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Serve Your Legal Career With Client Service
The blog world continues to focus on ways that lawyers can improve service to clients, in particular, by finding ways to instill an ethic of service within the culture of the law firm. Over at Legal Sanity, Arnie Herz references posts by David Maister and Dick Richards that can guide firms in creating, what Richards terms, "a mythology of client service." Specifically, Richards advises firms to foster client service by:
(1) culling and sharing stories of
extraordinary service from “their organization’s past and present;” and
(2) encouraging employees to engage in dialogue about exceptional
customer service they’ve received.
And what's the feedback for lawyers who take this advice to heart? Plenty, suggests Michelle Golden, since service types are viewed as the real stars in law firms. Put another way, serving others will serve you well in your career.
Ron Friedmann at Prism Legal takes a different approach to improving client service with this post on Client or Mystery Shopper? Friedmann recognizes the difficulty with using "mystery clients" to test lawyers' effectiveness in delivering service, but recommends that firms use client surveys to see whether they're meeting their clients needs.
As a solo, I've always recognized the value of client service; personal experience is what we solos have long touted as our advantage over larger, less personal law firms. At the same time, as I wrote here in the Paradox of Client Service, we can never equate service with being a "hired gun" or allowing our clients to become our masters. Foremost, if we don't retain our independent judgment, we may serve our short-term interest of keeping the client (think Vinson and Elkins and Enron!), but we harm both our client and our own reputation in the long run.
Posted by Carolyn Elefant on August 9, 2006 at 05:46 PM | Permalink
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