Community Table: Explaining the Process to a New Client The Correct Way

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

This is Unbillable Hours Community Table, a monthly virtual round table where lawyers discuss issues their practices are facing and receive feedback from lawyer and law firm management consultant, Christopher T. Anderson. Join the conversation live every third Thursday at 3:00 PM Eastern. Our first question is regarding how to properly set expectations for the clients who don’t understand the legal system.

Caller #1:

Some clients have a lot of legal literacy. They kind of know what to expect when they come in. They’ve got a pretty good idea of what the system is like. When you talk to them about what’s going on in their case, they get it. And those clients tend to be a lot more satisfied because they know what to expect, I would assume. And then there’s a lot of clients that have a lot lower legal literacy. They think cases should go faster. They assume that because they came to a lawyer, they’re going to end up in a courtroom on trial and they think it’s a failure or some kind of a cop out if you’re pushing for settlement, which is how most legal cases end. So what would you say to an attorney on recognizing that level of legal literacy and helping bring people along so that they understand what’s going on?

Mostly from a perspective of trying to get cooperation in the relationship, because when they don’t understand and they think, “You’re not working for me because you’re trying to get me to settle and I want you to go fight for me, ” how would you address that?

Christopher T. Anderson:

I think this is really two very different questions and I think there’s a danger in conflating them. Let’s just tackle the legal literacy one first. I think that one’s the easiest because one should not presume, again, any level of legal literacy.This happened to me, my wife had a surgery recently, and I have a fair amount of medical literacy. So I’m reviewing stuff with the surgeon afterwards and I’m asking questions using words that surgeons use and all of a sudden she just leaps up like four levels and now she’s talking way over my head. And I was like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, sorry. I know I used some words, but I’m not actually … Let’s bring it back down. You were at one. I talked to you at two, you went to five. Let’s come back to two.” And I think lawyers might dangerously do the same thing.

A client comes in with some literacy. Maybe this isn’t their first divorce. Maybe they’ve been through the criminal system before. Maybe they have had a commercial dispute like this before, whatever it might be, does not an experienced lawyer them make. So the easier is to explain always. Just say, “This is what’s happening, this is what’s going to happen. Stop me if you want me to skip that part, but otherwise I’m going to tell you what we expect to happen.” And to discuss the course of the case from beginning to end, including why settlement is often the best option. If only from a cost benefit analysis for them, how much trial is going to cost and how much it’s worth sacrificing a little bit. And since the lawyers are listening, one of the things I tell them, I’ve had this conversation so many times, but I just tell them out up front, “I love going to court.

I love trials. I am never as alive as when I am in front of a jury, banging my fist on the bar, making my case, making my client’s case.” I love it. And then for most days I’m on trial, I get to bill 12 hours, eight hours of being in court, two hours of prepping, and two hours debriefing and getting ready for the next day. Most lawyers don’t … They’re lucky if they get to bill five or six hours a day, so it’s like a double day. There’s nothing better for me in this whole wide world than a trial. It’s just not good for you because 12 hours, you’re looking at $8,000 days for you.

For that to make sense, that should be needing to up your recovery on this case by 25, $32,000 a day. Well, a lot of cases don’t have 25, $32,000 worth a day of value in them, but doing that, having that conversation early on, what to expect and don’t presume any level of sophistication at all is a great place to start. The other aspect of it is this, and this is a lesson I learned the hard way. I fancied myself a bit of a prescient when it comes to negotiations. When I go into a mediation, within the first 30 minutes, I know where it’s ending. I know if it’s not going to be successful or I know what the dollar amount is or whatever else. I just know it. And so in my early days of my career with this skill, I used to try to push it.

It’s like, “Listen, I know where this is going, guys. We’re going to land this at $150,000. Why don’t we all just get this done before lunch?” And then it would blow up. And what I learned was the clients on both sides need to feel heard. And that’s what courts are for. Traditionally, that’s why we have a court system. Court systems have evolved from a system of elders. You just bring your disputes to the elders and lay them out and they would make decisions for the community and everybody would then go their way. So they grumble or they wouldn’t or whatever, but that’s what you would do. And it got more and more formalized. We got a court system out of it. But for the longest time, the courts operated very much the same way. And now they’ve gotten all formalized and for lots of good reasons, but to bring your dispute before a court costs so much more because of all those formalities.

So much so that we’ve lost the key aspect of it is that the client be heard, because for the most part, the lawyers are heard. And the clients do like listening to you fighting for them. They love it. They do, but they don’t love it when you say sidebar. They don’t love it when you’re questioning technical witnesses. They don’t love it when you’re arguing about finer points of law. They don’t understand it. They don’t see any value in any of that. And so the cost benefit or the benefit is harder to reach there. So if you’re going to settle, if you are pushing to settlement, you can’t eliminate the part where they get heard. In the old days, we used to refer to it as everybody wants their day in court. Well, you don’t get your day in court very much anymore. It’s expensive to get your day in court.

So how can we replace your day in court? And we’d replace that by being heard in some way. It could be by getting a mediator in even briefly and just letting them tell their story, letting them rant to the mediator. That’s it. Most clients don’t know the difference between a mediator and a judge. It’s just a third party that’ll listen to them or some other way. But we invent lots of different ways to make sure that they feel heard. Even sometimes in a negotiation or whatever, when you say, “Listen, I think we’re getting close to settling this case, but let me tell you, I want to review and make sure that I haven’t missed anything. Here’s what I’ve learned about the case.” And then you tell it back to them and then you say, “So help me make sure I haven’t missed anything that’s important to you, ” and then let them do that.

And then say, “Well, based on all that, this does seem like a relatively fair deal. You’re going to miss out on $50,000 here, but it’s going to cost us $150,000 to go get it. So is that what you would like to do? ” So I broke that question down into, first of all, the sophistication thing, making sure you explain what’s going to happen, soup to nuts, beginning to end, and then making sure they feel heard. And I think that’s the antidote to what you’re talking about.

Caller #1:

It seems like it had a lot of people commenting on just feeling like their lawyer wasn’t listening to them, and that’s this direct indicator to, “I need to be heard. I need somebody to understand what I’m going through.”

Christopher T. Anderson:

Yeah. I mean, it’s worth so much. I was just going to look in a little anecdote, long, long time ago before we had YouTube, sometimes when you wanted to learn something, you would get a course on tapes, little cassette tapes. And one of the first ones I ever bought was one on negotiations. Oh, the guy’s name’s going to escape me. Hopefully it’ll come back to me while I’m doing this. Dawson, last name was Dawson. But anyway, it was a whole course on tape. But one of the anecdotes he tells was that this family who was an adjuster, I think, and he was trying to negotiate a settlement on an insurance claim. And the couple had had a fireplace, a low rolled out of the fireplace, burned their carpet, caused smoke damage, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he goes in and he’s trying to negotiate it and they just keep coming back to … And it burned my grandmother’s carpet and they’d had this rug out in front of the fireplace and indeed had a big burn hole through it.

He stopped. He’s like, “Hold on. They’re telling me what I need to know. ” He’s like, “So what if I took you to the rug store and let you choose the best rug you could buy? If whatever suits you, we can’t replace grandma’s rug, but we can get something like it or something better or something you’d really love.” How would you feel about that? They said, “That’s all we really want. ” And he took them down and they bought a $50 rug. The failure to listen avoids results like that. So we all need to do a better job. We all need to do a better job of doing just that, letting the client talk and listening and then confirming what you think you heard and not making the assumptions.

Announcer:

Our next question focuses on how to craft your marketing to appeal to the best clients.

Caller #1:

Now this comes from asking all these legal clients what they wanted most when they were looking for a lawyer. We said, “When you were shopping for a lawyer, rank the things that are most important to you to least important to you. ” The groups were recommendations and reviews, reputation for legal prowess, affordability, tech savvy, and oop, now I’m going to forget the fifth thing, but I’m not going to talk about it anyway. But when we looked at the groupings of data, people who were looking for recommendations and reviews, they were the most common. They were also very easy to work with. They prioritized cooperation, they prioritized communicating on their end, and they didn’t have a whole lot of complaints about not hearing from their attorneys. People who prioritized affordability were the least satisfied out of any group, which I don’t think would be surprising to any law firm anywhere.

They had the most complaints about the widest variety of things, and people who prioritized technology were the most satisfied. They had the fastest cases. They had the least complaints about pricing, and they had the highest indicators of legal literacy of any group. They were by far, all data pointed to them being the easiest to work with.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Hold on. You skipped over the legal expertise.

Caller #1:

Yeah. People who were looking for legal expertise were very similar to the people who were looking for reviews. They were also very happy, but they tended to prioritize communication a little bit more than the people who were looking for recommendation. Oh, communication was the other thing. There were people who were specifically looking for a communicative attorney, and they benchmarked exactly at the averages.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Okay.

Caller #1:

So we had a ton of people asking, “How do I adapt my marketing practices and adapt my intake practices to try to attract more of these people who want to be cooperative from the start, or is that even possible?” It’s a business thing, right?

Christopher T. Anderson:

Yeah.

Caller #1:

We want people who are interested in technology, and we know that that has a huge impact on their experience in the end. In fact, we found that people had more to say about the way their lawyers used technology, and it had a better impact, a bigger impact on satisfaction scores than lawyers with bad legal competence. If you sucked at technology, people were more angry than if you sucked at law.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Isn’t that funny? It’s also precious because that’s where we’re going.

Caller #1:

Right. People expect their lawyers to be just as good as their doctors and their plumbers and have apps and everything, right? So how are we moving in that direction to attract people who care about these things and serving them in a way that makes it possible for your law firm to have these clients that you want to work with?

Christopher T. Anderson:

There’s two answers. One, from your list, the first step is going to be get tech savvy, right? Because you can’t fake it. You can’t advertise it if it ain’t you, because that’s really … What you said that they’re the most satisfied. I bet they’re not the people who put tech forward. I bet they’re not the most satisfied if it turns out their lawyers are lodie. So you got to go get yourself up leveled on that before in your firm and the way you deal with your clients before you go to market with it. And there’s lots of great tools. There are numerous … Text is more important than phone calls these days, so having a good texting solution, putting client information where they can get it when they want it, all really, really important. Once you put those into place, then to your second point, then lean into it.

Stop. Everybody’s website says stuff about how they’ll communicate well with you. I hear a lot of lawyers go like, “I’ll personally answer your phone calls.” Like, you idiot. How do you expect to do that when you get busy? How do you expect to do that when you are actually successful at filling your client load and you’re trying to bill enough to make it to the next level? You’re setting your client up for disappointment the first time you don’t answer that call because it’s going to happen. And you’re also, as you said, leaning yourself into clients who may respond to that marketing and now your client base will be filled with people who are average at best at how much they appreciate their lawyer’s work and how difficult they are to work with. Rex and reviews, listen, we do need to do a good job of that.

But again, it’s sounding like … And then those lawyers who do lean into and market for their affordability, well, get what you ask for, right? And those are going to be the least satisfied clients. And I’ll actually push back a little bit on the ones that look for expertise. Most of those clients are liars. They don’t know it, so maybe they’re bullshitters, but generally speaking, there are outliers. There are people who actually are qualified to evaluate the expertise of their prospective lawyer hire, B2B, certainly those people. But for the most part, they rely on indicators of expertise that lawyers can buy and they don’t know the difference. So there’s just too many plaques lawyers can buy out there for top 40 this, top 100 that, blah, blah, blah. And there’s some legit ones, but again, the consumer doesn’t know the difference and then they get upset with the communication you noted, but they tend to be happy.

Well, that’s good. But again, if you want to differentiate yourself, you do those things, right? Go get the plaques if you need a couple, get the legit ones, get yourself an AV rating, get your Avo 10, get super lawyers, get whatever it is that helps you tick that box, but differentiate yourself with tech because they can test that immediately and they know what they’re talking about. They know that their doctor provides their records on a portal and their bill and their medical billing. They know on a portal and that they can send a question at three o’clock in the morning and it’ll be answered by 10 o’clock in the morning when the doctors get in. That’s how they’re experiencing the world and other services much faster and much easier. I can wake up at three o’clock in the morning and go like, “Oh shoot, I need a car downtown at 6:00 and I just put in a day on Uber and car’s coming, right?

I can schedule it and it’s so easy.” So yeah, I think you have to, A, get good at the tech and then lean into it in your marketing. I think that research, we all need to pay attention. When you have facts like that, we all need to listen and lean into them. And you know what? We’ll just make the world a better place because having a world full of happier clients, it’s a good world.

Announcer:

Our final question discusses what law firms are doing to make clients think they’re low tech.

Caller #1:

We did get a lot of questions on what law firms are doing that is making their clients think they’re low tech. I know one of the answers that came in several times was snail mail. There were two people out of a thousand who said the primary way that their lawyer communicated with them was snail mail and the secondary way was facts. I think we have the answer for those two lawyers, but otherwise, what are law firms doing that are making clients feel like, wow, they are not with the times?

Christopher T. Anderson:

A huge reliance on phone, I think is a big part of it and a lack of adoption of some of the technologies that I was just talking about. What with it means today is it just keeps moving. So having clients being able to self-serve a lot of the stuff that they need through a portal, through some other access and even on demandServe is more the experience that they’re looking for. Responding to SMS or text is huge. I mean, that’s how most clients want to communicate. I mean, I remember that there’s some comedian that does a bit, and I do it terribly, but he’s like, “This is my phone and I hate, it has an app on it called phone.” And I hate when people use it against me and that’s how a lot of people feel these days. Don’t fricking call me. Just text me.

And because it saves them time. And when you call or you say, let’s schedule a call, it already makes you backward. If you’re going to schedule calls, schedule a Zoom or don’t schedule a Zoom. Just send me a Loom or a Voxer and we could do it that way. Just start to adopt some of the newer stuff that the clients are used to using. And here’s a really great question. Ask them from time to time. How would you like to communicate? If you start hearing it enough, implement it because the times they are changing and they’re changing faster than you can wait for somebody to write a book about it. Just ask your clients what they want. And I think that goes a long way. How would you prefer to communicate with us? Guarantee the answer is not going to be by fax. It’s just not.

Caller #1:

We charted preferences by age with things like communication and we saw that the older somebody got, the more interested they were in a phone call. And then there was a sharp drop off at 65. And if they were going to talk to you in person, they just wanted to see you face to face.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Yep.

Caller #1:

And then the text messages were really high and the interest in web portals was much, much higher the younger you went. It was like an inverse proportion where the younger your clients were, the more they were like, “Just give me a link.”

Christopher T. Anderson:

Right. Yeah. Which totally makes sense. Totally makes sense because just think about when did your clients come of age? 18 year olds have never lived in a world that didn’t have an iPhone, just didn’t exist. 40 year olds have never lived in a world without cell phones. 35 year olds haven’t lived in a world without email, not lived. I’m talking about it as a baby. And then add 15 years to all those numbers, right? 50 year olds have always had email as part of their adult experience, right? So that’s where we are and that’s where your drop off is exactly where it is.

Caller #1:

The pushback we get is it’s so time consuming to customize the process for every single client and to talk with them. We need a system that works. We want to look at this data and inform it and have something that works. Do you think it’s practical for the average law firm to personalize the experience for every single client, have those conversations, use the four agreements with them, sit down and connect, or is there some way to systematize this so it kind of works for everybody and you’re hitting the top 80%?

Christopher T. Anderson:

Yes, you can absolutely systematize it so you can do that and that system will last about another four months. No, that’s not where we are anymore and it isn’t hugely time consuming to individualize the experience. We have access to all of those things. On one platform, we can Vox, we can SMS, we can phone, we can email, we can snail mail clients, we can communicate with, and/or we can put stuff in the portal. We can communicate with clients the way they want to be communicated with, and we just put a note on the file that says that now. Hopefully we can work with some of our technology people, Clio, you listening, so that we might be able to make an indication on the program like, “I’m going to put in this communication, now follow my client’s preferences.” And then soon enough, our AI virtual assistant will help to direct the communications the way they’re supposed to go.

So no, individualizing, customizing the experience is what is going to make us successful and the tools to do that are becoming easier and easier. So think that way first and then act that way as soon as you can.

Announcer:

Thank you for listening. This has been Unbillable Hours Community Table on the Legal Talk Network.

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