Client Relations
Leave Your Clients Better Off Than When You Found Them
Most clients come to us at the darkest hour of their lives. Some have reached the end of long marriages that they struggled unsuccessfully to keep intact, others have put up with degrading harassment on the job until they can take it no more while others face years in prison. Even those clients who retain …
Read MorePower Hour #5: Send Four Thank You’s
Lots of lawyers make a big deal about sending Thanksgiving cards to stand out from the rush of holiday cards. Trouble is, even TurkeyDay greetings have become oversaturated. Starting next week, I’ll receive at least five or six autumn-themed cards with leaves or Pilgrims, wishing me a Happy Thanksgiving with at best, a personal signature…
Read MorePowerHour No. 3: Ask for Testimonials
This week’s first PowerHour was Update Your Profile – so you may be wondering why testimonials weren’t covered in that post. But while it’s true that there’s some overlap, testimonials are important in many other contexts other than online profiles – and for some profiles – such as LinkedIn, testimonials (at least from former clients)…
Read MoreWhy the Frictionless Client Experience Is A Legal Fiction
Most of today’s clients have grown accustomed to a frictionless customer experience long before they ever step foot over our office threshold or log in to an online client portal. Most likely, within hours of their first encounter with a lawyer, today’s client has tapped the screen on their phone to summon a car from…
Read MoreDo Lawyers Need To Be Weekend Warriors If That’s What Clients Want?
In response to my earlier posts asking whether today’s clients are more demanding, one commenter observed that increasingly, clients expect lawyers to schedule appointments on evenings and weekends to avoid missing work. The commenter sought feedback on how other lawyers handle these types of requests since the commenter — quite reasonably — would rather not…
Read MoreAre Today’s Legal Clients More Demanding…Or Is It Just That Lawyers Haven’t Kept Pace?
Veteran Chester County, Pennsylvania solo, Sam Stretton bemoans the deterioration of the attorney-client relationship in the modern world, blaming the change on clients’ unreasonable expectation of perfection combined with their lack of appreciation for attorneys’ need for privacy and the cost of legal services. Yet as I read Stretton’s piece, I wondered whether all of the…
Read MoreLegal Ethics: Can Law Firms Pay for Their Clients To Uber?
With so many articles about whether a new platform is the next Uber for lawyers or whether legal services can be Uberized at all, lawyers are missing out on something even more obvious: how we can use the real Uber or other similar ride-sharing platforms to better serve our clients. For example, if a client doesn’t own a…
Read MoreWhat’s Your Watermelon – The Small Thing That Can Transform Your Practice or Your Client’s Experience in Big Ways
Earlier this summer, when gifted a large watermelon, I accidentally discovered an easier approach to cutting it. After splitting the watermelon in two, instead of balancing the watermelon on its rind and slicing down on the fruit, I found that flipping the watermelon over and cutting directly into the rind enabled me to finish the…
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