Walker Clark Worldview

“We all know that we should be cross-marketing and cross-selling, but we’re just so bad at actually doing it.” I frequently hear comments like this from law firm partners.

There are a number of reasons why a law firm can be so bad at cross-marketing.

• Lack of available, shared information about the best cross-marketing opportunities
• A partnership culture that produces a “my client” mentality rather than “our client”
• A partner compensation systems that do not reward — and in some cases discourage — cross-marketing
• Lack of adequate marketing support
• A misdirected marketing strategy that focuses on opportunities with relatively low return on investment

All of these are important factors; but, in our experience, the most important obstacle of all is simply that the partners lack the basic skills to work together as a high-performing business team. Unless and until partners can learn to organize themselves for the achievement of specific goals, manage internal disagreements productively, and build genuine trust based on the free flow of information and ideas, they will never — repeat never — achieve their full potential, whether at cross-marketing or any other worthwhile goal.

This sounds like a dogmatic statement, but there is simply too much overwhelming evidence — both in law firms and in other businesses — that supports the importance of group development as the make-or-break factor in the ability of a business group — like a group of partners or a practice group — to achieve its goals.

To quote the American comic strip character, Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

The good news is that business groups develop their achievement potential through specific behaviors and skills that can be learned and improved with practice.

To learn more about how to do this, contact Lisa Walker Johnson by e-mail or through the walkerclark.com website.

Norman Clark

A managing partner of a reputable and reasonably successful midsize law firm recently told me, “We look for partners who are just like us, who we know will fit in.”

This is not the first time that my colleagues and I have heard about this “unwritten trump card,” as a senior partner in another firm describe it.  ”If we have two candidates who are roughly equal, we will usually give the nod to the lawyer who has the better chemistry with us,” a partner from yet another law firm once told me.

Especially in the traditional context of a law firm partnership, it is natural to want partners with whom one feels comfortable, with common backgrounds and points of view to one’s own.  We are more likely to trust and feel confident about people who are more like ourselves.

Is is perfectly natural.

It is also potentially lethal to any business, but especially law firms.

Our firm’s experience working closely with law firm partnerships and practice groups demonstrates that a group of professionals is better able to make hard decisions, manage change, and get the best results from innovations if it has people with diverse backgrounds, experiences, personalities, and points of view.

Such groups are usually better able to:

• See through unproductive business paradigms that most law firms continue to accept blindly as immutable truths.
• Apply a lively intellectual rigor and critical thinking to proposed innovations and, as a result, usually obtain a better return on their investment in them.
• Spot new opportunities before their competitors notice them and build competitive advantages that will be difficult for competitors to overcome.

By contrast, partnerships that are not diverse, where everyone is “just like us,” are usually more likely to:

• Cling to old business assumptions, habits, and “values,” even then they clearly do not produce desired results.
• Dismiss fundamental changes in the legal market as “fads.”
• Worry that recruiting and promoting women and ethnic minorities might “compromise our standards.”
• Fail to implement new strategies or management changes, even when the partners agree that they are needed.
• Avoid differences of opinion as being “damaging to our partnership culture.”
• Consider honest questions or doubts to be disloyal to the firm.

Which of these partnerships is more likely to grow?  Which is more likely to be in business 30 years from now?

Diversity is not just good social policy or a way to check a box on a client’s checklist of selection criteria. It is good business. Rather than look for “people just like us” when we select new partners in our law firms, we need to look for people who challenge us intellectually and who call on us to look at our firms and our profession in new ways.

Norman Clark

This is the final posting in a series about the characteristics of successful quality assurance programs in law firms.

How does one measure the success of a quality assurance program? When Walker Clark advises a law firm, we tell the partners to look for these indicators:

• Improved productivity by fee earners — because they can spend more time on billable work and less time fixing mistakes and responding to client complaints
• Higher collections realization rates — because the firm now manages the major reasons for fee write-downs and write-offs
• Higher levels of client satisfaction – because the firm meets or exceeds client expectations and gets things done right the first time
• Competitive advantage – because the firm can demonstrate quality, rather than just mumble slogans about it

As the previous parts of this series suggest, serious quality management is a challenge for most law firms.  People have to discard bad habits.  They have to sharpen their thinking about the routine work that they do every day.  In some instances, lawyers need to change some of their long-held, fundamental ideas about what constitutes quality in a legal service.

Quality management often involves a set of discrete journeys that a law firm must make…

• From considering errors and mistakes as failures to be hidden — to viewing them as data-rich opportunities to reduce or eliminate them in the future
• From assigning blame — to finding solutions
• From viewing quality in legal services as something that only a lawyer can define — to understanding quality in terms of the client’s needs, expectations, and perceptions

Each of these requires a profound cultural change for most law firms. It is a necessary change, as well; because law firms that are unable to manage serious cultural change are doomed to declining competitive performance and, eventually, irrelevance in the fast-changing, highly competitive legal markets of the 2010s.

The “quality assurance” culture also requires a seriousness of purpose and an ongoing commitment to the procedures and methods. Partners must be highly visible in their support for, and compliance, with the quality assurance program. They must reinforce among junior members of the firm that quality assurance is everyone’s job and is important to the business success of the firm.

Like most worthwhile investments, quality assurance sometimes is not easy, especially because of the cultural changes that it sometimes requires. But that effort produces profound and positive results that are:

• Long-term and sustainable
• Beneficial to almost every aspect of law firm operations
• Measurable in terms of dramatic improvements to profitability and financial performance.

Norman Clark

Thomas Friedman published an important column in today’s New York Times:  “The Fat Lady Has Sung.” I highly recommend it to readers of this blog outside the United States who seek insight and understanding about the leadership dynamics and current dysfunctionality in the American political system.

It is also required reading for the managing partner of any law firm anywhere.

Friedman is critical of both President Obama and the Republican Party.  Put your own personal political views aside as you read the column.  It discusses some basic truths that apply to law firms going through times of challenge and change, whether in the United States or anywhere else in the world.

Courage in a crisis

While consensus, trust, and common goals are essential elements of long-term success, times of challenge frequently require clear, directive leadership. I have seen a number of law firms fail to achieve goals and capitalize on opportunities. Why did they fail to implement what appears to have been obvious? In most instances, there were two reasons. They both relate to failures of courage.

I will state each one in plain but honest terms.

• Personal cowardice. No one is willing to step forward and assume the risks of taking charge. Crisis is not a time for “summits” and consensus building. Those can come later.  Clarity, direction, commitment, and resolve are what are needed now.

This does not imply dictatorship. The two greatest American presidents in my opinion, Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, did not seek or assume dictatorial powers, despite the criticisms of their opponents. (Some of Lincoln’s and FDR’s political opponents made today’s “Tea Party” movement in the United States look like…well… a tea party.) Instead, their great contributions were to set a direction for a country that, at the time, was adrift politically and whose long-term survival was legitimately in doubt. They consulted their opponents, were not constrained by ideology, and were not afraid of a pragmatic trial-and-error approach with respect to the details.

• Group cowardice. In some law firms, the partners are unwilling to go through the sometimes painful process of resolving internal disputes. Conflict is an essential part of the development of any business group. Without it, there is no hope of developing the genuine trust and common purpose that are essential to becoming a high-performance business team.

Responsible dialogue

Friedman’s article suggests is that “no” is not a responsible position for someone responsible for governing a country.  The same applies to law firms. Irresponsible minorities frequently betray themselves in one or both of two ways:

• The party of “no.” I have seen a few law firms wrecked or almost destroyed by the stubborn refusal of a willful minority of partners to accept any change whatsoever to a failing status quo. “No” is not a negotiating position. Instead, it is the first word in saying “farewell.”

• Taking hostages. Super-majority voting requirements in partnership agreements are usually a wise precaution when making fundamental decisions about the partnership or the business. The minority must use super-majority requirements responsibly, and not to hold the law firm hostage to the minority agenda or to no action at all.

The best way to test the legitimacy of opposition to change, especially in difficult times, is to ask questions.

• Probe the rationale behind the opposition.
• Feed back what you understand the opponents’ position to be.
• Ask them how they would apply their rationale to relevant hypothetical situations.

These techniques will usually expose intellectual dishonesty, if there is any, and allow everyone to focus on any honest issues that need to be discussed.  If all else fails, this truth-seeking strategy will also bolster the courage of the majority to deal with irresponsible factions in the partnership and, if necessary, to remove them before they can sabotage the future of the firm.

Norman Clark

In its Knowledge@Wharton site yesterday, the Wharton Business School, University of Pennsylvania, posted an interesting abstract about motivating employees: “Putting a Face to a Name: The Art of Motivating Employees.” This should be a quick, but worthwhile, entry on your personal “to read” list.

University of Pennsylvania professor Adam Grant draws several interesting conclusions from his research.  I believe that, although not drawn from observations in the legal profession, they have direct applicability to law firms.

People are motivated by an understanding of the positive impact that their activities have on others.  Here are summaries to two of their studies:

Grant and a team of researchers — Elizabeth Campbell, Grace Chen, David Lapedis and Keenan Cottone from the University of Michigan — arranged for one group of call center workers to interact with scholarship students who were the recipients of the school’s fundraising largess. It wasn’t a long meeting — just a five-minute session where the workers were able to ask the student about his or her studies. But over the next month, that little chat made a big difference. The call center was able to monitor both the amount of time its employees spent on the phone and the amount of donation dollars they brought in. A month later, callers who had interacted with the scholarship student spent more than two times as many minutes on the phone, and brought in vastly more money: a weekly average of $503.22, up from $185.94.

Even reading about the benefits that one’s work produces for other people can produce apparent increases in motivation .

In a follow up study to the one he published in 2007, he focused on lifeguards at a community recreation center. Some of them were given stories to read about cases in which lifeguards had saved lives. A second group was given a different kind of reading material: testimonies from lifeguards about how they had personally benefitted from their work. The results: Those who had been reading about their ability to avert fatalities saw their measure of hours worked shoot up by more than 40%, whereas those who had merely learned that a lifeguard gig could be personally enriching kept working at the same clip.

The Knowledge@Wharton post has links to the papers that Grant and his teams produced.

Some law firms try to minimize face-to-face contact with clients by junior associates and support staff.  Grant’s research suggests that this is a mistake.

Everyone in the firm needs to see the face of the client. In some cases this can be a simple face-to-face encounter, such as a partner taking time to introduce a client to associates and support staff who work on the client’s matter. Even when employees cannot literally see the face of the client, partners should make sure that each member of the team — from senior associates to the crew in the mail room — understands how their efforts ultimately benefit the client.

Norman Clark

An all-too-common sight on the bookshelves of many law firm partners is the thick, dusty binder labeled “Strategic Plan.” The partners, usually with the assistance of a consultant, developed an elegant, impressive, detailed strategic plan. They implemented almost none of it.

Implementation usually involves some significant changes in attitudes and habits.

• It requires a shift from a short-term mentality to a long-term commitment to sustainable business success. Partners need to focus on what they need to do now to build the long-term performance of the firm, and not just how much they can bill in fees this month.
• It involves discipline and a new ordering of priorities. These are essential to completing action items on time, measuring results against expectations, and making continuous improvements.
• It requires an understanding that the old ways of doing things will not necessarily work in the future. Many firms have done well in the past largely due to excellent lawyers, hard work, valuable clients, and good luck. The first two are excellent traits. However, at no time in recent years has client loyalty been weaker; and good luck eventually runs out. Past success guarantees nothing in today’s legal markets.
• It requires change leadership on the part of the firm’s managing partner and the entire management team. Unless the firm’s leadership team is willing to provide consistent, unequivocal, and unanimous support for the needed changes, the firm is probably wasting its time trying to improve.

Implementation is hard work, particularly for partners and managers who are already overloaded with everyday client work and administrative responsibilities. The choice for law firms is summed up in the old management proverb:

If you keep on doing what you have always done, you will get what you have always gotten.

Norman Clark

How do you and your partners typically refer to clients:  ”my client” or “our clients?”

The difference is very important. There are variations among individual law firms, of course; but there are also patterns that my colleagues and I have observed in law firms worldwide.

For example, “my client” firms typically:

• Rely disproportionately on a small number “rainmakers” to generate most of the new clients and new business.
• Prefer “eat what you kill” compensation systems.
• Have high levels of internal competitiveness among partners.
• Rely more on individual performance than group collaboration for the overall business success of the firm.
• Measure lawyer performance primarily in financial terms, such as billings and value of originated work.
• Do not make cross-marketing a priority.
• Must overcome internal resistance in making major shifts in the firm’s business priorities and marketing strategy.

“Our client” firms usually:

• Expect all partners, as well as experienced associates, to participate in marketing and business development.
• Have a more collegial partnership culture.
• Prefer compensation systems that reward professional development and mentoring of junior lawyers, as well as financial contributions.
• Emphasize teamwork and group effort as being of equal importance to individual performance.
• Make cross-marketing an important priority and are usually successful at it.
• Adapt to changing market conditions with agility.

The next time you are discussing clients with one of your partners — or even more importantly with one of your associates — listen closely to the pronouns. They will tell you a lot about your own firm,

Norman Clark

In almost any discussion about law firm associates, the topic of mentoring eventually appears. Everybody agrees that mentoring is a good thing to do, but very few law firms do it well. Based on the observations of my colleagues in Walker Clark, LLC, here are the five most common reasons.

1. Failure to link mentoring to the skills that an associate needs to advance in the firm. To produce a worthwhile return on the investment of partner time, mentoring needs to be relevant.
2. Failure to make mentoring a basic responsibility of every partner. By contrast, some law firms even make mentoring an element of their partner compensation systems.
3. Failure to agree a basic level of attention and effort required of all mentors, so that all associates have an equal opportunity to benefit from mentoring. Perhaps the most frequent criticism that we hear from associates about their law firms’ mentoring programs are that associates have highly inconsistent experiences with mentoring and derive unequal value from the process.
4. Failure to reinforce to associates the importance of participation in mentoring. Mentoring requires two-way communication, not just passive listening to a partner telling professional “war stories.”
5. Failure of partners to share experiences and ideas about mentoring with each other in a structured manner. By contrast, law firms that do mentoring well usually devote part of a partners meeting, once or twice each year, to what works well and what needs to be improved in their mentoring programs.

Does your firm need help with mentoring? Walker Clark, LLC, can conduct a quick, low-cost diagnostic review of your mentoring program and recommend practical improvements to improve your return on investment. For more information, send me an email.

Norman Clark

Despite good intentions, some law firms seem to be unable to implement. The partners spend many hours rehashing the same issues, but there is little or no forward movement.

My partner, Lisa M. Walker Johnson, has developed a four-point agenda for partners and senior managers to discuss frustrating implementation issues in law firm management:

What are we NOT doing or achieving that we WANT to be doing or achieving?

What are the obstacles to our success in these areas?

What specific next steps will we take, separately and together, to begin to address these obstacles?

What do we need from each other right now, and in the coming weeks, so that we can become more effective and feel more motivated?

Invest 60 minutes in discussing the issue in the context of these four questions.  Stay focused and disciplined. Limit your discussions to that issue only. Avoid tangents and side issues. Document the results and assign one partner to monitor the completion of each of the action items.

If your law firm can hold only two of these “60-minute retreats” each month, each focused on a single issue,  you should begin to see progress on even the most frustrating issues.

Norman Clark

Most law firm websites are beautiful failures. They are visual delights, bursting with information; but they fail to  catch new clients. In some cases, a firm’s web site can actually disqualify it from receiving legal work that it could perform very well.

Your law firm’s web site could be your least productive marketing investment. You can spend thousands of dollars for the design and many hours producing content for the web site. Despite all this hard work, the web site might not draw new clients and new work to your firm.

As a partner in a South American law firm once told me, “Our website is nothing more than a glorified telephone directory.”

This is not the fault of the web designers, the internet, or the firm’s webmaster.  Instead, the problem is the content. It fails to differentiate the law firm in any way that is important to the law firm’s target audience, whether sophisticated purchasers of corporate and commercial legal services or ordinary people with personal legal needs.

Instead of helping the firm to stand out from the competition, most web sites camouflage the firm against a competitive background where almost everyone in the market is offering essential the same services and making essentially the same promises.

Your web site usually has only one chance to catch potential clients or referring lawyers. Unless you can capture visitors’ attention quickly, they will probably spend no more than one minute at your site before they leave it, possibly forever.

How does your firm use those 60 seconds?

Norman Clark