Your Clients Are Not Who You Think They Are
When I left the big firm to co-found an accountancy practice with another partner, I walked in with a full set of habits built for corporate clients. Long, careful emails. Considered written advice. A working assumption that the person on the other side could read between the lines and would take responsibility for asking the right follow up questions.
Our clients at the accountancy practice were extremely small business owners. The playbook did not translate. It took me years to fully articulate why, and that lesson now sits at the heart of how I think about running a law firm.
The dimension that actually matters
Most lawyers think their target market is defined by practice area. It is not. The deeper dimension is client behaviour. Some clients behave like consumers. Some behave like businesses. Practice area is a proxy for that behaviour, not the variable itself.
If you run a mid-cap M&A practice, a cross-border transactions practice, or a workplace investigations practice, your clients are mostly behaving like businesses. If you specialise in relationship property, wills and estates, or first home buyers, your clients are mostly behaving like consumers. The expectations, the pain points, and the way they assess you are all different.
How consumers judge a lawyer
Consumer clients cannot assess whether you are technically good. They do not understand the law and do not have a reliable way to gauge legal quality. So they judge you on three things.
Your customer service.
The clarity of your communication and your ability to explain ideas in a way they can actually understand.
Their gut instinct on whether you are trustworthy and have their back.
How businesses judge a lawyer
Business clients are more sophisticated. They have usually worked with lawyers before. They are often professionals themselves. Their assessment is not perfect, but it is informed. They judge you on:
Your understanding of their commercial context.
Your ability to tailor legal solutions to that specific context.
Your technical competence.
Your ability to communicate technical ideas at their level without dumbing things down.
Your ability to articulate risk in a way they can actually absorb and act on, so they understand it at a fundamental level and can make informed commercial decisions about it.
Same firm, two completely different operating models
Because the two client types judge you on different things, your operating model has to be built differently. Two concrete dimensions show why.
Communication
For consumer clients, the phone beats email almost every time. In my early years I used to send long, well-structured emails that I thought explained things beautifully. Clients could not absorb them. Even when I numbered five clear questions, they would come back having answered four and missed one. They are not meticulous like that, and they should not have to be.
A phone call lets you gauge tone, feeling, and where the client is mentally. It also solves a deeper problem. Consumers do not know what they do not know, so they often ask the wrong questions. Your job on the call is to elicit the underlying rationale, work out what the right question actually is, and guide them to ask it so you can give them an answer that is genuinely useful.
For business clients, the inversion holds. Communication needs to be comprehensive and written. Disclose the pros, the cons, and the risks on paper. They need something to fall back on, something to show their superiors, and something that covers them internally. The writing should be meticulous, concise, and anchored to their commercial needs.
Pricing
For consumer clients, pricing needs to be transparent and up front. Scope it. The typical case looks like this, the fee for that scope is X. If the matter goes left or right, the fee will change and we will communicate that with you before it does. The posture is closer to active project management than billable hours.
For business clients, hourly billing is the norm and they are comfortable with it. Deliver the commercial outcome they need, stay within market rates, and they will pay. The trust mechanism is fundamentally different.
These are just two dimensions. The same logic flows through intake, document design, team structure, marketing channels, and the skills you hire and develop in your people.
A word on mixed models
If you serve both consumers and businesses, it is draining. Everything is different between the two. Communication, pricing, scoping, expectations. Juggling both is operationally and mentally expensive. Pick one and commit. The more profitable side is usually the business side.
Worth sitting with
Which side of the line your firm actually sits on? Is your operating model built for that side, or just inherited from where you used to work? It is worth a ponder.
More next Tuesday,
Gordon