GCs Know How Lazy You Are -- Here's How They Figured You Out

Don't give your client the wrong impression by falling into any of these behaviors that general counsel consider signs of a lazy lawyer.

Resting in the center of the panopticon of the legal world are the big-ticket clients who pore over every bill and second-guess every charge. There was a time when Biglaw could easily convince its clients to pony up nearly any expense for the privilege of even the limited attention of its partners, but budget pressure and technological advances have transformed in-house counsel into eagle-eyed enforcers. Ever wonder why work is shifting from Biglaw to lower-cost alternatives?

Well, because your clients have figured out how lazy you are.

Or perhaps more accurately, they think they’ve cracked a code and focus on a few key indicators to conclude that you’re not the lawyer for them. If you’re not really lazy, here are the key behaviors to avoid if you don’t want your client jumping to wrong conclusions.

Law360 spoke with a number of GCs about how they decide on outside counsel and came up with five behaviors that get under their skin. Here are some excerpts.

Lack of Responsiveness

“To me, the best outside counsel are the ones who respond quickly,” said Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP partner Andrew Strong, a former general counsel of The Texas A&M University System. “Slow response is an indication of either indifference to your matters, or simply not being responsive enough.”

Completely ignoring clients is one thing, but “slow” is in the twitching eye of the neurotic beholder. In a completely connected world, clients can adopt the habits of the worst high school girlfriend and read disinterest and infidelity into every 30 seconds that lapse between their email and your response.

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I had a client who would call at 9 a.m. with a question and freak out when 11 a.m. would roll by without an answer. As a lowly second-year at the time, I had the answer for him, but I couldn’t offer it up because I needed the sign off of two partners in two different offices, one of whom was on trial (in the days when lawyers weren’t allowed any communication devices in the courtroom).

That’s why the standard is uniquely disadvantageous to bureaucratic Biglaw, where a litany of moving parts can so easily be mistaken for a lackadaisical approach.

Sloppy Work Product

“If the drafts of the briefs have glaring errors and typos and is a mess to begin with, that’s not going to build trust — that’s going to erode trust,” [Mitsubishi Electric US Inc. counsel Patrick] Kennell said. “I end up spending a lot more time than I anticipated in reviewing them because I don’t have that trust.”

How is this the second item on the list? Isn’t this the sign of a lazy lawyer since time immemorial? Before BlackBerries and tracking software, clients could still read a draft and spot trouble when the brief misstates the law. Only Justice Scalia is allowed to do that.

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Poor Understanding of the Client’s Business

“If they answer a legal question in a vacuum without understandings of those things, you’ll never get the answer that you need,” [Chief legal officer of mortgage services firm Digital Risk LLC Debbie] Hoffman said. “When we call outside counsel, we know what the law says — we want to know what the nuance is, what are the gray areas. We’re not just looking for the basic, black-letter law answer to our question.”

When working with Wall Street, this usually translates to, “We know the law says this is illegal, but you need to understand how rich it’ll make us and then tell us it’s okay.” Still, you’re a guest (or intruder) in the client’s world, and the only way to persuade them is to demonstrate that you’ve taken the time to learn to speak their language.

Inability to Shoot Straight

One of the things that really gnaws at Kennell is when he’s talking to outside counsel and it’s clear they’re unwilling to admit they don’t know the answer to his question, when they could just as easily say that they will find out the answer.

Between the lines, the advice is to take your ego out of it. Claiming to know the answer to a complex question off the top of your head may make you feel like you won Jeopardy, but to everyone else it looks like you’re not taking the question seriously enough. Besides, feigning confidence in an off-the-cuff answer only makes the client wonder why they’re getting billed for all this research.

Shoddy Billing Practices

“When I get a bill from outside counsel and I see entries like ‘attention to matter’ or ‘review correspondence,’ the lack of specificity in recording their time … makes me wonder whether they were really doing that work,” Strong said. “It’s incumbent on the lawyer to provide some description of what they’re doing.”

Billing time is like writing a résumé. Every lawyer has to dig deep into their creative writing skills to figure out an acceptably impressive description for: “filing the mountain of irrelevant documents the client sent ‘in case these are helpful'” or “pushed ‘next’ on Westlaw — 5.3 hours.”

But you’d better make it look good, or clients will doubt the ineffable work you put in everyday.

5 Ways GCs Can Spot A Lazy Lawyer [Law360]

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