What You Don't Know

• Author: David V. Lorenzo
• Pages: 39-40

What You Don’t Know §21.

39

§21.

WHAT YOU DON’T KN OW

Your clients come to you looking for advice. When they walk in your office they are usually

facing a serious situation full of potentially adverse consequences. They sit in front of you and

they complain. They moan and groan about how they got into this mess and about how unfair it is

and about how they just need a little help working their way through this situation.

Of course these clients are minimizing the potential exposure of their situation. They need

help and they know it. But many of them will still shop around. They will still look for a bargain.

(As a side note: These are the same people who would shop for a bargain from a brain surgeon

or parachute manufacturer.) And this is partially due to their pathological condition that prevents

them from naturally comprehending the concept of a price/value relationship.

But part of the blame lies with you. You enable these dysfunctional psycho-clients. You do

this every time you reduce your fee. You do this when you rationalize, during your own personal

moments of delusional behavior, that taking a client at a reduced fee is better than letting them

walk away.

What you should be doing instead of reducing your fee is helping your clients understand the

value of working with you.

Clients have three basic choices when selecting a lawyer.

Choice 1: Work with a cheap, crappy lawyer. This will generally produce crappy results. Cli-

ents know this but some of them legitimately have no money and they are forced to go this route.

Choice 2: Work with a lawyer who does everything right but has only average knowledge and

experience and charges exactly what everyone else charges.

Choice 3: Work with the elite lawyer who does everything right, has invested in educating

himself in several nuances of specific areas of the law, has taken on challenging cases and has

developed relationships that allow him to achieve results not possible for about 97 percent of the

legal population.

Most clients will select Choice 2 because they do not understand the difference between the

lawyers in Choice 2 and Choice 3. And when they select the lawyer in Choice 2 they will try and

get him for the price they would pay the lawyer in Choice 1. Because in their mind, all lawyers

are the same.

And this is what YOU don’t know.

This is not your fault.