There’s no shortage of law firm websites claiming that they are in it for their clients. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a website which doesn’t contain some puffery about being client oriented, client centric or having a dedication to excellent service.

To a certain extent, the firms who put out these statements do believe them. They do understand that without clients there’s no law firm and without results there’s no clients. But that doesn’t answer the more fundamental question: who are they in it for?

The same firms will push their rates up to what they think the market will bear. They will all set chargeable hours and billing targets. Admittedly, not everyone will sue their associates for missing those targets. That distinction presently belongs to North Dakota law firm Larson Latham Huettl, who we featured in a previous lesson. Even so, all have firm targets and the focus is always fee income. That tells you who they’re in it for.

Look at the names which law firms use to describe their attorneys, the most common being ‘timekeepers’ and ‘fee earners’. Any firm which was truly in business for their clients would refer to their attorneys as ‘problem solvers’. They wouldn’t set productivity targets for partners and associates — they’d set client service targets.

Many law firm leaders would regard this as taking your eyes off the prize — the prize being money. They would see this approach as a “set up to fail” strategy. But they’d be wrong about this. The reason they’d be wrong is because clients say they are. Maybe this seemed less important in the immediate post-pandemic boom years. But things are getting tough, maybe it’s time to pay attention.

Once you start thinking of attorneys as problem solvers rather than cash generators, a very interesting thing happens. You realize that the prize isn’t money, it’s happy clients. Then you see that it’s actually a “set up to succeed” strategy. To the problem solver, money is just a by-product, albeit a vital one, but it’s still a by-product.

Here’s our tip-sheet for problem solvers:

  1. You exist to solve your client’s problems.
  2. Commit to it and be good at it.
  3. Make it your business to study your client: their purpose, their vision, their culture, their people, their processes — all of it.
  4. Identify and understand their current problems and anticipate their future ones.
  5. Develop effective solutions for them.
  6. Put those solutions into practice, and do it efficiently, effectively and transparently.
  7. Make it your personal target to develop into a reliable problem solver, specializing in the client in question.
  8. Do this for all of your clients, with this focus and intent, all year.
  9. Accept that the number of chargeable hours, and the recovery rates will be whatever they will be.
  10. Prepare to be pleasantly surprised.