I was conducting a workshop at a law firm on how to build good client relationships. I do this workshop for the firm every year as part of their New Lawyer Training program. This is one of the larger firms in the area, and they hire about sixty new attorneys every year. The workshop content is pretty much the same from year to year, but this year, a few days before the workshop, Barry, the director of training and development, called and said, “We need you to dumb things down this year.” This is not a request I get very often, so I was all ears. When I asked what the issue was, he said, “You normally teach more advanced communication skills, but the new lawyers coming out of law schools don’t have the basic skills needed to interact in a professional environment. You see, Stevie, law firms don’t really compete with each other based on our knowledge of the law. You either know the law, or you don’t. You either win cases, or you don’t. We really compete based on how our clients feel about us. If clients feel good about the firm, we keep the client. Our firm isn’t located in one of the big three markets, but we routinely steal clients away from New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. This isn’t easy to do because some clients have the impression that any firm outside those areas is, at the least, unsophisticated, and at the most, incompetent.”

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