With M & A work having ground to a virtual halt, many City lawyers are exploring other avenues in an effort to keep themselves busy and avoid the attention of their axe-wielding Senior Partners.
Whilst business development is very much the order of the day, these lawyers might do better to spend at least some of their time ensuring that the powers that be do not see a recent article on www.law.com which was reporting on the 2008 'Legal Week' client satisfaction survey. It didn't make happy reading, apparently.
In a nutshell, many in-house counsel in some quite substantial FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 companies were deeply cynical about attempts being made now to forge relationships and win work now, when just a few short months ago, the very same lawyers were not returning calls or providing anything like adequate client service, largely because they were at the beck and call of the banks and private equity houses that were handling the high profile and, no doubt, hugely lucrative deals of the moment.
Taking a short-term view on client relationship management is not the way to build a sound and sustainable long-term business - ask any number of bankers. And as Hank Udow, in-house counsel at Cadbury said: "One thing is for sure. It'll take more than a free meal" (to persuade me to change my mind).
This whole sorry scenario once again begs the question as to whether businesses are using the right type of professional adviser, either for their legal work, or for their tax and accounting work. At MSI Global Alliance (www.msiglobal.org) we recognise and respect the value that the Magic Circle law firms and the Big 4 accountancy firms bring to most of their clients. But we do also believe that some of their smaller clients might be better served by a mid-sized firm that does have the relevant expertise - and for whom that client would be larger, and more important - and therefore presumably would receive a higher level of service in good times - and bad times.
James Mendelssohn (jmendelssohn@msiglobal.org)
Posted by: |