A main reason why clients can't get from their lawyers the type of written advice they cherish (a concise one-pager) is that law firms produce memos to please the partners, not the clients. But there is a way to make both happy.
99% of clients value simple, concise, to-the-point, practical legal advice. They have little interest, or in most cases no interest at all, in the supporting legal analysis. When you ask lawyers what their clients want, they all seem to know this perfectly well: the client want a clear, concise and practical answer to his question. They know it, but they don't do it. Clients keep receiving long, legalistically-charged memos with detailed discussions of case law and endless footnotes. How come that law firms fail to produce what they know their clients are expecting?
Look at the production process in law firms. Legal advice is written by associates, then turned to a partner for review and signature. The partner wants to make a quality check, and rightly so. So, he needs to know how the associate has reached a particular conclusion, he wants to ensure that the associate has checked all relevant case law and legal articles, and has applied logic in the reasoning. He does not want to check the file, so all relevant facts must be presented at length in the memo. The associate must therefore spell out the entire background, analysis and reasoning in the memo. This is not useful for the client (the client is only interested in the practical conclusion), but associates feel they have to set out all the supporting sources and reasoning to pass the partners' quality check. And so, they keep producing memos that will make clients angry and resentful about legal fees.
The way to solve this is to distinguish the production process and the delivery process. Lawyers should not communicate the legal advice as they have produced it. The process of producing a memo requires legal analysis and reasoning, and a quality check of such analysis and reasoning is a must. So, lawyers must indeed put in writing their analysis and reasoning. But this has to do with the production side of the legal advice. The delivery side is a completely different issue. The question is: "Knowing that we have produced a legal advice based on a reliable analysis, what is the best way to present it to the client?" Most lawyers ignore this question, and simply forward the exhaustive "production-stage memo" to the client. What the client receives is actually an internal memo that the law firm uses for its own purposes of quality check, and it makes clients turn red.
In practice, in addition to and on the basis of the memo that reflects the production of the legal advice, lawyers should prepare a separate "communication memo" that provides to the client exactly what he wants to know, in a manner as concise and to-the-point as possible.
Antoine Henry de Frahan
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