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Life in the Trenches

or
What your clients really want from you.
By Attorney Michael A. Loduha
© 2002 All rights reserved

        A few years ago, I surveyed lawyers in several states for their respective bar associations. The results provided a picture of "life in the trenches" that most collaborative practitioners know all too well. The results demonstrated that most lawyers have a guarded outlook for the future of the profession and their future within it generally. Generally, lawyers, whether offering collaborative family law services or not, share the same anxieties and are professionally satisfied and gratified by the same things. The collaborative lawyers that I've met around the country are open and generous when it comes to sharing both the message and the methods and techniques of collaborative family law. Yet many lawyers with whom we share thoughts and feelings, fail to "pick up on" collaborative family practice. If we believe that the collaborative choice is a better way for spouses and their children, do we not have a moral duty to promulgate and promote it? And if we do, doesn't that duty extend to attorneys as well? But many attorneys don't seem to "get it" and. wearing my research hat, I wondered why this is so.

    Survey results of bar associations and client segments in Wisconsin, Indiana and Tennessee have amazing similarities. The overall results of client surveys present a unique picture of those individuals who, collectively, control a firm’s goodwill and control about 70% of future business. Single surveys can provide correlation of information that is available by no other means. Overall results present benchmark scores for the population surveys. Repeated surveys can spot trends, as well as measure the effectiveness of practice development or marketing programs.

        Survey data is always static. Like a snapshot, it freezes the respondents’ thoughts and feelings at a moment in time. Client decision behavior, such as when to use legal counsel, when to recommend counsel to others with perceived need and the like are dynamic and always changing. But the overall data from a client survey, like a snapshot, can still be very valuable.

        Attorneys encounter clients one at a time, sometimes several a day, and build a mental image, a different sort of snapshot, over time. The attorney gets meaning from this data through the filter of his or her own perceptions of the client interaction. Even a survey small in scope shows that the elements of an attorney’s practice situation impact how an ambiguous situation will be evaluated. In a firm, the practitioners’ ability to get meaning from the mental “snapshot’ is more difficult. Each member of the firm must incorporate the snapshots of the others members and, combined with his or her own, draw meaning from them. A client survey does an end run around these individual interpretations of client experiences. It does so by going directly to the clients.

        A summary of some of the more interesting aspects we discovered:

Chart 1: Attorney Expectations
        Lawyers have a guarded outlook for the future of the profession and their future within it generally.

        Members of bar associations were asked to indicate how they thought each of the following statements would impact their practice over the next ten years - with response options being “Increase”, “Decrease” or “Stay the Same”.

    Competition in the profession will…
    Adjusted for inflation, a general practitioner’s net income will…
    Pressure to specialize will …
    Pressure to advertise will…
    The effectiveness of advertising will…
    The number of hours a general practitioner works to stay current will…
    The invasion into the gp’s business by accountants and others will…
    Friendliness and cooperation between attorneys and law firms will…
    The viability of small general practice firms will…

Chart 1 reflects the results of the Wisconsin survey (numbers closely resemble the Tennessee results) which show that expectations for the coming decade are guarded with the overall majority (90.1%) of the respondents feeling that the pressure to specialize will increase, with 7.4% feeling that it will stay the same, 1.7% it will decrease and .8% just don’t know.

Chart 2   What do clients want?

        We asked attorneys in two Midwestern states (in an unaided first position format of a written survey) what were the most important elements of quality legal services. Even with the wide variety of expression that comes with an unaided format question, we noticed that the substantial majority (around 96%) of responses fell into one of four main attribute categories. These were honesty, competency, caring and cost. There were substantial similarities between lawyers and clients for these attributes of quality legal services - and one major surprising difference.

        Chart 2 shows the attributes important to attorneys. Attorneys place the highest value on competency, followed by caring, honesty and cost.

Chart 3. Next we asked that same question of clients in both written surveys and telephone surveys. We found that clients value caring most, followed by competency, honesty and cost.

Chart 4 shows the attorney and client data superimposed to make the similarities and differences clear.

What conclusions can be drawn from these data?

Cost, regardless of the bitching, comes in last for both attorneys and clients. This doesn’t mean that clients are numb when it comes to money or that their tolerance of what they perceive as high fees is infinitely elastic. But it does mean that of the four principle attribute qualities, money is consistently fourth out of four.
Honesty (integrity) comes in third for both attorneys and clients. Not differentiated in this data point is whether clients are saying “be honest for me” or “be honest to me”. Additional research indicates that “be honest to me” outweighs “be honest for me” about 2 to 1.
On the importance of honesty and cost in quality legal services, attorneys and clients agree quite closely.
It is in the differing values attorneys and clients put on the caring and competency attributes of quality legal services that the greatest insight is to be found. Lawyers value competency the most - generally equaling the value of all other attributes combined. For clients, the converse is true. Clients value caring attributes as much as all other attributes combined.

While this can drift dangerously close to a “tastes Great - Less Filling” debate, this differential in the expression of attribute values is important to those who wish to promote the collaborative choice in divorce to the bar as a whole. The vocabulary and expression of valued attributes in collaborative family law tends to come down on the “caring” side of the caring/competency watershed. This is clearly illusion more than substance in that it is more difficult to be a competent collaborative lawyer than it is to be a competent litigator. But people “get” an idea - especially one that they have yet to experience, based on how it appears to align with their value system and prejudices. Lawyers value “competence” over all - yet collaborative family law sounds in the vocabulary of the “caring” attributes.

To bring the benefits of collaborative family law to as many divorcing couples and their children as possible, as soon as possible, we need to promote it to the bar as a whole. Pre-collaborative lawyers will be more susceptible to presentations using the vocabulary of competence. If we talk about collaborative competence as the key to both their success and to client benefit, they’ll “get it” much quicker. To quote Mary Poppins, “A spoon full of sugar makes the medicine go down.”