It's About the Client

• Author: Adam Newhouse
• Pages: 45-53

45

CHAPTER 6

It’s About the Client

Serve the customer has been chanted by ambitious businesspeople for

decades. The legal profession was no different. For years, serve the client

was our mantra of trust and professional reliability. By the time the tides

of the Great Recession began to rise, however, this mantra had become

empty words, their deeper meaning forgotten. By that time, lawyers

were seen as serving mostly themselves. At least that’s what our pre-

vailing story had to say.

If our current story tells a tale of lawyers serving themselves, then

obviously the first thing for us to do is put clients at the center of our

practice. In other words, we must go back to the basics of serving the

customer first.

Knowing the Client—Context Is Everything

Think about it: Your competitor can duplicate your product quality,

your prices and even your service levels. But if you have truly learned

what makes one customer different from other customers, you have an

advantage—assuming, of course, that you use this knowledge to better

serve each customer.127

—Michael Hinshaw & Bruce Kasanoff

The question then becomes: If my customer doesn’t know what he

wants, how can I?

The answer is, you can’t!

Not unless you know more about him than he does about himself.128

—Michael E. Gerber

127. Michael Hinshaw & Bruce Kasanoff, Smart Customers Stupid Companies: Why Only

Intelligent Companies Will Thrive, and How to Be One of Them 66 (Business Strategy Press

2012).

128. Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and

What to Do about It 222 (Harper Business 1995).

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