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Reinventing The Law Business: A Satisfied Client Is… A Disaster!

If "satisfying" clients is not enough, what must law firms do in order to survive and thrive?

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This is going to be a two-part series of articles about client satisfaction.

Let me start right in with a truly awful statistic I read somewhere, which is that 20% of “satisfied” clients fire their lawyer every year. This means that if you are satisfying your clients, then every five years you still have to completely replace your client base just to stay even. Yikes!

Considering how difficult it typically is to win new business, this would be a monstrous problem, to say the least. However, thankfully, the same place where I read the 20% statistic said that less than 1% of “over-satisfied” clients fire their lawyer in a given year. Whew!

I have to be honest and say I don’t remember where I read these statistics and I don’t really know if these statistics are accurate – i.e., how could this really be accurately tested – however, the numbers were scary enough that they stuck in my mind. Putting aside the exactitude of the statistics, even if these numbers are partially correct, the point is completely obvious; namely, that “satisfying” a client is not nearly enough to be successful. Instead, in order to succeed you have to “over-satisfy” your client….

When you think about it, you never “have” a client. A client always has the sole discretion right to fire his or her lawyer. It is not like a fish you catch and put in your creel and then get another fish. The metaphor is more like you catch the fish and put it in the creel but when you go for another fish and look the other way all these people are trying to steal that fish from you, so if you aren’t paying attention, when you turn around the fish you caught is gone!

Indeed, if you want to make yourself nervous, you just think about all the other law firms that are constantly pitching every single one of your clients on the view that they would be a better choice of law firm than your firm. Of course, back the other way, every time you seek a new client you are effectively trying to woo the client away from its current counsel. Like it or not, there is competition in the legal world.

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So to cut to the chase, “satisfying” a client is a likely path to failure, and “over-satisfying” a client is a likely path to success.

When I was thinking about this a few years ago, I happened to have been reading a book about Ritz-Carlton by Joseph Michelli called The New Gold Standard: 5 Leadership Principles for Creating a Legendary Customer Experience Courtesy of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company (affiliate link). The whole point of their program is to “WOW” their customers. They realize that these WOW moments are what distinguish them from their competition and turn a plain old hotel guest into a loyal customer for life.

At my law firm, Duval & Stachenfeld LLP, we wanted to make this a pervasive point, to both our attorneys and our clients, so we came up with the following slogan:

“At D&S a satisfied client is a disaster!”

This is to remind us that just “satisfying” a client is failure. We need to WOW them at all times — that is our mission and goal, or we run the real risk that sometime, not that far off in the future, that client will be the client of another law firm and not ours.

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Bruce Stachenfeld is the managing partner of Duval & Stachenfeld LLP, which is an approximately 70-lawyer law firm based in midtown Manhattan. The firm is known as “The Pure Play in Real Estate Law” because all of its practice areas are focused around real estate. With close to 50 full-time real estate lawyers, the firm is one of the largest real estate law practices in New York City. You can contact Bruce by email at thehedgehoglawyer@gmail.com.

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