Explain the "Why" to Your Clients
Smashing Magazine has published a tremendous guide to designing an easy to understand e-commerce checkout process for web sites. If you take credit cards on your site, it is a must-read.
However, even if you don't charge people on the web, you should check out the article anyway, because it explains something about collecting sensitive information from people that we all need to understand: it isn't just the "what," but the "why" that matters:
Even unambiguous fields, such as “Email address,” are great opportunities to explain what you’ll use the data for. “Email address” may be a sufficient description, but most people would want to know how you’ll use their email address. Why do you need it?
In your client intake forms, do you explain why you need all the information you are asking for? Perhaps you should.
Respect Your Clients
I think it is fair to say that this goes for clients, too.
From This is Indexed.
Watch Your Time Like Your Clients Do
Next time you're chit-chatting with a client over the phone, head on over to Lawyer Clock and watch how fast your "burning" your client's cash -- they certainly are.
Stop Negotiating Via Email
PsyBlog recently highlighted Ten Studies About the Dark Side of Email. One highlights why you should never negotiate (with clients on fees or opponents on settlement terms) via email:
Email negotiations often feel difficult, especially with people we don't know well. When Naquin et al. (2008) compared them with face-to-face negotiations, they found that people were less co-operative over email and even felt more justified in being less co-operative.
Part of the reason negotiations are difficult is that people tend to be more negative on email. For example, Kurtzberg et al. (2005) found that when people evaluated each other in performance appraisals using both pen-and-paper and email, they were consistently more negative about their colleagues when using email.
Yet another reason why, when the stakes are high, face-to-face wins the race.
Cognitive Dissonance and the Low-Cost Lawyer
This interesting Wired Magazine piece, titled Why We Love Our Dentists, explores the unique relationship between price paid and perceived value. According to a recent study, two dentists will reach the same conclusion when looking at an identical x-ray only about half the time. Yet despite the fact that dentists are so frequently wrong (they can't both be right, can they?), people love their dentists more than any of their other medical providers.
The reason, according to the article, is due to cognitive dissonance, "the human tendency to react to conflicting evidence by doubling-down on our initial belief." The study's author Dan Ariely attributes our irrational love of dentists to the pain they inflict:
I think all of this pain actually causes cognitive dissonance and cause higher loyalty to your dentist. Because who wants to go through this pain and say, I’m not sure if I did it for the right reason. I’m not sure this is the right guy. You basically want to convince yourself that you’re doing it for the right reason.
The article has a few more examples of irrational behavior influenced by perceived value. Consider this study:
[R]esearchers supplied people with Sobe Adrenaline Rush, an “energy” drink that was supposed to make them feel more alert and energetic. (The drink contained a potent brew of sugar and caffeine which, the bottle promised, would impart “superior functionality”). Some participants paid full price for the drinks, while others were offered a discount. The participants were then asked to solve a series of word puzzles. [T]the people who paid discounted prices consistently solved about thirty percent fewer puzzles than the people who paid full price for the drinks. The subjects were convinced that the stuff on sale was much less potent, even though all the drinks were identical.
What does this mean for lawyers? Know that your clients hold deep-set beliefs that the value of your advice is tied (even if subconsciously) to the price they pay for it. In other words, if you're the lawyer offering the lowest prices on your services, understand that your clients believe your advice is less valuable than the same advice offered by your higher-priced peers.
An unanswered question: do lawyers offering that low-cost advice believe they're less competent than their higher-priced peers? Just as their clients expect to get what they pay for, do lawyers expect to deliver what they charge for? What do you think?
Legal Rebels Video
Here's my six-minute / twenty-slide presentation on Building the Service-Centered Firm I delivered as part of the ABA Journal's Legal Rebels project.
Communicating Value and Price
I've been a big fan of Merlin Mann for several years now. As I was checking out his website yesterday, I found his pricing page cheekily titled: Do You Charge Money to Do Things? Here's how Merlin describes his pricing scheme:
For most all of my speaking, consulting, and advisory work, yes: I do charge a fee, plus expenses. And, candidly, I charge kind of a lot.... I learned a long time ago to only work for or with people with whom you have mutual admiration and respect—and who already think you’re valuable and great at what you do. In my experience, the folks who expect you to make a case for your own value make for terrible clients. They may be good negotiators and nice people, but working for them is a gut-wrenching travesty. And I don’t do travesties.
With all that said, I do a fair amount of (private, unpublicized, non-ribbon-based) work with non-profits and other deserving groups. And, no, I normally do not charge for this work. So, If you’re working for a good cause or represent an organization that’s trying to do something you know I care a lot about, please ask me. No promises, but I’ll do what I can with what I have.
So, yep. “Expensive” or “Free.” It’s a fee schedule that works.
I think it would work well on a firm website, and provides an important reminder every lawyer should have on their desk: "The folks who expect you to make a case for your own value make for terrible clients."
Your Clients Don't Care Where You Went to Law School
After my Law Firm Website Venn Diagram got such great feedback, I thought I'd do another highlighting one of my big pet peeves: lawyer bios. Here you go:
Use Words that Suck Less
As someone who splits my professional time working with both lawyers and with corporate America, I hear just as much business jargon as I do legalese.
Though I've not found a "de-legalese-r" site on the web, I have found Unsuck-it, a website that takes business-speak and makes it, well, less sucky.
Some examples:
Incentivize: In order to meet our phase 1 deliverable, we must incentivize the workforce with monetary rewards.
Unsucked: Encourage or persuade.
Low-Hanging Fruit: Our budget’s tight on this one, so we need to go for the low-hanging fruit first.
Unsucked: Easy goal.
Synergy: We are actualizing synergy amongst team members directly related to the project.
Unsucked: Working together.
You can search for terms, and even generate an email to the offender who used the word. Now, we just need the legal version!
What are your Relationship Rituals?
Keith Ferrazzi shares a few simple "Relationship Rituals" that should be on every professional's weekly checklist:
1. First thing every day after you turn on your computer, ping one friend and one acquaintance.
2. Every weekend, invite someone else into an activity that you normally do alone (walks, gym sessions, gardening, shopping trips).
3. Pick a day for a weekly check-in with a colleague/associate/friend, during which you share a success, a challenge, and make a commitment for the upcoming week.
4. Every Friday, send a broadcast – status update, blog post, Tweet, etc.
5. Host a monthly dinner or happy hour.
What are the things you do every week to maintain your client relationships?
Do your customers trust your apology?
In this NYT article, author Daniel Pink challenges businesses to speak like real people. The whole article is worth your time, but what grabbed me was this simple quote from the head of the t-shirt site Threadless:
The best way to figure out if you're running a good company is to figure out if your customers trust your apology.
I think this is right on, and a great measure for every business. Do your customers trust you when you apologize to them for making a mistake? You do apologize, don't you?
Building the Service Centered Firm
Here's my new presentation, "Building the Service-Centered Firm" that I just gave as the keynote at the Minnesota Solo/Small Firm Conference in Duluth the first week of August.
Say it again?
A quick client interview tip from the always helpful Rules of Thumb website:
If someone you're interviewing makes the same point more than twice,it's the most important thing to him, and a crucial clue to his personality.
Worth keeping in mind!
Should you tell prospects why they shouldn't hire you?
Jessica Hische, a tremendous print designer and illustrator has a section on her website titled "Why you should not hire me to design your website." Some excerpts:
I might seem like a jack of all trades because I do print design, typedesign, lettering, and illustration, but really I’m a specialist. Ispecialize in drawing type and illustration. This is what I’m best atand is probably why you found my website in the first place. I find itstrange that I get so many requests for web design—I went to school forgraphic design, yes, but each subfield of graphic design has its ownset of problems, limitations, and guidelines.
Just as you wouldn’t expect any random person thatowns Adobe illustrator to be able to draw a decorative initial fromscratch, you can’t expect any print designer to be able to really andtruly design for web. Web design is not print design, it is so muchmore complex. With book design, a person that encounters your bookknows how to view it. They look at the cover, they open the cover, andpage by page they work their way to the end. With web design, it’s (forthe most part) not linear. You have to understand how people are goingto use the site (and how people use the web changes all the time).
Anyway, to conclude a fairly long rant: Hire people that are best atwhat they do. It’s not that I (or other print designers) CAN’T do webdesign, its that you should want to hire someone that will do itbest—someone that knows the ins and outs of the web and can then hirepeople like me to do what they do best: draw ornaments, logos,illustrations etc that will make the site sing.
I'm quite certain many lawyers and firms would benefit from a similar "disclaimer" telling potential clients why not to hire them. Communicating what you do -- and most importantly, what you don't (and won't) do -- goes a long way towards getting you the clients you want and dissuading the ones you don't from picking up the phone.
How Much Should Legal Fees Be?
Lawyers, do you think clients would use a service that describes itself as follows:
We are an independent, unbiased resource designed to deliver legal fee and price transparency and the expert information legal clients need. Our team of expert lawyers has helped us comb through a mountain of flat fee and billable time data to ensure you have the information you need when it's time to hire a lawyer.
Well, that service doesn't exist for legal clients just yet (as far as I know), but it does for people with car trouble. It is called RepairPal, and it gives people pricing advice (including printed estimates) for various auto service repairs. Here's how it works:
RepairPal takes the mystery out of car repairs with a simple tool thatwill tell you the average price you should be paying for a repair inyour zip code. You just pop in a few details about your repair andcar, and it will do the rest. It breaks down the estimated repair costin a few ways, showing you the range to expect depending on whether yougo through a dealer or independent repair shop, the cost of labor andparts, plus the parts usually needed and how much they cost. Theresult? You can feel better about making an informed repair decision,and you don’t have to scramble to get your friend the “car expert” onthe phone to ask a dozen questions.
Imagine a world where your clients' expectations of the cost of your services is driven less by the facts of their case and more by an "estimate" they got from the internet. A brave new world is coming. Are you ready for it?
Measure Time the Way Your Clients Do
Just a quick thought: Are you measuring time the way your clients do?
Are you keeping track of the days (not minutes or hours) between when you first promised something and when it was finally delivered? Are you measuring the time between your last client update and the next one? Do you know how long -- in calendar time, not billable time -- that the average __________ takes?
You should, because even though your clients see every moment you spend working for them on their bill, I bet they wish you'd pay the same attention to their calendar as you do to your stopwatch.
A/B Test Your Alternative Fees
All too often, firms view alternative pricing as an "all or nothing" proposition. They fear a wholesale move away from the billable hour could drive their firm to financial ruin if they get the "pricing thing" wrong. However, instead of rolling the dice with a firm-wide implementation of an unproven and untested pricing methodology, firms should take a lesson from the web design industry and do A/B testing. What is A/B testing? In The Ultimate Guide to A/B Testing, Smashing Magazine defines it this way: At its core, A/B testing is exactly what it sounds like: you have two versions of an element (A and B) and a metric that defines success. To determine which version is better, you subject both versions to experimentation simultaneously. In the end, you measure which version was more successful and select that version for real-world use. This is similar to the experiments you did in Science 101. Remember the experiment in which you tested various substances to see which supports plant growth and which suppresses it. At different intervals, you measured the growth of plants as they were subjected to different conditions, and in the end you tallied the increase in height of the different plants. A/B testing on the Web is similar. You have two designs of a website: A and B. Typically, A is the existing design (called the control), and B is the new design. You split your website traffic between these two versions and measure their performance using metrics that you care about (conversion rate, sales, bounce rate, etc.). In the end, you select the version that performs best. If you're thinking of moving from the billable hour to alternative fees, don't do it all at once. Instead, identify two similar matters or clients (we'll call them A and B). Keep serving (and charging) "A" the way you always have. However, with "B,'" change your pricing structure. Give "B" a flat fee for the work you're billing "A" for by the hour. Pay close attention to the metrics that matter to you and to your clients. Measure time to complete tasks (not in minutes, but in days). Keep track of the people and resources used. Watch what folks are doing (and how they do it) instead of just asking them at the end of week or month how much time they spent. Most importantly, measure both client and attorney satisfaction with the work and results. If you do enough A/B testing across your client portfolio, you might find that alternative fees aren't as scary or hard to implement that you thought they would be, but that they make your clients and attorneys happier and make your firm more money.