Here’s a .pdf of a Quality of Experience Survey I designed with pages for both the client as well as attorneys/staff to complete (separately, of course) — along with room for them to suggest improvements.  Let me know what you think.

For the Attorneys and Staff to Complete:

For the Clients to Complete:

Remember, your clients don’t have general needs, they have specific ones.  They want you to be great at solving their problem, not good at solving everyone else’s.

And yes, you can actually buy this knife for just $999.00.

The need to survive in practice is a powerful one.  It takes time to establish a reputation of competence and skill, and when you have hungry children and a school loan payment due, you don’t feel as if you have the time to wait.  And so you use whatever is at hand.  It’s easy to justify at the moment.  Until you realize that you are one of those lawyers, walking down the boulevard in hot pants hoping someone will stop and pick you up.

Go read his entire post.  Now.

Lots of lawyers claim to be “results-focused.”  Clients want good results, after all, and marketing yourself as one “focused” on delivering them has got to be a lot better  (to clients, anyway) than being “timesheet-focused.”  However, I think  many lawyers who focus only on the result are hurting their clients (and their own practices).  Let me explain:

Most clients get just one “result” in their matter:  it could be a divorce, a home purchase, or a settlement check.  Until that moment — which can take months or years to achieve — they wait.  They get bills.  They attend hearings.  They read letters and go to meetings.  But they don’t know for certain what’s coming in their case until it finally arrives.

So what do clients focus on every day while awaiting their result?  They focus on the quality of their experience:  Does their lawyer return their calls?  Does he validate their parking or give them a hot cup of coffee while they wait in his waiting room?  Does he communicate everything he’s doing on their case and bill them fairly?

And because they don’t have any “results” to share with others, they share their experience instead:

Bill:  ”How’s your case coming?”

Wendy:  ”Not sure.  I’m still hoping to hit the jackpot, but my attorney is an ass and never calls me back.”

So what’s an attorney to do?  Start by focusing on something more than just the quality of your clients’ results.  Focus on their quality of their experience as well.

Here’s how:

1.  Looking at the chart above, realize that for every client, there are two distinct parts of their legal matter:

• The Quality of their Result (QoR) speaks for itself, and is measured by how satisfied (or unsatisfied) the client is as their matter concludes.  It is the thing most lawyers claim to focus upon, but in certain instances (litigation, for example) is either pre-ordained or out of the control of both attorney and client.
• The Quality of their Experience (QoE) is the measure of their satisfaction with everything else, including how they feel about their lawyer and the service she provides.

2.  Ask some of your former clients (or pull some old files and do this yourself) to map out on the grid above how they felt about your representation, making certain their “Experience” measure is for everything that came between hiring you and their result.

3.  Unless everything is in the upper right quadrant, get to work.

If you’re a lawyer who delivers a great experience — even with the occasional bad result — you’re likely to see more repeat and referral business from your former clients than some ”results-focused” lawyers who consistently get great results but make their clients miserable in the process.

LexThink.1 Tickets are now available!  I hope to see you there!

I’m really excited to announce that Ignite Law is back at ABA TECHSHOW this year.  It takes place the evening before TECHSHOW “officially” kicks off at 7:00 pm on March 28th at the Hilton Chicago.

The focus of this year’s event is Serving the 21st Century Client.

We’ve renamed the event LexThink.1 (to reflect the tenth of an hour increments most lawyers bill in as well as the length of the six minute speaking slots), but the format will remain largely the same:  Twelve six minute/twenty slide presentations that are selected by the public.

The (still free) tickets will go on sale Monday, January 16th and speaker submissions will open up on January 30th.  Voting on the submitted talks will take place beginning on February 24th.

We’re still tweaking the event site, but head on over to check it out.

I’m also happy to announce that JoAnna Forshee and Jobst Elster (from InsideLegal, the producers of the event) and Andrea Cannavina (from LegalTypist) have signed on again to help us deliver another great night of legal innovation.

We’ll have sponsorship information up in a few days as well, if you’re interested in that sort of thing.

We hope to see you there!

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style. ~ Kurt Vonnegut