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By Charlie Miller and Ronna Cross, Patton Boggs
  Charlie Miller is Deputy Managing Partner and Ronna Cross is Director of Business Development at Patton Boggs, Patton Boggs is a law firm with 500 attorneys based in Washington, D.C. with six additional offices worldwide. Miller can be reached at 214-758-1565 and cmiller@pattonboggs.com. Cross can be reached at 214-758-1501 and rcross@pattonboggs.com.
Most thriving law firms today understand how important it is to:
- Thoroughly understand your clients’ and potential clients’ businesses;
- Identify existing and prospective clients’ problems, opportunities and changes; and
- Create value-added solutions
At Patton Boggs, we collectively call these habits of thought and action, “capturing the voice of the client”. Capturing the voice of the client has generated revenue for us far beyond everyone’s expectations. But building that ability into our culture took some effort and habit-forming.
In this article, we draw on our experiences and analyze the “what, why, when and how” of capturing the voice of the client. And how you can start doing the same within your firm. What we found is that the “little things” make the big difference.
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Preparing Yourself to Originate!
- Listen and learn your way to success with a client - or a prospect
- You're always being evaluated; don't wait till you're asked for a proposal before you make the client's concerns your own...it may be too late
- Use a variety of tools to monitor value and satisfaction with your client service - especially routine meetings
- Deliver value as the client perceives it, not as you do; even doing this for free yields profitable returns
- Do your homework: study up on your clients, prospects, and your competitors
- Think of yourself as vitally dependent of the success of your client's business...you are
- Let the client tell you about their business and their issues in as many ways as you can think of
| What is the Voice of the Client?
The goal is really to get inside the client’s mind. Think like the client thinks. Worry  about what the client worries about. Understand the client’s goals and obstacles, and the underlying reasons for each. Our attorneys have learned to operate on the premises that the client’s business is our business, its capital is our capital, its obligations are our obligations, its failures are our failures and its successes are our successes. We aim to serve as though our livelihood depends on our client’s success. For it does.
Recently, for example, we participated in a beauty contest for a lateral partner’s 10-year client. The winner would become the company’s sole legal counsel. Several “little things” differentiated us from our competition. We:
- Held internal meetings with the lateral partner to learn the 10-year history
- Digested the company’s Annual Report and SEC filings
- Reviewed the company’s website and recent press
- Studied the management team’s CVs and conducted due diligence on our competitors’ backgrounds and expertise
These little things added up to one big thing – we were thinking like the client and they knew it. We didn’t talk about how great we were and what we could do for them. We asked insightful questions about their business based on our research, listened carefully to their answers and offered solutions based on what we heard.
We also used the beauty contest as an opportunity to “interview” the client. We asked what they love about working with lawyers, and what they hate. We asked where we had done well and where we could do better. Our final client service question, directed to each management team member, was “if you could give us one take-away message from this meeting, what would that message be?” The answers provided priceless client intelligence.
Crucially, we told them we valued their business and asked to be their sole counsel. But our behavior and attention to their needs said those things even more clearly.
Consequently, what distinguished us was that we had superior in-depth knowledge of the client’s business and our competition’s strengths and weaknesses. We knew what kept the client up at night. We knew their long-term plans. We knew their perceived risks and what they viewed as opportunities and challenges.
But this is not just attention to demonstrate at a proposal, but as integral to an ongoing relationship. At the conclusion of our presentation, the CEO told our deputy managing partner that there he would seen no need for the beauty contest if we had this kind of visit six months earlier. That comment certainly underscores “why” you should capture the voice of your client.
The Why
The why of capturing the voice of the client is a fundamental axiom of any great client service organization. To play the game at all, you first must have an intimate knowledge of the client’s business, organization, culture, industry and financial metrics. These are the table stakes to provide high value legal services, get paid premium rates for doing it and continue to be asked to provide those services over a long period of time. A very important reason why.
Mark Whitley, director of strategic planning and marketing at Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice, a fast-growing corporate law firm based in North Carolina, states that clients want their lawyers to “understand [their] business better and tell [them] more about how [the lawyers] can help.” Understanding your client’s business and finding ways to help them are little things, but the payoffs are incredibly profitable.
But how well do most of us ante up? When lawyers are surveyed about their client relationships, they overwhelmingly affirm they have an in-depth understanding of  their client’s business and industry. But when the lawyers’ clients are asked, “How well does your firm understand your business?” they indicate they don’t perceive their lawyers know their businesses well enough.
Your client’s perception is your reality, which is another reason why you should listen to your client.
If you adopt your client’s mindset, it’s relatively easy to determine what they need. Once you determine what they need, you can craft a value-added offering and generate revenue for your firm. If you know your client very well, you can navigate your proposal through the sales process with minimal effort in a condensed time frame.
According to Cordell Parvin, an attorney who now coaches young lawyers, clients hire lawyers for four reasons:
- To solve a problem
- To act on an opportunity
- To deal with internal change within their organization
- To deal with external changes
Dig out these reasons and their impact on your client, and you will be making the client perception your reality.
The When
When do you capture the voice of your client? Every chance you can get.
Patton Boggs is genuinely focused on developing solid, long-standing relationships with its clients. Our goal is to keep our clients happy and loyal by providing exceptional client service and creative solutions. We’ve found that the natural evolution of our client relationships provides ample opportunity for us to hear our client’s voice. But it needs to be managed.
Many lawyers use standardized client interviews, surveys, questionnaires and the like to capture the client’s voice. While these methods do collect client feedback, our approach is more tailored and personal. We train our attorneys to ask client  service questions during routine interactions with clients. And to stay in charge of the follow-up. We encourage them to track client press and read Annual Reports. And to use this information to create value-added reasons for follow-up. In these ways, we’ve become particularly adept at capturing our client’s way of thinking.
We’ve even asked Kyle Volluz, in-house attorney at one very important client, to provide the in-house counsel’s viewpoint as a panelist alongside our deputy managing partner. How better to “capture the voice of the client” than by working side-by-side with him while preparing and considering that very topic. It’s a little thing, but the results were beyond insightful.
The How
Formal surveys (internal and external), client interviews, client visits, general marketplace surveys and client questionnaires are all helpful tools. But in the end, “capturing the voice of the client” is all about the little things. It is not about building bureaucracy, administrative and support infrastructure, systems and processes.
It’s really very simple: it’s about listening and learning. It is about being able to accept criticism and negative feedback constructively, without being defensive or combative.
It is about changing habits. It is about creating a culture within your organization that places a premium on being the best in key niche practice areas and industries. We call it being a “category killer.” To do that, we want to keep listening to the best in those categories.
One way we do this is in our biannual magazine, Capital Thinking, the brainchild of the firm’s CMO, Mary Kimber. For the content of Capital Thinking, we identify areas where we are or want to be category killers; the articles cover those areas. Professional writers interview the firm’s clients and attorneys, giving our key clients opportunities to talk about issues relating to their businesses. It’s a little thing, but you guessed it: we’ve doubled down with Capital Thinking, supplying valuable insights to our clients for free, and capturing their voice in the process. Just one lead from the last issue of Capital Thinking resulted in a six figure real estate deal for the Firm. Okay, so that’s a big thing.
Take-aways
In every formal and informal interaction with an existing or prospective client we try to conclude with an action-oriented summation:
- “What are the next steps?”
- “How should we move forward?”
- “When would you like us to follow-up with you next?”
- “These are the action items” (this is really the best way).
So, we thought it would be appropriate to end this article the same way!
Success in capturing the voice of the client means creating a client service culture based on one fundamental principle: “You are an extension and an integral part of your clients”. To build this culture requires promoting successes, building the value proposition and fostering leadership. It takes a long term perspective, strong commitment and perseverance. In the end it’s about building great “habits”. And as Mark Twain said, “Habit is habit and not to be flung out of the window by any person, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.”
© 2007 PBDI/SAGE PDI. This article comes from the October Issue of ORIGINATE!, a new online monthly newsletter (with ongoing support resources) dedicated to helping individual lawyers develop business successfully in order to build their careers. Our September issue is complimentary; otherwise articles are usually available to subscribers. Find out more about subscribing at www.pbdi.org/originate.
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