“The Trusted Advisor” by David Maister, Charles Green and Robert Galford.

Reviewed by Mark Jones, Managing Partner of Addleshaw Booth & Co.

One of my most frequently used David Maister quotes runs thus: “I like lawyers. Smart people. Intellectual challenge. Can’t manage their way out of a paper bag.” Oh how true. And all too often, lawyers are ‘smart’ in a very ‘narrow’ way: as technicians.

A few years ago, one of my partners and I were tutors at a training session involving twenty or so senior assistants. At the end of one session we moved to questions. The participants focused upon the meaning of ‘commercial’, as in ‘commercial advice’. “Well,” said my partner, “what the client doesn’t want is a sixteen page treatise on the law, drawn from every relevant textbook, concluding with: that’s the law, over to you.” “So what are you suggesting?” came the question. “A two page summary of the facts, the relevant law, the available options and their implications followed by a recommendation of the option you would adopt in the client’s shoes and an explanation of why you would adopt it,” said my partner. “But you can’t do that,” said they. “Why?” said my partner and I. “Because it’s cutting corners – it’s negligent,” came the response.

It’s only ‘negligent’ in those terms, of course, if, in giving the advice and making the recommendation, you don’t know which corners can be cut, which portions can be missed out of the recital of the law, and what is the most appropriate application of the law to the facts. And if you truly know and understand what your client wants, you can tailor your advice (or ‘cut corners’) accordingly. But when I said that, I was greeted with a frosty silence. Comfort, in the minds of the participants in that course, flowed from confidence in their technical ability. Their hostility reflected a lack of the confidence necessary to step outside the realm of the technical into the ‘real’ world of the client. And then, as a profession, we wonder why our clients view us as risk-averse, fence-sitting and un-businesslike in the way we deliver advice!

The objective of this book is to explore that need to go beyond mere technical mastery of one’s discipline (now widely recognised as ‘a given’ and ‘not enough’) and to master the crucial additional business skill of earning the trust and confidence of clients (increasingly acknowledged as the key to client satisfaction and loyalty).

So what do I think of it? I think it’s the best book on the subject of building client satisfaction and relationships that I’ve read in years. It’s going into our office libraries with a ‘read me’ recommendation from me.

First the physical. What do you get with this book? Two hundred and twenty four pages of text, including an Appendix but excluding notes and references. Charts, diagrams and tables are sprinkled through the book, but the core of the book – to my mind at least – is actually the Appendix: twenty pages of lists drawn together from throughout the book, setting out the authors’ tips and advice. The Appendix is a combination of aide-memoire having read the book and ‘revision primer’ for future reference as challenges arise in day-to-day client relationships. So simple, but so clever: as a device it should be used more often in practical teaching books.

Now the content. The authors divide the book into three parts. Part one deals with their perspectives on trust: what they mean by it, how one earns it, how to give advice and the importance of attitude. Part two covers the structure of trust building: engaging with the client, listening to the client and helping the client with their problems. Part three then addresses the issue of putting trust to work: in getting hired, in current assignments and in cross-selling. Finally, of course, there is the Appendix. All three parts of the book are liberally sprinkled with practical, actual examples from the experiences of the three authors. I find practical examples to be of great value, but maybe that’s just the way I am. For me they prevent any book of this nature from becoming dry and academic.

And dry and academic this book is certainly not. It is an easy and refreshing read. It is not heavy. Reading the book for the purpose of review brought back to my mind a conversation with a client now (sadly for me) retired, but on behalf of whom I had enormous fun over a period of ten years or more in the eighties and nineties. He bought companies with a good product, injected the necessary management resource or finance, developed them and then sold them. In advising him in the doing of that, I learned about everything from the electronics of high speed recording machines to the practicalities of barter trading with the then Eastern Bloc. “Mark,” he said to me once, “what makes me keep coming back to you is that, in giving your advice, you take a risk with me.” That wasn’t a cue for my partners to start losing sleep over the level of our professional indemnity cover. What the client meant was that I had taken the time to understand what his commercial goals were and to understand what the risks to which he was exposed were. What he valued was the fact that I delivered legal advice to him in a way designed to maximise his chances of avoiding those risks and of achieving his commercial goals. In the terminology of the authors of this book, in doing that I earned his trust.

The authors assert in their introduction that they have, in the course of their careers (encompassing some fifty years of experience amongst the three of them), made every mistake they describe in the book and broken every piece of advice it contains. They say that whatever wisdom the book contains has been learned the hard way and that – whilst their formal education served them well – nothing in it prepared them for the real world of trying to serve clients effectively. To become a good advisor, there are skills involved which are critical but which no-one ever teaches you.

Over the last twenty-three years I have made my fair share of mistakes. In my own way, I have also learned some of the lessons set out in this book. If I had had the book with me through that period there are some mistakes that I can still bring to mind, which I may well not have made. It would also have been a good deal easier to learn some of the lessons with such a clear ‘practice manual’ to hand!

Buy – and read – this book. It will be £16.99 well spent and a few hours well invested. l

Published by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd. Tel +44 (0)20 7316 1934