January 31, 2007
Customer Care by the Law Firm
I was reading a paper reporting on David Maister’s ideas for improving a law firm’s client services. The opening salvo read “The first step is to care about your clients”.
You can follow checklist after checklist, but if you do not have a culture of caring about your clients, you can never touch the benefits that fall to those law firms that achieve excellence in the eyes of their clients.
Tom Peters made it clear in A Passion for Excellence. You don’t determine what excellence is or when or if you achieve it. Excellence must be earned through the eyes of those who judge you, and the most important judge of all is the customer—the law firm’s clients. Peters and his co-author Nancy Austin gave us the model for excellence in that 1985 book.
Achieving excellence in the eyes of your clients takes people who care about their clients, and once you achieve it, you can only hold onto it through constant innovation. All of that takes leadership. It takes an organization with a common set of beliefs—a culture in pursuit of excellence.
Your customers judge you based on more than your legal skills. They judge you by how they are treated by every single member of the law firm who touches them directly or indirectly. You are judged by the quality of every act and every output of every member of your law firm that reaches your clients.
I was always struck by Peter Drucker’s explanation that the only sound strategy is the pursuit of excellence; anything else is merely competent, and that leads to marginal.
PS: David Maister's web site and his separate blog are important information sources for managing partners.
Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris, Inc. For information about Juris® products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income, go to www.Juris.com.
Related posts
Filed under Blog by Tom Collins
Leave a Comment