The Tricks Biglaw Firms Use When Selling Lobbying Services

In-house counsel are looking for lawyers who will shoot them straight, tell them when we they're being unreasonable, and deliver them tangible wins.

Your pitches make in-house counsel want to close their heads inside their laptops.

It is the time of the year when state legislatures across the country generally shake off the slumber of winter and reconvene for the year.

Which means for a many a Biglaw Government Relations team, even though the holidays may be in the rearview mirror, their Christmas is just beginning.

Being the sizable health care provider that we are, we regularly engage the services of Biglaw for their lobbying work. Generally, we work with firms with both a Washington D.C. and a local office, since most everything that we do is stringently governed by some sort of federal and/or state law or regulation.

Unsurprisingly, firms with both federal and state lobbying practices under one roof tend to be expensive — very expensive. This has caused us to annually shop around our engagement to ensure we are getting the best value for our account.

I have been in many traditional Biglaw pitch sessions and generally the winner is easy to pick for a particular engagement. Which firm has the most experienced lawyers on the subject matter in question? What is their pedigree? How much do they cost? How successful have they been for similarly positioned clients in the past? And best of all, their track record of litigation success is public record so you can quickly verify they are not overstating their success rate.

A quick evaluation of all of these factors helps the proverbial cream rise to the top rather quickly. Finding the right firm to service your government relations needs, however, is an entirely different beast.

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An all Harvard law pedigreed team will matter little if one of them has a bad reputation with a random state senator or representative. Similarly, since we are a Midwestern state, we have a large rural population which is represented by, shall we say, rural legislators. And our experience has shown those particular rural legislators do not take kindly to them “big-city” lawyers telling them how to represent their constituents.

With the traditional calculus for selecting a Biglaw firm out the window, the annual pitches we receive tend to take on the feeling of a used car and a snake oil salesman all rolled into one.

We have had pitches where the firm promises they can pass any piece of legislation we could conjure up. Right, because in today’s day and age where we are facing a federal government shutdown this Friday (even though the House, Senate, and White House are controlled by the same party), your firm miraculously can shepherd through a piece of legislation which only benefits us as a single client.

We have had firms who guarantee us access to any elected official at any point in time from the governor on down. Sure, I am sure some of those elected officials who are scheduled months in advance down to the minute will gladly cancel for us, one of a hundred health care providers in the state.

And my personal favorite, those who claim to have some “dirt” on a politician which they know they can exchange for a favor for us as their client. Yes, please tell me more about the morally/legally dubious way in which you plan to advance our cause with elected officials.

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At the end of the day, our hospital is still looking for a Biglaw partner who will serve as our partner for a venture beyond the resources of our sparsely populated in-house office. Shoot us straight, tell us when we are being unreasonable, and deliver us tangible wins.

Promise the moon which I know you can’t deliver, and you can bet you will be lumped in with all the other car/snake oil salesmen I have sadly grown accustomed to.


Stephen R. Williams is in-house counsel with a multi-facility hospital network in the Midwest. His column focuses on a little talked about area of the in-house life, management. You can reach Stephen at stephenwilliamsjd@gmail.com.