Legal Management

Creative Ways to Define Your Market

Many attorneys define their market by they do, as in "I am doing copyright" or "I am doing real estate". This is the continuation of university, where "law" was divided into "contract law", "commercial law", etc.

Another, client-centered way of defining your market is to define what clients you work for and what needs you meet for them. The two above examples will become "I help high-tech companies protect their intellectual capital" or "I help real estate developers to manage risks."

Some firms find it difficult though to define their market in this client-centered way, because every lawyer is doing something different. Of course, if the firm is a labour law boutique, defining the market is easy because the specific market of each attorney in the firm is the same as the firm's. But when in the same firms, each attorney is working for different clients in different areas to fulfill different needs, it becomes tricky to explain what the firm is about.

Time to be creative. What criterion to use? An example: the type of client relationship that you have. Or the pricing system. That is becoming the core feature of your firm and what links all lawyers together: a certain philosophy, a particular approach to client relationship, etc.

Antoine Henry de Frahan

Strategy Made Simple

You have a strategy if you can answer the following questions:

• What clients do you want to have?
• What needs or desires of your clients do you want to fulfill?
• What do you offer to fulfill these needs or desires?
• What positioning do you want to have in your market?

Antoine Henry de Frahan

The Emotional Cost of RFP

The problem when you use requests for proposals is that you necessarily have to say "no" to the all of the respondents except one, and who likes to do that?

Antoine Henry de Frahan

Why General Counsel Call on Law Firms

Because:

-    They don't have the manpower in-house

-    They don't have the expertise in-house

-    They have the manpower and the expertise, but they want a second opinion.

Antoine Henry de Frahan

Reporting Lines

Do lawyers in the business units report to the CEO of the business unit, to the head of legal at HQ, or to both of them? This is a critical question for the standing of the legal function in a company, with clear cultural differences: in US companies, in-house counsel tend to report to the general counsel. In French companies, they tend to report to the CEO of their business unit. Some companies try to combine both with a matricial reporting system differentiating between "functional reporting" and "structural reporting. 

Antoine Henry de Frahan

Why Don't We Work More for You?

If you want to get more work from a client, try the question: "Why don't we get more work from you?"

Antoine Henry de Frahan

Looking for a Market Opportunity?

Advice to law firms: I have met two general counsel of major companies this week who are both lacking adequate "legal watch" services. What they want is to be informed about legal developments relevant for their business, both actual and potential (what's in the pipeline). They don't seem to be able to get this from their law firms. 

There are many reasons why law firms are not able or not willing to provide this service:

-    Law firms see legal watch as a non-profitable activity. And indeed, general counsel are not willing to pay fortunes for that service. Tip: if you want to offer that service, think carefully about organization, leverage and efficiency.  

-    Law firms tend to delegate legal watch to junior professionals without experience in the relevant sector. That may result in a very basic type of legal watch, totally useless to the in-house lawyers. What general counsel expect is more than that: insights, analysis, prospective, opinion about what's happening and what's coming up. TIP: get senior attorneys involved to benefit from their insights and analysis.

Antoine Henry de Frahan

High End Commodities

We have come to see the legal market as a superposition of three different markets: a market for standard services ("commodities"), a market for expertise, and a market for big, strategic transactions or litigation. We often represent these three markets as a hierarchy: commodities at the bottom, strategic transactions at the top, and expertise in the middle. (This also reflects the differentiation in hourly rates). There may be more to it, actually.  It may be wrong to believe that commodity work is necessarily low-end and at the bottom of the pyramid. There is a market segment for "high end commodities", and you will find a lot of it in banking and finance work.

Antoine Henry de Frahan

Three Questions to Save Training Money

Do you know precisely what you want to improve?

If your answer is "management" or "communication" or "negotiation", you haven't done your homework yet. What exactly do you want to improve? Exactly what performance needs improvement? What specific behavior do you want to enhance?

Are you convinced that improving it is a priority?

There are so many nice things to learn, but so little time and budget available for learning. It is easy to waste your time while having a good time). But you can have a good time AND make a great use of your training resources. Make sure training will focus on what really matters both for your organization and for the participants. Is there a compelling reason for this training? Is it really important to have it now? Does it efficiently support the strategic objectives of your organization? Is it a "must have", or just a "nice to have"? What do you risk if you don't do the training?

Will better skills lead to better performance?

Sometimes, the reason for poor performance has nothing to do with lacking skills. If I learn to swim, my swimming performance will be zero if I don't have a swimming pool. If I learn creativity, I won't be able to use it and be more creative if my boss is a risk-averse tradition lover who won't leave me any room for innovation. Training is very often a bad solution to a real problem. Don't make that mistake. Make sure the bottleneck is indeed about skills, and not about anything else such as lack of strategic focus, inefficient organization, conflicts among decision-makers, laziness, lack of motivation, etc.

Antoine Henry de Frahan