Legal profession

Finding opportunities in the threats of a crisis

Dr David Cliff discusses how legal professionals can connect with clients and learn from the current crisis to find opportunities despite the threats.

About the author: Dr David Cli› is founder of Gedanken, a leading-edge executive and business coaching organisation.

These days of Coronavirus have resulted in us having to re-evaluate the way we work. Huge sections of the population on lockdown, in self-isolation and the general inhibition of commerce and trade make for a fierce mix for all businesses, not least the legal profession.

Certain aspects of the profession's work may soar. Probate, for example, may be one of the grisly windfalls that comes and, indeed, the acceleration of wills as people are confronted existentially with the realities of life that they often do not countenance. Equally, there will be a trail of destruction, with business windups and disputes alongside some interesting cases relating to the provision of medical services, especially where triage capacities have to be used in a pandemic context.

Maintaining contact with clients

All of these things, however, are in the future. The reality for many law firms - in common with other small businesses - is that business dries up as clients find themselves in a situation of having the magnificent preoccupation of what has been described as a once-in-a-century event and access to legal services, already typically a necessary evil for most, does not (unless it must) occupy the forefront of the public’s mind.

Working models of how to address legal services at these difficult times are not always apparent to clients, and so reaching out is important. Lawyers maintaining contact with extant clients and extending context-specific offers of help are not at odds with guidance on how they may promote their services. Most lawyers can often cement the relational space with their clients by offering to very much ‘be there’ at a time of crisis, even if there is no immediate need, as such, for a service.

Maintaining contact with clients, therefore, is good sense in terms of good customer services and effective marketing in these times. There is also a humanitarian element to this that is not lost upon the client.

Equally, although marketing rules for lawyers are more qualified towards those who have yet to be retained as a client, opportunities to offer greater availability at times like this can afford a rare opportunity for clients to consider their position in relation to the support they may need.

In fact, Crisis Intervention Theory comes into play here. This is where people's openness to behavioural flexibility increases at a time of crisis as their current coping mechanisms, frames of reference towards their current situation and resources, are not necessarily fit for the times in which they find themselves.

At this point, an anodyne e-mail or passive reaching out is not so much an ‘invitation to treat’, as a piece of information overload. Reaching out to people at times of crisis has a simple function. At the primal level, it extends individuals' perception of increased survival chances, which have been imbued within all of us as part of our evolution. At an existential level, it offers opportunities to reassert personal control and is an expression of their personal will to power at the time of perceived powerlessness. Finally, at a time of confusion and, in some cases, elements of social breakdown, reaching out enhances the individual's overall social functioning in an organised technico-legal society by celebrating it and, in some very symbolic way perhaps, exercises their individual rights.

Opportunities to better serve clients

Rather than seeing threats such as these as a potential downturn in business, every business can seek opportunities to better serve their clients at this time. Good services should be focused on helping clients through different periods of their lives juxtaposed against the current economic and social conditions. Simply worrying about where the business is coming from can, often, get in the way of effectively responding to clients' unique needs in the here and now.

Crisis needs to bring about behavioural flexibility changes in how services are delivered. Of course, many businesses are switching to Skype, Zoom and other electronic forms of communication with clients as a concomitant part of continuing to trade during a period of enforced isolation. But these means have been around for some time, hiding in plain sight to some as an excellent means to cement a real connection with the client and an opportunity for an audio-visual immediacy that transcends the letter, e-mail or phone call. Equally, such electronic media needs to be considered carefully amongst those ‘press the flesh’ traditionalists. The face-to-face encounter may be the gold standard for quality relationships with one’s client and securing a longitudinal relationship with them, but actually we make a whole load of preferential assumptions around this.

Often immediacy of access, sound and vision, without the kinaesthetic aspect of the face-to-face encounter in physical proximity, simplifies ease of access. The 15- to 20-minute online conversation can be so easily diarised for all concerned that it is far more likely to happen, effectively, sooner and most importantly on time because of the nature of the delivery mechanism when compared with a face-to-face meeting. All these things are great reinforcers and reassurance within client relationships. Surprisingly, this has not been well exploited by many firms which either display excessive tradition, technophobia or just plain resistance to the discipline involved in thinking through and implementing this type of client access.

The technology is typically proven, encrypted and, with relatively few disclaimers and contractual qualifications, fit for use; yet, so many have this resistance to something that adds both capacity and convenience to a modern practice. Many large international law firms, and some of the bigger group practices, have well-accommodated this technology, yet many firms large and small are still resistant and, frankly, are missing an opportunity both to enhance their business and the quality of service to the client.

Such remote access means maintain client intimacy and the dynamism of the exchange, whilst productively contributing to the green agenda as well. In addition, reflection on Coronavirus will show that both for ecology and infection control, we need to approach face-to-face meetings with a little less alacrity than hitherto and consider other means of cementing the relational space that exists between service receiver and service provider.

Offering pragmatic solutions in the current crisis

My articles are usually more academically focused than this, but from the position of crisis in which the country and most businesses find themselves, pragmatic solutions form part of the necessary behavioural flexibility to address that. It also is cognisant of the fact that many law firms still equate marketing with brochure websites and droning tributes to the quality of their specialisms rather than getting to where the client is at.

In these challenging times fostering new client relationships as well as maintaining existing ones despite required social distancing remains as important as ever. It should be viewed as much more an opportunity than a threat. Embracing technology can very clearly enable clients to get the help they need with immediacy and convenience. Many of the organisations I work with discovered truly great benefits for all, long before the Wuhan outbreak. Crisis Intervention Theory asserts that people will consider unprecedented behavioural changes at the height of challenge, hence many firms have now started to experiment with this approach. The theory also posits, however, that once a crisis recedes, we tend revert to type. Sound business planning and considerations as to how we interface with and best serve clients are needed at this point if the valuable learning experiences of these current times are not to be lost.