Specializing Law Practice: Excellent Service, Efficiently Delivered - Part I

• Jurisdiction: California,United States
• Citation: Vol. 21 No. 3
• Publication year: 2015
• Author: By J. Christopher Toews
• topic: Business of Law,Trust Law,Family Law,Tax Law,Personal Injury Law

Specializing Law Practice: Excellent Service, Efficiently Delivered - Part I

By J. Christopher Toews

Chris Toews is a partner in Toews & Murphy, Inc., a San Luis Obispo law firm specializing in trusts, estates and closely held businesses, and has been in practice in California since 1984. He holds specialty certificates in tax and in trust, estate and probate law. He was formerly an associate at Donovan Leisure Newton & Irvine in New York City and later a Vice President of Citibank, N.A. He can be reached at chris@toewslaw.com.

The core mission of every successful service business, including law firms, is to achieve excellence by providing a service that solves important problems for its customers¹—and to provide that service in a different way that is superior to anyone else. As two business writers aptly put it, "in business there's no place to finish except first."²

The other component of success is to deliver customer service in a way that yields adequate financial returns for the owners—to be efficient enough to provide services at competitive rates, while paying the owners more for their time than the owners of competing firms.

The thesis presented here is that specialization is the most important single strategy for developing excellent services and for marketing and delivering those services efficiently.

DEVELOPING EXCELLENT SERVICES; KNOWLEDGE BASE ISSUES

The first task for the law firm that aims to finish first is to develop and offer excellent services, that is, services that are different and better than those offered by competing firms. Specialization is a crucial strategy for achieving this because it allows the firm to build and maintain a knowledge base for each specialty that is deeper and more thorough than that of the competition. All else being equal, the quality of the firm's advice will be a function of the quality and depth of the knowledge base that the firm maintains to support it.

The size of the knowledge base required to provide excellent service tends to be underestimated because it is assumed, incorrectly, that the required knowledge is limited to that needed to prosecute the client's legal case or otherwise address the legal aspects of the client's problem.³ However, excellent representation requires that the firm view clients holistically,⁴ that is, as people with problems to be solved and not just as legal cases to be processed. One consequence of this approach is that the knowledge base required to render superior service is very extensive.

For example, a top-drawer personal injury practitioner must be equipped not just to prosecute the client's legal case and obtain compensation for the client's injuries, but also to assist with the client's physical and emotional recovery from a traumatic event.

According to a prominent personal injury practitioner whom the author recently interviewed,⁵ the knowledge base required of a top-drawer practitioner in that area includes knowledge of all of the following:

[Page 20]

• Substantive tort law;
• Procedural rules applicable to the preparation and trial of personal injury matters;
• The rules of evidence;
• Legal rules and procedures relating to subrogation and insurance claims;
• Rules and laws relating to the rights of third party lien claimants, such as insurers, to a portion of the settlement proceeds;
• The local medical service delivery system, including knowledge of which providers will deliver services in consideration of a lien on the client's recovery;
• Laws governing automobile and general liability insurance;
• Experience in negotiating with professional litigants, such as insurance companies;
• A list of resources needed to assist the client with the non-legal aspects of recovery, such as psychotherapists and rehab specialists;
• A list of expert witnesses needed to effectively prosecute personal injury cases, such as accident reconstruction specialists, vocational rehab specialists, diagnosticians, and economists;
• Detailed personal knowledge of the judges who preside over personal injury matters, as well as strong...