What Clients Really Want
You got into the legal field because you wanted to help. You imagined challenging, satisfying work and a salary you could thrive on. You love your clients but…
They don’t turn in their homework on time. You're so busy with phone calls that you don't have time to focus on your matters. You feel frustrated and burned out.
Is this you? If so, I want you to know that a major factor in this (super common) situation is how you’ve learned to manage your legal clients.
And that’s something you can change.
To manage your clients effectively, you need to understand what they want from you.
Clients want legal solutions… but not just legal solutions
The framework I’m sharing here was developed by John Grant, an attorney and legal ops consultant. He identifies five core needs common to every client.
Mitigating a risk. Every client is facing a risk. For family law clients, it might be the risk of losing custody of their children. For estate planning, it might be the risk of leaving their family without support.
Navigating complexity. Every client wants help working through some kind of legal procedure, like a mediation, a lawsuit, or a transaction. (Or they want to know that help would be available if they decided to pursue a legal procedure.)
Getting informed. Every client wants to understand what their legal options are. The degree of knowledge they want varies, but every client wants to know, or at least confirm their understanding of, their legal options.
Getting advice. Every client wants an informed opinion about what they should do next. They might not like your answer! But they want your advice.
Feeling a sense of consortium. Every client wants to feel, “Someone is with me in this. I’m not alone. Someone understands what I’m experiencing and is in my corner.”
Law school is optimized for the first four needs. We learn to analyze fact patterns, find the applicable law, and apply it. If we do clinical programs, we might also practice advising clients about their options.
But law school teaches us nothing about the fifth one. And when clients don’t get that sense of consortium, they won’t be satisfied with your services. You can do a perfect assessment of their legal problem and give the best possible advice, and still get a cranky Google review. Or endless phone calls. Or no cooperation. Or a bar complaint.
And that actually does make sense! Clients’ emotional experience of working with you is the only real yardstick they have, because most don’t have the technical expertise to assess the quality of your legal services. But they absolutely know how you made them feel.
So what creates a sense of consortium? Primarily, communication.
Since most clients have to rely on their emotional experience to judge the quality of your legal services, you can’t assume they will see your technical excellence. You need to attend directly to their emotional experience with thoughtful, intentional communication.
(By the way, communication is the most common issue clients cite when filing bar complaints—close to 10%.)
You are communicating so much more to your clients than you probably realize. Law school doesn’t train us to see the full scope of how communication plays out with our clients. It mostly teaches us to communicate with lawyers. Client communication usually only comes up in ethics class.
As a result, we learn to see client communication is a technical process that we use to comply with ethical rules and avoid the risk of malpractice suits. Think: disclosing settlement offers, sending non-engagement letters to prospective clients, and notifying clients of upcoming hearings.
But client communication is much, much broader than that. It’s happening all the time. It’s all the things you say, write, and do—and all the things you don’t say, write, or do.
Putting toys in your waiting room can say, “I understand that you work long hours and childcare is expensive. You are welcome here.”
The phone call you didn’t return can say, “I know you’re worried, and I don’t care.”
Silence, followed by the bill, can say, “I only care about getting your money.”
You probably don’t intend to say the last two! Not every client will interpret it that way, but some will. That’s why we look at communication holistically; the things you don’t say can destroy the sense of consortium just as effectively as the things you do say.
Communication isn’t just what you say (or don’t say). It’s what the client hears.
There’s a lot of CYA communication in the legal profession. On some level, you’re always thinking ahead to the bar complaint you hope doesn’t happen, and that makes sense.
But you don’t just want to paper the trail. You want to avoid the bar complaint completely. And you can’t do that with CYA communication alone, because you C your A by saying the right thing. And that’s not enough.
To build sustainable, peaceful practices, we have to investigate how our words and actions are actually landing with clients.
Communications Practice Tip
Try this: Think back to a recent situation where you felt frustrated with a client. This works best if it’s a situation that happens a lot in your practice.
With that situation in mind, think about how the situation might have gone from the client’s point of view. Then make guesses about 5 things the client might have understood from what you communicated (even if it’s not what you meant). Consider your words, and also tone, body language, timing, context, and so on.
Now do an experiment. Write down one thing you could change in your communication the next time you’re in that situation. Choose something that feels easy. Make the change the next time you’re in that situation and see what happens. Write about what you learned, and plan your next experiment.
Why it works: When we practice noticing all the messages a client might be receiving, we create opportunities to get more intentional in our communication. We can make guesses about what our clients are experiencing, and craft small experiments to test our ideas.