There are at least two obvious strategies for growth: go wide or go deep. Go wide implies covering as much territory as you can, while go deep suggests mining your current location to extract as much goodness as possible. For many businesses, including law firms, go wide is their first impulse. Doing the hard work of attracting new clients can feel more manageable than doing what feels like the infinitely harder work of truly engaging with an existing client to deepen that relationship in meaningful (and profitable) ways.
I wrote about this phenomenon recently in a post entitled That New Customer Smell. That post led to several delightful and rich conversations with Susan Hackett. For those of you who haven’t yet had the pleasure of meeting Susan, let me introduce you. Susan was for 22 years Senior Vice President and General Counsel of the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC). Among her many accomplishments at ACC was the creation and adoption of the ACC Value Challenge (highlighting the need to link value to the cost of legal services). Susan is now CEO and Chief Legal Officer of Legal Executive Leadership, a management consulting firm that helps clients “find smarter ways to work,” build stronger legal teams and “promote thought leadership and collaboration in their work and workplaces.”
In her many years of close work with corporate counsel around the country Susan has learned a great deal about what law department executives expect from their external counsel. It was that perspective she brought to our initial conversations and agreed to share via this blog in a series we’re calling Focus on Clients. Over the next few days we’ll be posting on this blog highlights from our conversations, which examined how critical it is for external lawyers and their clients to engage in meaningful conversations with each other. Because, as with our personal lives, relationships deepen and grow through shared experience and conversations that matter.
Next in this Focus on Clients series: Making Rain by Making Conversation
[Photo Credit: Velvet Android]
Above and Beyond KM 