Paying Clients Come First. But Should They?

If I had a dime for every time a partner told me that they had to cancel their participation in an internal meeting at their law firm because of a client conflict, I … well, I would probably have enough money to buy us a budget bottle of wine. Yet, considering how often I have heard it, I estimate that the excuse is being pulled on average every 3 seconds - around the clock, around the world. It seems standard practice for many lawyers. But is it the right practice?

Let’s do the math:

Picture a firm of 100 partners, each devoting - on average - 15 hours monthly to important firm matters.

Now, you may ask: what are important firm matters? Basically they should be any matters that partners are involved in. If they are not important, why have partners involved? So, basically business-critical activities such as collaborative business development, talent development, innovation, managing the firm, practice, people as well as partnership strategy, governance and policy matters.

Obviously some partners devote more than 15 hours per month to these tasks and some devote less. But this is a conservative average for what I just listed. So, that’s 1,500 hours per month or 18,000 hours per year. You can multiply that with your desired average partner charge-out rate to make the number meatier. If you use $500/hour, that’s $9 million.

I very much doubt that such a firm has any clients that pay the firm $9 million a year. Yes, I know, you will prove me right by pointing out the very exceptions. Still bear with me as it does not matter whether there are no clients of that caliber or just one or two.

So, if a firm had a $9-million client-gorilla and that client had set up a meeting with a partner, would that partner cancel (or better still: just not bother to show up for) the meeting because another client, who drops a fraction of that money on the firm, requested the same meeting slot?

Hardly.

Yet, partners act so again and again. In firm after firm.

You are of course right to point out that the firm is not like a client. But it should be. If we brought rigor to how we spend time on internal matters, we would not be so inefficient, unprofessional and ultimately ineffective. A firm deserves the best of the partners’ time and attention, creativity and discipline. Instead partners too often bring their least to such “internal” efforts.

At the most successful professional services firms, the firm comes before the clients because it’s right and also good for clients. Like bitter tasting medicine, that’s very hard for many partners to swallow. Of course, this also means that these internal matters are handled - prepared, conducted and followed-up - in a professional manner. But that’s a topic for another day.

Cancelling an important, internal meeting because of a “paying client” tells you something about that partner’s attitude towards their firm. Even worse, the partner doesn’t behave like this alone. “People like us do things like that” is what defines culture. And a culture that puts “paying clients” before the firm stands in the very way of building a great firm.