Providing real value to clients.

• Author: Smiley, Joyce K.

Some of these facts don't make sense: Can you guess which ones?

A: The Association of Corporate Counsel urged law firms to "consider redirecting at least part of the time and money that they are spending on new client marketing, to assess and address existing client concerns," as a result of the annual "Managing Outside Counsel" survey.

B: According to that survey, one-third of the participating in-house counsel cited communication and personality issues as reasons for terminating law firms.

C: In December 2008, "The American Lawyer" reported that its survey of the AmLaw 200 revealed that only 2 percent of the responding firms made the effort in 2008 to meet with their top 20 billing clients to discuss their firms' performance.

D: "The American Lawyer" also surveyed in-house counsel who are members of the networking site Legal OnRamp. "The vast majority of the LOR respondents," wrote Editor-in-Chief Aric Press, "reported that their outside firms don't even bother with client satisfaction surveys."

E: According to LMA's "Marketing the Marketer" survey, in 2008 client feedback was the respondents' lowest priority [see "Marketing Budgets, Initiatives Take Hit in Battered Economy," November/December 2008, p. 4].

The answer: C-E: Legal marketers' obligation to law firms is to determine how firms should best utilize their marketing resources, and that begins with listening to what the market expects. And yet, so few firms are, as the media puts it, bothering to find out if their clients are satisfied enough to continue doing business with them.

A Broken Proposition

The surveys alone are telling us that general counsel are becoming more vocal about the value and excellent service they expect from their law firms. Two years ago, Margaret Seif, vice president and general counsel of Analog Devices Inc., a publicly traded high-tech company based in Norwood, Mass, said she was "amazed at the number of firms that don't ask how they are doing," in a webcast sponsored by Thomson West. Firms that do not ask clients how they are doing "are complacent, too busy or don't want to hear the answers," according to Seif.

Seif's perspective on law firms' client relations efforts remains the same. "It's still amazing to me," she says. "Some firms think that their results speak for themselves, whether it's how they handled a big corporate deal or how they won a major piece of litigation."

After Seif's statements aired on the webcast, she was invited to speak on a...