Finance - How Can You Stop Worrying About Collections?

How can you stop worrying about collections? Build more consumer-focused client service into your practice and build trust and respect into every phase of the attorney-client relationship. Trust and respect are the hallmarks of positive and financially rewarding service relationships.

Traditionally, we thought we would create a relationship of trust and respect simply by being a good lawyer, as we defined good. If we considered the matter at all, we believed that we could enhance our credibility with an office near the courthouse, particularly a "lawyerly" office with the visual cues associated with the law, such as marble, wood and symbols of justice, and with Latin phrases and legalese-phrases that clients aren't meant to understand but sound impressive.

We also believed that if we provided high quality legal services, as we defined quality, we would build respect. We thought that winning, getting the deal closed, getting the document drafted was enough to cement the relationship.

We are now in a new era of legal consumerism and we need to embrace new ways of building trust and respect. We are part of the service sector in the new economy. It's no longer enough to be a skilled lawyer and have an impressive office. Clients now view a high level of legal skills-what we deliver-as the starting point, and they look at how we deliver our legal services as the primary basis for deciding how they value their relationship with us. We need to figure out how to build relationships on the clients' terms without sacrificing our professionalism, which means addressing problems like tardiness in the production of work, unclear drafting, insensitivity to the non-legal dimension of legal issues and failure to keep clients fully informed (timely returned phone calls, etc.).

How can you stop worrying about collections? Build more consumer-focused client service into your practice and build trust and respect into every phase of the attorney-client relationship. Trust and respect are the hallmarks of positive and financially rewarding service relationships.

Traditionally, we thought we would create a relationship of trust and respect simply by being a good lawyer, as we defined good. If we considered the matter at all, we believed that we could enhance our credibility with an office near the courthouse, particularly a "lawyerly" office with the visual cues associated with the law, such as marble, wood and symbols of justice, and with Latin phrases and legalese-phrases that clients aren't meant to understand but sound impressive.

We also believed that if we provided high quality legal services, as we defined quality, we would build respect. We thought that winning, getting the deal closed, getting the document drafted was enough to cement the relationship.

We are now in a new era of legal consumerism and we need to embrace new ways of building trust and