lawyer discontent and client dissatisfaction: revisiting the chicken and egg debate
When I was a kid, I often pondered the age-old question: which came first, the chicken or the egg? Just when I thought I had the answer, someone would offer input that plunged me back into uncertainty. My memory of this childhood mental exercise was jarred by Gerry Riskin's recent post entitled Client Satisfaction with Law Firms Plummets. In it, Riskin reports that the latest BTI Consulting Group survey of corporate counsel found that only "30.7% of large and Fortune 1000 companies recommend their primary law firms" and that "an astonishing 53.7% of clients ousted their primary law firms in the past 18 months." In addition to capturing my attention, this post and information inspired commentary from bloggers Dan Hull, Tom Kane and Robert Ambrogi. In his post, Ambrogi relays a BTI principal's statement that a root cause of the reported unhappiness and attrition is law firm failure to keep up with what's important to clients. This is not the first report of widespread malaise among legal service consumers and it likely won't be the last. As I stated in an earlier post on the legal profession's Broken Windows, the typical lawyer-client relationship is in a state of decay and disrepair and both sides are suffering as a result. I could accept this as a given and move on to think about possible remedies. But, I just can't shake the begging question about the genesis of the malady: which came first, lawyer discontent or client dissatisfaction?
