Think Like The Client

Legal acumen, experience, and expertise are necessary, but not the only criteria for providing corporate clients with the practical, creative, and cost-efficient support they demand. In this competitive, global, and technologically integrated corporate environment, successful business leaders must be risk-takers who act quickly and decisively.  As their attorney, we of course cannot be cavalier, rash, or reckless with our opinions, but in order for our advice to be heard and considered, we must acknowledge and incorporate their methods of thinking about business decisions into our own legal counseling techniques.  To be a successful and trusted corporate counselor, therefore, we ourselves must be responsive, decisive, and succinct. 

Responsive:

In order to best serve their in-house clients' needs, outside corporate counsel must think and act decisively; in other words, like the business executive who is, after all, the in-house lawyer's client.  This is often quite a challenge for attorneys who, first as law students and then as law firm associates, learn to think expansively thorough comprehensive and documented research and analysis. But in commercial and corporate work, the presentation of the universe of options, with little regard for real world probability, is often not worth the effort, time, or cost.  Moreover, it requires in-house counsel to then take additional time extricating the most relevant elements and restructuring the presentation in a more digestible format for their internal business clients.

Decisive:

CEOs and other key executives are trained in business school or on the job to make quick decisions, based more on instinct than research.  Business theory teaches the 80/20 rule:  20% of the work yields 80% of the results and, correspondingly, executives follow the U.S. Marine rule on decision making:  when 80% confident of a decision, it is time to act.  Logically, it follows that once you have done 20% of the work, and thus have 80% of the result, that should, more times than not, be sufficient -- a fact outside counsel must recognize in order to be useful to the client's lawyers and business leaders.

Succinct:

Outside counsel must accept that although the "Why" is intellectually interesting, in-house counsel are usually just after the "What" and the "How."  Business executives generally want to receive the least amount of information necessary to make an informed decision -- the "What" and instructions boiled down to their simplest core on how to effectuate that decision -- the "How."  Lawyerly caveats such as "on the one hand...but on the other hand..." fail to provide the clarity decision-makers seek to guide them in setting a course of action.  Similarly, lawyers are trained to present the culmination of their exhaustive research in the form of detailed and well-researched memorandums.  This form of presentation, along with corresponding footnotes, while important for certain areas of the law, such as litigation, is of less utility when answering business-generated legal questions.  The underlying rational can be provided later, upon request, if only for the files.  Outside counsel can better meet the in-house lawyer's needs by responding in a format with which the in-house attorney's business counterparts are most familiar:  PowerPoint, bullet points, short e-mails (rarely more than a page), and rarely, if ever, by fax.  (Unlike law firms, company legal departments generally lack the personnel resources necessary to process paper quickly.)  Most executives have little interest in reading lengthy briefs or memos and in-house legal departments are too lean and time-pressured to spend their time reading and summarizing them.

Lessons Learned:

So what are the lessons I have learned in practicing law and seek to apply at Virtual?  Be Responsive, Decisive, and Succinct.  Be Virtual.