committed to be of service. Also take a genuine interest in the career of the individuals that employ you. Tell them, occasionally in so many words, that you are committed to make them successful. Cultivate a culture of being helpful, of providing assistance. When you are dealing with a corporate client with a corporate law department, become acquainted with those lawyers and encourage them to give you a call not so you can have a client, but so that you can be helpful. For any minor matter and offer to help if they ever need some he, and offer to help on the cuff. As corporate lawyers grow and ascend into positions of responsibility, the parts of their Rolodex that are most precious are the phone numbers of the outside counsel that they can turn to reliably to assume problems from their shoulders and propel their careers. And even if they move across the country, they will continue to call those numbers when the really threatening problems arise.

And that’s what we are in this business for, right? To do the really important stuff and the hard stuff. Lord knows why we want that, but we do, and the way to get there, as far as I can see is by sitting on the wall.

Thanks for the opportunity to speak to you, and I hope your retreat is a dynamite success.

Copyright 2003-2014 John F. Lynch All Rights Reserved.