From the Wool-sack
| Publication year | 1984 |
| Pages | 1657 |
1984, September, Pg. 1657. From the Wool-Sack
When I was a law student, one of my professors reportedly became greatly agitated with one of his colleagues who persisted in referring to the practice of law as a business instead of a profession. He maintained that lawyering was a profession. He was wrong. When Bates & Osteen was first decided, I chuckled to myself and said it would have no effect on the way lawyers went about attracting clients and practicing law. Being a good student, I was, like my professor, wrong.
Lawyers have long been at the bottom of the economic heap and nowhere is this truer than in downtown Denver where the economic survey results conducted in 1982 showed that partners in large Denver law firms were scarcely earning enough to keep the wolves from the door. It was, therefore, with compassion and understanding that I read the article in the February issue of The American Lawyer explaining how one such large Denver law firm was dealing with the problem of generating new business to increase income. That article described how the Denver law firm of Weatherseal, Kramer, Soberscoff and Fish(fn1) is going about getting new business.
Not content with simply producing outstanding legal work, a technique that for many years was relied upon by lawyers in order to stay in business, the firm in question, according to The American Lawyer article, has set up four marketing teams whose purpose is to get business by using the special methods that have been developed. In pursuit of that end, the firm has spent more than $100,000(fn2) on a firm called Marketing Institute International Corp., a firm which, at least up to the time the article in The American Lawyer appeared, had done no international work. What it had done, on the domestic level, was to teach law firms how to develop business without worrying about the quality of their legal work. That probably explains why in roughly ten pages of describing how to get clients a new way, not one reference is found to the importance of doing good legal work, even though the Weather-seal firm is described by the author of the article as being only a B plus firm,(fn3) a characterization...
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