Canadian Lawyer

I work with and every so often they'll call up on a bill to say, 'I know you did the work, I trust you did it as efficiently as pos- sible and you did a good job on it but this particular one we killed the project. We're not building the condominium. We're not going ahead with this project. We're not going ahead with the licence. So from a management position, while the bill is right, it doesn't meet our value proposition for this particular file. will do is I'll just agree to write down the bill to the client to say, 'Yeah, I understand. Because on that one, it doesn't work out, and this is what the client is looking for at the end of the day. the client that really matters. Clients are less inclined to pay for processing content. They want advocacy. They want counsel- ling. That' are more able to differentiate that than they were 20 years ago or 10 years ago or five years ago. Maybe they care more about differentiating it because of the pres- sures that they have, but there' s huge value and perhaps clients ference in terms of processing paper and doing an agreement versus counselling your client and that really matters when it comes to rendering the accounts. s a big dif- BLANCHARD: I think that we have to listen to our client, and we have to actually innovate. We have to be more agile in our answers and the way we do things, and that' is natural, that we have to demonstrate to our clients that we are efficient in the way we provide our services. So yes, excellence in legal services and the quality of our services is essential, and on top of that, you need to actually be able to show that you're efficient in the way you do that. s just a requirement that DAWE: From a law firm management perspective, there' and that's within a law firm. Lawyers are s another side to that used to being judged on, compensated on the billable hour. So part of our job is if we're taking on these alternative fee arrangements, when they're being staffed, you have to have some thought put into it at the beginning as to how people are going to be credited, people being the lawyers that are working on the files for the product at the end of the day, because if it' through and you're getting paid for them, then that' got a fixed fee arrangement, and there's ' In that case what I ' s billable hours and they're flowing s simple enough, but if you've half a dozen people working on the file, and at the end of the day you find that the two senior partners have taken all the fee credits and the associates have gotten nothing from it, come compensation time at the end of the year, that' problem, and it's going to be hard to start peeling it back and reallocating fee credits. SONBERG: It's the value proposition to s going to be our Client feedback MACKAY: I'm shocked at the number of firms that won't do [client feedback], don't do it, or do it at varying degrees. I'm just shocked. I cannot tell you how much cli- ents love it. One of my first engagements was to sit on a patio in Scottsdale, Ariz., and interview clients at a big client event for a U.S. firm, and they said to me — and it really struck me as a young consultant having not done that before — it struck me when they all said this is what makes a difference between this firm and every- body else. They actually care what I have to say and they've hired you to ask me, and the clients love it. DAWE: hard wired to be perfect all the time, and one of the reasons that lawyers are sometimes reticent to bring something like this into the firm is they think that the flaw that they see in themselves is now going to be out on the table and discussed. And I think the underlying thing as managing partners that we need to do in our firms, if we can, is make it more of a safe haven for lawyers to recognize that sometimes things don't go perfectly, sometimes a file could have been handled better. Within the firm itself, I think it would it be great if lawyers could see it as a place where we could dissect the things that don't go as well as we would like and not think then there's going to be a separate conversa- tion with the partners talking about how that person is really not up to snuff. I think as lawyers we're all CURRENT INSIGHT INTO WORKPLACE LAW EMPLOYEE OBLIGATIONS IN CANADA JAMES A. D'ANDREA for our industry because I think things will change very fundamentally in the coming years. 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