3 Faux Pas I've Seen At Beauty Contests

In-house columnist Mark Herrmann tells you what NOT to do if you want to get his business.

The business development gurus (most of whom have never developed a stitch of business in their lives) are happy to tell you how to succeed at beauty contests.

But who will tell you how to fail at beauty contests?

You’re in luck! None other than your pals right here at ATL!

What faux pas have I personally witnessed during beauty contests?

Faux pas number one:

I’m a partner at a huge law firm. I landed the defense of a few related class actions as a result of a reference from a satisfied client. To land that business (and because I was being honest), I told the client that my particular skill was class action defense. I trumpeted my class action experience, and I said relatively little about my trial experience.

The class actions involved allegations of consumer fraud, but the client was soon hit with a bunch of individual product liability cases brought by people who said they’d been injured by the product. The client decided to run a beauty contest to pick lead counsel to try the product liability cases.

Sponsored

I suggested that the client interview one of my partners — a guy who had won some high-profile product liability trials and might be the right person for the job.

Fast forward to the day of the interview: My partner shows up at the beauty contest, shakes hands all around, and then regales the group with the tale that he just flew in on BigCo’s corporate jet: “I’ve been trying BigCo’s most important product liability cases for a decade. So BigCo told me to take the plane to fly in today from Atlanta. Yesterday, BigCo flew me from Dallas to Atlanta on that jet.

“Man, that’s the life! The plane waits at the airport until you arrive, and then you just get on board and the plane whisks you away. You don’t have to bother with airport security or worry about getting to the airport on time. And those planes are great! Mine would have seated eight, but I was the only person on board. That plane could have taken me from Atlanta to London without needing to refuel.

“Okay. Let’s talk about what I can do to help you defend your cases.”

The interview actually went pretty well after that.

Sponsored

But it didn’t matter; the pooch had already been screwed.

The client called a few days later to tell me that my partner was a well-respected trial lawyer, but he was obviously committed to BigCo and loved how BigCo treated him. If BigCo and my client ever made competing demands on his time, it was plain which client was going to get short shrift. Thus, although the client was pleased that I’d suggested it interview my partner, the client was going to hire someone else to do its individual-case trial work.

What’s the lesson? If you’re talking to a client about handling its work, it’s a good idea to focus on the client and its work.

Faux pas number two:

A company asks major law firms to submit fixed-fee proposals to handle the company’s repetitive low-value lawsuits. One of the world’s most respected firms submits a relatively competitive bid. At the interview, that big firm explains why it has offered such competitive pricing: “We figure that we can use your small matters as training cases for our new associates. We generally defend only big cases, and we’re desperate to bring some training cases into the firm. We’re able to offer you a competitive price for this work because we’re so anxious to make cases like this available to our new associates.”

The other firms competing for this work were, of course, explaining that they’d assign one senior partner to supervise all of the cases, and then assign a partner to each new case as it came in. The responsible partners would naturally use associates to help on the cases, but the other firms guaranteed that the responsible partners would take the key depositions, argue all major motions, and serve as first chair at any trials.

Who do you suppose landed the cases?

What’s the lesson? A client might actually care about whether it wins or loses its lawsuits. Consider that possibility as you prepare your pitch.

Finally, faux pas number three:

WidgetCo had just been on the receiving end of a nasty piece of business-to-business litigation. The discovery battles had been endless and nasty. WidgetCo was delighted when a court sanctioned the plaintiff’s lead counsel — a partner at Bigg & Mediocre — for discovery abuses. The trial court found that the lawyer had served unnecessarily burdensome discovery, and the lawyer and his firm were ordered to repay some of WidgetCo’s discovery costs.

A year later, WidgetCo invited a bunch of large firms, including Bigg & Mediocre, to submit flat-fee bids for the defense of a certain type of litigation. Bigg & Mediocre survived the screening of the written materials and was invited to come in to make an oral presentation.

And who shows up to make the pitch but the very guy who had been sanctioned the previous year?

Maybe Bigg & Mediocre thought that WidgetCo was impressed by the partner’s sanctionable misconduct. (“See? Our lawyers are tough! You know it from personal experience.”) Or maybe Bigg & Mediocre was asleep at the wheel: The invitation to submit an RFP came in; the sanctioned partner had relevant experience; the sanctioned partner managed to put himself at the helm of the RFP response; and no one ever asked whether the sanctioned partner had recently humiliated himself before this very client. (Frankly, I’m not sure I would have thought to ask that question. Reality often outruns my imagination.)

In any event, what’s the lesson from faux pas number three? Before you send a person out as the firm’s representative to a potential client, make sure there’s no reason the client might already hate the representative.

I’m afraid my experience of beauty contest faux pas is fairly limited. I’ve never seen a law firm partner insult the general counsel, intentionally pour coffee into a client’s laptop, or threaten the client if it refused to hire the firm. But I’m sure my readers’ experiences are far broader than mine have been. If you’ve witnessed any noteworthy beauty contest faux pas, that’s why the “comment” icon exists.


Mark Herrmann is the Chief Counsel – Litigation and Global Chief Compliance Officer at Aon, the world’s leading provider of risk management services, insurance and reinsurance brokerage, and human capital and management consulting. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Inside Straight: Advice About Lawyering, In-House And Out, That Only The Internet Could Provide (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at inhouse@abovethelaw.com.