What Your Clients Are Saying About You
If You Aren’t Listening To What People Are Saying About Lawyers, You’re Missing Out On The Opportunity To Overcome The Stereotypes.
I love all things business ownership and will forever consider myself a student, always looking to discover more tid bits of wisdom along the way. I recently joined a small business round where I live and attended my first meeting. We were discussing things like new minimum wage increases and how to overcome those, client retention, and social media presence. Somewhere between minimum wage and client retention a comment was made that reminded me of why I choose to work with lawyers. A fellow business owner stated, “lawyers will charge you $400 to wipe your own a**”!
Let’s just face a truth…
No one really enjoys working with lawyers, let’s be honest. 9.99 times out of 10 people fear even sitting in a lawyer’s office because they feel like they’re going to pay for the air they breathe!
Here’s a great study that was done that outlines common complaints about lawyers.
Here’s why they feel that way though
They do not see the value in working with a lawyer. To them you are just a bill, something they don’t have the education an know how to do themselves, so they are forced to pay for your services.
Here’s how you can change that:
There is this thing out there called perceived value. This refers to the value a consumer perceives from a service or product they pay for. If they don’t see something as valuable, them spending money on it is going to be a negative experience for them. On the flip side if they do see the value in something, they won’t mind paying for that product or service.
3 things you can do to increase perceived value in your legal practice
Let them know you’re human too
People feel out of place when they deal with lawyers. Lawyers are smart and their vocabularies reflect years of schooling and legal jargon that your clients just don’t understand. This makes them feel like you view them as inferior. That’s not the feeling you want to leave your clients with.
Tone it back and choose verbiage that they can understand. Be friendly in the office and their legal “Pitbull” in the courtroom. Your clients will feel more comfortable and you will become more approachable to them.
Under promise, over deliver
When you oversell yourself and your firm you can set the bar super high right off the bat. Then, if you don’t deliver, you leave your client so disappointed that they have nothing but horrible things to say to everyone about you and your firm. If you take the alternative approach, you unexpectedly delight your clients, which, I can promise you they will not see coming AT ALL. This makes them feel taken care of and cared for as a client. Then, they’ll be more likely to tell people about how you did all of these “extra” things for them. These can be small things like an extra 20-minute strategy call before a court date, a small gift at the beginning and/or end of services, or a thank you card in the mail once they commit to having you represent them.
For the love of law, keep them in the loop!
The #1 thing clients say they would have liked to see in the legal services they obtained is more communication as to the progression of their legal matters. Here’s what’s happening folks, you are taking on clients and not giving them a timeline of their services. Even if this can vary, an estimated timeline is better than nothing. Clients go weeks without hearing from their lawyers and it’s ticking them off. Install a process in your legal practice TODAY that provides reasonably timed (weekly or biweekly) updates to all your clients on the progression of their legal matters. It should be your goal to call the client with an update before they even have enough time to get frustrated and call YOU to find out what the heck is going on.
If you’re ready to level up in your firm, Contact us to see if we’re a good fit.
