A discussion on what value means in legal services and how to provide it.
What they don’t teach you at law school (series)- adding ‘value’
This is the third in my series of blogs on “What they don’t teach you at law school”. This series aims to provide junior lawyers and other junior professionals with some hints and tips about how to navigate the early years of a demanding career from what I have learnt so far. I qualified as a UK lawyer (solicitor branch) about three years ago and have worked in a mixture of law firms — so this is all pretty fresh in my brain. Of course, I’m still learning too.
What is “value”?
On day one of being a lawyer, this is almost an alien concept. No law school I know of talks about how to ‘bring value’ or ‘add value’ to their clients and what this really means. So what is value?
Ok, first things first, I am not talking about your pay (although that is of course important too). I’m talking about the value you bring to your clients and how you can do that and why it is so important.
In order to explain this more, let’s dig into an example where a lawyer does not bring value to a piece of work.
A client asks for you to prepare a simple confidentiality agreement with a short brief about what to include. You give them a modest quote since it’s just a simple agreement and they accept. You get to this a couple of days later and send it to the client. They email you back the next day asking where the intellectual property clauses are and how this will help protect their copyright in the transaction. This is at odds with their initial instruction where they only asked for a simple confidentiality agreement and you explain that in order to do what they are asking, they would need a different document which would take more time to prepare and therefore would be more expensive too. Your client is not impressed with being told one price, and then another. They are also not very happy about the delay caused by you providing the wrong document.
So how could this situation have been avoided?
On the face of it, you did all you were asked to do. After all, it’s not your fault the client didn’t know to ask for the right document. Except… it is. Your clients expect better of you, not just in the documents or advice you produce but with the time you save them.
Your role is to dig deeper and to think of the big picture before you provide any legal documents or advice. Think, in this instance, is a confidentiality agreement really the most appropriate document for what the client is looking to do? If you are not sure, ask questions or pick up the phone, it will save you both time in the process — and time saving is just one example of the value you can bring.
So how do you bring or add value?
The example above talked about just one way to bring value to your clients, but bringing value is actually a very wide topic. It’s about what makes you valuable as a legal adviser, instead of your client simply printing off a template from a website or re-using an old version of a document they used in the past.
- Saving the client time — this is a crucial way to bring value to any legal work you do. Your client’s time is expensive and so is yours. One of key advantages of using a lawyer (in addition to getting the law correct!) is to save everyone time and make sure everything is done to the correct standard and as efficiently as possible.
- Highlighting other issues the client may have not spotted — when a client asks you to do some research or review a document, you might spot things they don’t know about. Sometimes this is your primary task, but sometimes you can also add value here too, especially when you pick up on other areas of law that the client might not have thought to have been concerned about.
- Providing consistency — Has the client asked you or your firm to prepare some documents before? Great, have a look at how they were provided to make sure your new agreement is taking a consistent approach. No one wants 10 different types of boilerplate clauses across their contracts all doing the same thing.
- Doing things how the client likes it — does this client have preferences, for example, do they always like to pitch their liability clause the same way, or is there a playbook for how they like to prepare their agreements? Make sure you follow this before giving draft documents to a client so save everyone time and to get things just the way you want them.
- Providing solutions on how to deal with legal updates- just because that’s the way the client has done it in the past, doesn’t mean it’s the way they should do things in the future. The law can change and it’s your job to spot that and inform your clients what they need to do differently. The value add is to provide options for solutions, rather than just highlight problems.
- Providing referrals — sometimes you can’t do everything, maybe because it’s not your expertise or not your jurisdiction and that’s just life. However, when you can provide your clients with options when these circumstances arise, it can really add value since the client doesn’t want to spend time looking for other advisers and in my experience this aspect of time saving has always been appreciated (although remember to abide by any regulatory rules you need to be aware of when making referrals).
The wrap up — why is value important?
Your value as a legal adviser to your client is more than just providing a document or answering a question. It is about providing a service which which gives the client what they need rather than what they have just asked for. It’s also about understanding the client’s business and their risks and having an extra pair of eyes for them, which ultimately saves them time.
Do you agree with the ways that lawyers can add value or have you encountered other ways that value can be added with legal services? Comment below!
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About me
In my day job, I am UK qualified lawyer specialising in data protection advice and technology contracts. You can find me on LinkedIn here.
This article does not contain legal advice and only my personal opinions
