Taking baby steps toward better serving clients

My friend Patrick McKenna just sent me a copy of his firm's latest research, "Current Practices in Client Teams."

It was a study conducted in June 2008 of nearly 100 law firms regarding how they form multidisciplinary teams to better serve their clients.  Candidly, it appears law firms have a long way to go toward achieving this goal.  Here's why:

• 63% of all firms (of all sizes) reported having NO budget specifically allocated to support their client teams

• Only 4% of firms (none over 500 attorneys) identified a budgetary item for satisfaction surveys, while only 6% spent any money on client research

• For the vast majority of respondents, the main reason to form client teams was to increase their own firm's revenues

Findings like these leave me at least puzzled, and, in darker moments, ready to strangle (metaphorically, of course) the next lawyer I encounter. It simply astounds me that any professionals exist today who haven't grasped the critical importance of better understanding their clients, and better adapting their responses to the marketplace.

McKenna and his co-author Michael Anderson exhibit laudable restraint in their closing comments: " . . . as our latest research here does not seem to give us comfort that enough firms have yet to understand how to make their client teams work effectively." 

Better get cracking with those next baby steps, I'd say. 

Comments

[David Maister]

These are astounding numbers aren't they? After all these years of having strategies that say "we will be superior at client satisfaction", only 4 percent have (a budget for) client satisfaction surveys?!? Does it mean marketing consultants wasting our / their time? Aren't we acting as "enablers" to people with deeply serious problems?