Biglaw, In-House Counsel

3 Client Pitches I've Seen Fail

In-house columnist Mark Herrmann talks about what doesn't work when trying to pitch him.

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dartboard pen inside straightIt’s hard to win a client pitch.

Heck — it’s hard even to obtain a client pitch. Most business goes to the law firm that the client has worked with in the past and is a known (and good) quantity. Why bother with a beauty contest?

But beauty contests happen: The usual counsel is conflicted out, or the case involves an unusual subject matter for the client, or the case is brought in a new geographic area, or the situation is somehow extraordinary. If you get to make a pitch, what works?

I’ve written before about what you can do right, about things I’ve seen work to develop business. Let me talk today about what I’ve seen fail. Here are three things I personally have witnessed.

First, I saw one of my then-partners try to impress a new client by talking about the great work he was doing for another company:

“My current client is very impressed by the work I do for it. I won a trial for that client in Florida. The situation was impossible . . . . The jury was against us . . . . .You had to pitch a perfect game . . . . The client loved me for the result. Now I do a ton of other work for that client. In fact, the client let me use the corporate plane to fly here today, and the corporate plane will take me to New York tomorrow to meet with the most important people at that client.”

We didn’t land the business.

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Why not?

“Your partner is certainly a great lawyer. He apparently does great work for a big company. But we were thinking: Where would we rate on that lawyer’s scale? Whose case will he concentrate on — ours, or the case that he’s doing for the client that’s so important to him? We just didn’t believe that a relatively small client like us will ever be on the radar screen for a person doing so much work for BigCo.”

Right.

If I’m a potential client, I want to feel like you’ll care about me.

Second, opposing counsel in a case had been sanctioned for serving burdensome discovery. Despite that, the lawyer’s firm was later asked to participate in a beauty contest to work for the company. And the firm chose to send over to make the pitch — the very guy who had been sanctioned!

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Big firms have many lawyers.

Those firms should spend at least a couple of seconds thinking about who a potential client will like and who a potential client will hate. The guy who served discovery so burdensome that the other side chose to seek sanctions — and then recovered them — is probably not the guy whose judgment the client will want to rely on in the future.

If the firm had sent over anyone but this person, the firm might have had a chance to win the business. But the firm chose to send over the only guy who was disqualified from the get-go.

Not smart.

Finally, consider what the other firms making pitches will do. The first firm sends over a team of three people, each with specialized skills. The firm has created a mock intranet, showing how the firm will interact with the client in real-time, sharing the firm’s work product, providing information about bills, and easing client communications. The presentation is impressive, revealing the time and effort that went into preparing the pitch.

The second firm sends over one guy with a pencil and a notepad: “We’ve done a couple of things like this in the past, and I’m pretty damn good, if I do say so myself.”

Look: If it’s a close call, clients will appreciate substance over form and might pick the firm that put less effort into its presentation.

But make sure it’s a close call.

You can’t let it be obvious that your competitor really cares about the new client and will put huge effort into landing the business, and you, in contrast, couldn’t care less.

Your lack of interest in the beauty contest doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll do bad work, but it could mean that other things are more important to you than this new client.

Winning new business is hard.

Don’t make silly mistakes and lose new business when opportunity knocks.

Earlier: Inside Straight: Business Development (Part 1)
Business Development: 5 Things That I Have Seen Work

Mark Herrmann spent 17 years as a partner at a leading international law firm and is now responsible for litigation and employment matters at a large international company. 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.

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