Beyond Biglaw: Give Clients What They Need...

Tailoring your services to meet the client's needs is the only way to build a legal practice that is sustainable, impactful, and rewarding for both the client and the lawyer.

Today is the two-year anniversary of our law firm. While I am grateful we have made it to this point, it still feels like we have much more ahead of us to accomplish — which is a good thing. Anniversaries can be tricky. On the one hand, it is beneficial and appropriate to reflect on the state of the business (or relationship, for a personal anniversary) while taking note of past successes, lessons learned, and future prospects. On the other hand, it is important to remember that our perspectives can be clouded by what we are experiencing at any given moment.

My preference, therefore, is to stick with what I know: that I am grateful to my partners and our clients, for one, and that I have had more varied experiences in the past two years than during my entire Biglaw career. Plus, that the experience has been a lot of fun so far, if a bit stressful at times. The good of building a law firm heavily outweighs the bad, thankfully.

Of all the lessons of the past two years, perhaps the biggest has been this: It is all about helping the clients. Not very profound, perhaps, but indisputably true, no matter what size law firm one practices at. Not only does helping clients lead to “success” as a lawyer, it is the most important value a law firm can have. We succeed when our clients succeed. It is that simple. But the first challenge is learning how best to tailor our services to the unique needs of each client.

While the types of clients we worked with while in Biglaw may have been pretty “standardized,” there is no question that we have worked with a much broader client base in our boutique practice. But no matter what type of client we have worked with, the only way to “get it right” and earn repeat business has been to tailor our services in a way that is effective for each client. It is hard enough to get results for clients, and trying to force a client service approach that works for one client on another only makes things more difficult.

Prior to starting this firm with my partners, I was fortunate to serve as a partner at two Biglaw firms with a deep commitment to client service and financial discipline. That experience has been very helpful in running our current businesses, even though we are on the surface “much smaller” than Biglaw firms. At the same time, we are privileged to have a sophisticated client base, and continue to service clients who we originally worked for while in Biglaw. Our experience with those clients has only reinforced our commitment to providing responsive service and top-quality work product. In many ways, our Biglaw training made continuing to work for Biglaw clients one of the easiest adjustments to boutique-firm practice. We know how to work with employees at large corporations, be they in-house counsel, technical staff, or executives. We are also realistic about why they may be working with us on a particular matter, and we know that our work product and results need to exceed their expectations if we want to get additional work from them. Two years in, that is still an enjoyable challenge to tackle. But our firm’s client mix is a lot more diverse than “legacy” Biglaw clients, and each of those other types of clients presents a different set of factors to consider in terms of providing outstanding client service.

As an example, because of our unique consulting work on patent litigation issues for investment-oriented firms, we have also needed to learn how to provide top client service to a non-traditional “legal” client — Wall Street-types. As you can imagine, dealing with this type of client can be very different than dealing with an in-house counsel at an international corporation. For one, our client contacts at investor firms run the gamut of roles — from portfolio managers to analysts to research staff. While their respective levels of seniority may differ, we have come to deeply respect the level of dedication and sacrifice that nearly everyone we have dealt with shows to their job. Yes, they tend to be highly compensated, or already wealthy, but at the same time, they are nearly always highly intelligent, hardworking, and with a voracious appetite for information — especially information that can make them money. In truth, providing excellent client service to these types of clients came with a learning curve for us, considering our former backgrounds and lack of experience in the investing world.

Dealing with a investor client is very different than dealing with opposing counsel or in-house counsel in one of our patent cases. For one, there is a lot less tolerance for equivocation and “holding back” in the name of professional courtesy or etiquette. When getting information in time can make or break fortunes, and where being 100% accurate while being “fast to the news” is the standard, there is little margin for error. As confident as we may be about our ability to “read” a patent case and evaluate litigation strategy — and even though we are very clear with our clients that we are there to offer legal evaluations, and not investment advice of any kind — we still felt pressure to adapt a bit to the culture of this new client base, at least when interacting with them directly. While the learning curve was a bit steep, it was also a lot of fun, and I feel much more confident now regarding our understanding of how to interact with this type of client, including how best to communicate with them so that we are adding value, rather than boring them with legal digressions.

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I can go on, and discuss the nuances of dealing with inventor clients, or working with foreign companies on U.S. patent issues, but I think considering the differences between working for former Biglaw clients and investor firms makes the point. Tailoring your services to meet the client’s needs is the only way to build a legal practice that is sustainable, impactful, and rewarding for both the client and the lawyer. When you work at a small firm, it is much likelier that you will have direct client contact on a regular basis. Yes, it takes work to develop each relationship and give each client your best. But it is only by providing that level of individualized service that a firm that just turned two can reasonably hope to one day turn twenty.


Gaston Kroub lives in Brooklyn and is a founding partner of Kroub, Silbersher & Kolmykov PLLC, an intellectual property litigation boutique. The firm’s practice focuses on intellectual property litigation and related counseling, with a strong focus on patent matters. You can reach him at gkroub@kskiplaw.com or follow him on Twitter: @gkroub.

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