Canadian Lawyer - sample

w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m M A Y 2 0 1 7 21 tistical type of information periodically to know what's happening in the marketplace and how you rate," he says. Client surveys don't always have to be done after the work is completed. They can also serve as a business development tool to recruit clients. Kaufman suggests corporate counsel sometimes warm up to lawyers surveying the marketplace to target specific clients, asking them about their needs, con- cerns and key issues and providing aware- ness of what the firm does well. Management consultancy Altman Weil, Inc. has surveyed clients in search of busi- ness opportunities and to perhaps identify legal services that the targeted company is not using. But often, surveys involve in- person meetings, says Altman's Philadel- phia-based principal Eric Seeger, whose work focuses on law firms. "We've seen a significant movement away from surveys towards face-to-face conversations with clients. Ten years ago, law firms were doing client surveys to let clients know they cared. Nowadays, when firms conduct surveys, they do so because they want the objective data that the sur- vey generates on how they're perceived by clients and whether they have any service issues or competitive disadvantages that should be addressed," he says. Many firms dropped the use of surveys in cost-cutting measures resulting from the 2008-09 economic downturn, observes Seeger. And some of that money was divert- ed to business development — getting law- yers out of the office to meet with clients. Altman Weil, he adds, has determined that clients appreciate direct conversations and Seeger stresses the importance of having senior lawyers involved with the file get feedback about budgeting, case strategy, matter management and efficiency. "Lawyers can't be afraid to talk about methodology and price in a very transpar- ent way. The more sophisticated clients have collected data on what they should expect to pay and which firms outper- form other firms. It behooves a law firm to understand how each client selects and evaluates outside counsel and make sure they're performing well in the areas the clients most care about," says Seeger. "Clients' budgets have been squeezed, they're managing against the annual budget number and they're rewarded for perfor- mance against budget. So the law firm has to be collaborative in helping the client meet their budget goals." In fact, Catherine Mitchell, curator of The JoyfulProfit Movement in Missis- sauga, Ont., which works on relationships between professionals and their clients, sees the lawyer's ongoing interaction with the client as an opportunity to casually survey the client and gather intelligence. "What I see has happened, while the move toward wanting to get client feedback is great, I see it becomes as a sort of panacea" where the firm relies on doing a survey once and doesn't worry about it again, she says. "But the individual practitioner has the oppor- tunity to get feedback at every interaction." She suggests identifying crucial junc- tions in the file beforehand that can serve as checkpoints for the lawyer to gather infor- mation and preferences from the client. "Clients are giving feedback in every inter- action, but if you don't see it as feedback, you're not going to put it in that bucket." Surveys, she adds, also send a message to the client that their views are important and they can serve as a way of demon- strating that a customer-oriented culture is important to the firm. "I believe where it has its most value is inside a commitment to a client-centric culture" as an expression of that commitment. One approach is to identify beforehand critical moments in the file that can be used to get information and feedback from the client. And she suggests information be gathered on the individuals involved in the file and the organization, as well as the overall industry. But the key is storing and accessing the information that is gathered so it can be easily accessed by others within the firm when they need it and correlating it with other surveys to provide a broad picture of clients and their views of the firm. Information gathered throughout the interaction with the client could be an effec- tive method, observes Anne Ristic, assistant managing partner at Stikeman Elliott LLP, where lawyers can use a variety of tools to capture feedback, client information and their preferences. "This whole approach gets ignored as a tool because it's not a program. But if I look at lawyers who I think are actu- ally the most successful at building cli- ent relationships, it's kind of like they're doing this all the time" — listening and understanding what the client is saying or not saying and understanding their preferences as well as any displeasure they might communicate, says Ristic. "When you're sitting there with your client, do all the things you have to do, you're getting all this information." Traditional surveys aren't universally used at Stikemans, she adds, but feed- back is considered vital. What the firm does rely on for large institutional clients is formal interviews conducted by the managing partner or chief officer. There are also annual formal feedback sessions based on a set of questions. Another strat- egy is a debriefing after each engagement, focusing on four questions and done in 30 minutes. "I feel like I want to double down more on getting those de-briefs on a case- by-case basis with the individual clients, getting that informal feedback, capturing that, doing those more personal, grass- roots ways of gathering feedback rather than the more impersonal, institutional survey," she says. The bottom line is without any type of feedback, the main method a client will use to express their dissatisfaction is by not using the firm again. Simply asking the questions can help secure business that might otherwise be lost, concludes Miller, whose Ten Things: Creating a Client Sat- isfaction Survey is being included in a book being published by the American Bar Association based on his blog posts. "Every law firm should have a process that they use, generally, to get better. You really need to reach out externally and be ready to take that criticism." Effective surveys In seeking feedback from clients, there are some basic areas that should be covered: • Was the project properly scoped; • What was the client's experience with the firm, its lawyers and staff; • What the client thinks the firm does well; • What it didn't do well; • What is the client's major concern; • How the firm can help them with their concerns.

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