General Counsel Panel Says Lawyers “Spectacularly Bad”

At the Legal Marketing Association Annual Conference on April 6 at the Disney resort in Orlando, we heard again from a set of in-house counsel about their needs and advice for outside counsel.

• Stephen Kaplan, SVP, General Counsel, Connextions
• Jeff Novak, GC, AOL Paid Services
• John Lewis, Jr., Senior Managing Counsel, Litigaiton, Coca-Cola

They said that law firms are “spectacularly bad” at asking about the client’s needs, but really good about talking about the law firm’s capabilities.

They said cost is important because it represents risk and is actually part of the outcomes they measure.

They remember when law firms ask “what does a win look like for you?” This relationship continues to grow revenue for the law firm, and they “make us look good.”

They recognize as novel the concept of a law firm saying “we know how to contain costs on our side, we can apply these same ideas to a client’s costs.”

They realize that the law firm is offering an partnership that transcends the vendor relationship when they educate the GC on a new role as a value-add, off the clock. They say it makes a difference in treatment of the lawyer/law firm: “We leverage vendors, put them under duress, drive their price down. We don’t do that to partners.”

When markets have mobile lawyers, after they move around and immediately want to command an audience on how great their law firm is now, GCs remark they have to remind the lawyer that they used to say these great things about the place they left. And GCs make a joke out of many of the claims law firms make about themselves. As for differentiation between law firm strengths, GCs say “A lot of firms struggle on the ‘what else’ question in pitches.”

Learn who are you, what is your brand, give GCs the differentiators that make a difference to their companies and them.

Firms must realize that GCs do not believe they hire lawyers not firms. “If you haven’t figured out how to make us clients of the firm, you are always risking the work moving. We want to be clients of firms who know our business, anticipate our needs and understand what we want out of our legal work.”

“It’s just not acceptable to come into a company looking for work and know nothing about us, it’s intellectually lazy, when everything in the world now is an open book test.”

It is painfully easy to stay up on a client’s moves, executives and activities, they said. This is table stakes now, firms should know clients as well as they can throughout the relationship and that includes every member of the client legal team team.

GCs remark that diversity is not a moral imperative, it is just the way the world is. Not having a diverse workforce, and not to recognize it among clients, is “just plain dumb.” This is about growing your firms, they say. It is evidence of a forward thinking, innovative legal firm. “The industry acts like a herd of wildebeests, moving together in almost every action” from associate salaries, law schools recruited, fees and partnership agreements. That is clear to GCs and it destroys the notion that there is anything that differentiates law firms one from another.

Good strategic and tactical marketing that reach GCs must convince them that there is a compelling reason to displace a current relationship. Example: One was sued in NY, and a law firm came to the company GC and said they’d like to represent the client in this case. They said they were so sure they would win, they had already drafted the motion and would do the engagement for a flat fee. And if they lost, the client didn’t have to pay. That got their attention. Only specific and highly customized marketing is effective.

GCs think “the landscape is changing, client expectations are moving. To not adjust the business model is akin to the tree that stands stiff in the storm and gets snapped in two.” The majority of legal work in not “life or death” for a company, and most matters can be done by any one of several dozen law firms. Firms have to be introspective about where their growth opportunities lie.

GCs have become very sophisticated at how they use data, especvially when insituting an electronic billing system where clients can discover errors that their law firms don’t even catch. When law firms say that they don’t have a method to analyze their work processes and create more efficient ones, it’s a red flag. Having the capacity to do these things is essential to the client’s work and revenue. In-house law functions are a cost that has to be managed, and that has to be part of a law firm’s marketing to us. “This business is one size fits one.” The things like the ACC Value Challenge are not the end of the conversation, they are just the beginning.