What's Your Anchor

For most practice areas, legal work runs on transactions. That business sale. That commercial lease. That dispute. That joint venture. That issue that has just landed on someone's desk. It is a series of one offs with no particular rhythm to them, nothing in the calendar that says the next one is due in March.

So it always feels like you are trying to win work.

What holds it together is the relationship with the client. You do good work, they remember you, they come back. That relationship is the anchor under the whole thing, and it is what I want to write about today.

The anchor is running on memory

Here is what I have been chewing on. Most firms have a system for almost everything that matters. Onboarding, file management, precedents, billing, conflict checks. The relationship with the client is the one thing carrying real weight that has nothing underneath it at all.

It runs on remembering. You mean to call Peter. You have meant to call Peter since March. Nothing has gone wrong, you have simply been busy and Peter has not come to mind. Then Peter has a problem and rings the firm that ran a seminar he went to in May.

Memory fails in a particular way here. It is reactive, so the clients who get thought about are the ones who make contact, which means the quiet ones get the least attention and the quiet ones are often the better clients. It goes first when you are busy, and you are busiest exactly when the pipeline needs feeding. And it cannot be handed to anybody, because "keep in touch with our good clients" is not an instruction a person can act on.

An anchor that depends on you having a spare thought is not much of an anchor.

What a system for it looks like

I do not think this needs to be elaborate. Four parts to this:

One. Work out what their recurring need actually is.

Every client's business generates the same kind of legal exposure over and over. A construction client has subcontractors and payment claims. An employer has people problems that turn into process problems. A property investor has leases and structures. A founder has shareholders and eventually an exit.

You already know what it is for each of your good clients, and you know because they have been asking you about it for years. The quick question on the phone. The contract someone wanted a glance at. The thing they raised at the end of a meeting about something else. Those questions are the recurring need showing itself, and most of us treat them as interruptions rather than as information.

That need is the subject of the relationship.

Two. Set a cadence, and set it in advance.

Quarterly for the good ones. Twice a year for the rest. Monthly for the handful where it is warranted. The number matters less than it being a number.

Put it in the calendar with the client's name against it, as a recurring task, so it happens whether anyone feels like it or not. What you are removing is the decision, because the decision is what fails when March turns into September.

Setting the cadence also forces a call you have probably never made deliberately, which is who gets the most attention. At the moment that is decided by who rings you. Doing it on purpose takes about 10min and it is the highest value time in the whole exercise.

Three. Decide the subject before you need it.

This is the part that makes the rest possible. A development in their area is a real reason to make contact. A change in the employment legislation, a decision that shifts how a clause gets read, a new disclosure requirement, an amendment that affects the structure you set up for them three years ago. You are not checking in. You are telling them something they need to know.

The economics of this are good. One development, relevant to fifteen employer clients, is fifteen contacts off one piece of work.

The thing that separates it from a newsletter is that it goes individually, with one line at the top saying why it matters to them in particular. Peter does not want a bulletin. Peter wants to know that this affects the contracts you drafted for him.

Four. Make it easy for them to say something back.

Most of these end with some version of let me know if you have any questions. Which asks the client to work out whether they have a problem, formulate it, and then admit it to you. Most people will not do that, so they read it, think that is useful, and reply to nothing.

Something answerable works better. "Do you still have the fixed term contracts we drafted in 2023. Those are the ones this affects." That is a yes or no, it takes four words to reply to, and the reply is a conversation starting.

The conversation is the whole point. Not the sending.

Who actually does this

Once the subject and the cadence are decided, most of it is not your work.

Somebody else can watch for the developments, draft the note, pull the list of which clients it applies to, and put it in front of you. What you add is the one line about why it matters to that particular client, and that takes a minute or two each.

Where I have landed

The relationship is the anchor. What sits underneath it in most firms is memory.

Put a process there instead and it stops depending on whether someone came to mind in a given quarter. Four contacts a year, on the subject their business keeps generating, each one easy to reply to. None of it is clever and none of it takes much of your week.

What it does is make sure that when something comes up, you were in front of them six weeks ago talking about exactly that. So the call comes to you.

If you want to think it through out loud, grab fifteen minutes with me on Zoom. Click here to book a 15min chat.

More next Tuesday,
Gordon