Launching successful client teams: seven ways you can help

Many law firms are establishing client teams as a way to help partners uncover opportunities, cross-sell, establish multi-level relationships, and deliver the additional value that is important to large clients. When they work well, client teams strengthen the firm’s performance and the client’s loyalty. But when they fail, which happens often, client teams create tension, bureaucracy and disappointing results. David W. Woods, president of Creating Key Clients, LLC, examines why some client teams thrive and others flounder, considering some of the ways firm leadership can help launch and sustain teams that succeed.

1. Focus on the few clients that really need teams
Generally, law firms establish too many client teams. Casting too large a net, such as the firm’s 50 largest clients, they create teams for some clients who don’t need a team, don’t value the effort and won’t reciprocate.

When is an on-going client team needed? First, when you’ve decided the client is strategically important - it provides a flow of work and other benefits to the firm like valuable contacts, referrals, firm development, and credibility. Second, when that flow of work is driving client demand for fee discounts, customization, knowledge tools, and other value-adds the firm can’t deliver unless partners focus on those needs and coordinate a response. Third, when the client is changing in some way that makes it apparent the firm needs a more collaborative, strategic and purposeful approach to building the relationship; for example, when the client is changing its strategies, its people, or how it purchases and buys legal services. Concentrate on the few of your clients that meet this three-point test.

2. Support the teamwork already happening in your firm
Don’t suffocate the successful, informal teamwork your partners engage in now by implementing a client team initiative that’s too structured and complex. Instead, uncover your firm’s invisible teams by finding out how your partners network, share information, socialize with the client, and market together. Don’t fight against these established practices, build on them; make it even easier for partners to find and connect with each other over client issues. You could host more get-togethers among practices, distribute reports and ideas more widely, have more open-door meetings, organize partner retreats around clients, arrange reverse seminars, and get the client’s press releases distributed on a client intranet.

3. Get the client’s input at the right time
Many firms start building teams by interviewing and surveying clients, wanting their input to guide the effort and their influence to drive it. That would be an appropriate early step to take with a client who’s expressed a desire for a team and a willingness to support it. However, some of your most valuable clients are tough, competitive, buyers; they want to negotiate with you, not partner with you. For those clients, step one isn’t to uncover their needs - you’re probably painfully aware of them already - but to improve your negotiating leverage so you can afford to keep them happy.

First, get up-to-speed on how the client buys and who’s involved. How close are your relationships with the key buyers? Are they under pressure to deal with you at arm’s length? Are the client’s lawyers and the business people on the same page or are their expectations of the firm different, even conflicting?

Next, determine what you are already investing in the relationship. What referrals and discounts have you given the client? What unbilled time, technology investments, and other valuable contributions do you already routinely invest in the relationship? Before seeking the client’s input, ask yourself these and similar questions in order to determine what additional investment you’re willing to make and how willing and able the client is to reciprocate.

4. Resist the temptation to use client teams as a public relations initiative
By announcing your team-building initiative prematurely, you risk raising your clients’ expectations to unrealistic levels. When just getting underway with client teams, you don’t need scrutiny and pressure; you need time to experiment, to evaluate the costs and benefits, and to give partners opportunities to get comfortable with new approaches and roles. When your teams are up and running, you’ll be ready to showcase your successes, but then, your clients will be doing most of the boasting for you.

5. Measure results in a balanced way
It’s important that teams show tangible results. If the partners who’ve contributed can’t point with pride to new work and other accomplishments, they’ll lose any sense of purpose and urgency. However, especially when your client teams are just taking root, don’t be too demanding of hard numbers. Measure activity as well as outcomes, and don’t insist on detailed plans or activity reports.

Soft measures like asking partners, “How has the team helped you?” will stress your tolerance for ambiguity, but if you push only for results that can be quantified, you’ll push the team into short-term, project work. A client team is a long term commitment. Keeping them focused and motivated requires both short-term, tangible achievements, but also valuable but harder-to-measure successes such as cultivating relationships, staying informed about the client’s strategies, contributing to knowledge bases, and generating new ideas.

6. Address the difficult issues about team leadership
Some firms with successful client teams believe that one partner or a core group has to have authority to settle problems, negotiate fees and make other commitments on behalf of the team. They feel clients want someone who has the power to get the team focused and underway. Other firms with equally successful teams believe giving responsible partners too much authority is a mistake. They feel partners would resist the perceived threat to their personal relationships and autonomy.

You’ll need to consider a wide range of factors about the client, the firm and the circumstances to decide where on the spectrum you want to land, but it’s a decision that can’t be avoided. Similarly, you’ll need to address the issues of how much time is too little or too much for responsible partners to spend, what legal work they need to do to retain their stature with the client and credibility with partners, and to what extent their compensation will reflect their contribution.

What all successful teams share in common is a conviction that, at the other end of the spectrum, responsible partners can’t be effective if they’re burdened with administrative work. It is not their role to make the collections other partners haven’t followed-up, handle the audit letters and other paperwork no one else wants to deal with, or fix the technology glitches no one else understands.

7. Avoid being the problem-solver
In a working group, lawyers know who does what. They know what information to communicate to whom and how.
In a client team, these operational issues have to be determined upfront. If they glossed over, you as a firm leader will be inundated with conflicts to mediate, confusion to settle and priorities to establish.

Insist that the client team settle its operational issues. Here, too, you don’t want great detail - teams evolve, issues surface, and you’ll never get underway if you insist that your teams identify every eventuality they might encounter. However, you do need to know that the fundamentals have been addressed. What decisions can partners make without informing the team? What information must be shared? How will feedback from the client be obtained? How will any complaints and kudos be handled? How will the contact database be maintained and used? How often will the team meet? How will members stay in touch between meetings? What is the process for resolving disagreements, including escalating them to firm management?

This will all be worth it!
It takes a tremendous commitment by a law firm to maintain its preferred status with a key client. Usually, one or a few partners take the initiative. While building their own practices, they work hard to maintain important personal relationships, anticipate the client’s expectations, monitor the competition and involve other partners to achieve the full potential of the relationship.

A client team can be a tremendous help. Key clients are so immense and diversified, competition so intense, change so sudden, and executive turnover so rampant, that to manage your most valuable client relations on a ad hoc basis is simply a risk not worth taking. Firms whose leaders know how to launch and sustain productive client teams will have a great competitive advantage.

David W. Woods is founder and president of Creating Key Clients, LLC, a consulting and training firm that helps professional service firms harness the power of teamwork to forge more profitable client relationships. He can be reached at dwoods@creatingkeyclients.com.