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Hi Joe,
Have you received your How To Market A Small Law Firm audio programyet? AFTER you've had a chance to listen to it, please send me ane-mail if you still have those IP-specific questions. Not sure I agreewith your 3 hour call back rule though.
Have you seen an ezine article I've written about the so-called "sundownrule" most lawyers try to live by? That is, they try & call theirclients back before the end of the day. In my experience that's amistake. Puts alot of pressure on the lawyer and fails to give theclient what they want most which is to bring some measure ofpredictability to what is for most a very scary and foreign experiencethat's way outside their comfort zone. Instead I'd suggest you try toget in the habit of scheduling telephone appointments with your clientsrather than bust your butt to try & call them back within 3 hoursif 3 hours isn't convenient for you, not enough time to find the answerso you can resolve their question in one call instead of two and 3hours may not even be convenient for them either. Better in myexperience to just schedule a call back appointment so everyone canrelax and maximize the efficiency of the phone time together.
The point of the pizza story is that our staff has as much to do withour success as the quality of our substantive work. In that real lifeexample, the lawyer's assistant lost her a good client who has alot ofbusiness to give because the assistant was doing what was mostconvenient for herself not what was most convenient (and mostrespectful) to the paying client who was standing there like a jerk nowrunning late because the freakin' pizza guy was more important to her than me.
Let's just balance out the priorities and look at this objectively. . .I'm paying you $3,000. I hire lawyers for this exact same kind of workon a pretty consistent basis. Between me and all the people I refer toreal estate attorneys I probably represent well over $50,000 of workper year. My own time is easily worth a few thousand a day and afterhaving been jerked around a few times while the staff of this attorneydemonstrated to me that they really don't give a crap about my timethey added a final straw onto the proverbial camel's back and made mestand there in my $1,000 suit with paying clients waiting for me tocall them back and myself waiting to pick up a settlement check forover $70,000 so that they wouldn't inconvenience the pizza guy for 5more minutes because he has to make a living too!?! It's not like theguy stumbled in off the street and was bleeding or dying of a heartattack. He was waiting for someone to make change for the cost of apizza he was being paid to deliver.
Rhetorical Question: How would you like it if it was YOUR phone callthat was being delayed and when I got on the phone I explained that thereason I'm 20 minutes late to call you back is because I had to giveyour time to make change for the pizza guy?
The purpose of writing the article was to make my clients aware of theneed to look at their practice from the client's perspective because atthe end of the day, they get to cast the final vote on your success.
Thanks for your participation in my coaching program. I look forward to continuing to learn of your success,
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