Tradecraft tips

More ungrateful clients

I think that Robert Burns hit the nail on the head when he posed the plea: “O wad some Power the giftie gie us to see oursels as others see us”.

A client telephoned me out of the blue asking for information about her house which had been purchased a few years previously. Immediately after the conversation was over I went down to the basement to retrieve the closed file. I had only been reading it for a few minutes when the client phoned again to say: “You probably don’t think that my query is very important.” Could I have given her query any higher priority? I wonder how I might have responded any more quickly.

On another occasion a recently bereaved family visited me at the outset of the executry to discuss the estate and to give details of the various assets. A few days later I received a mandate instructing me to deliver the file to another firm of solicitors. The family had gained the mistaken impression that I was not particularly bothered about the matter in hand. If that had indeed been the case the meeting would have lasted 10 minutes and not an hour and 10 minutes, and I would certainly not have telephoned halfway through the meeting to the Department of Work & Pensions to get an immediate answer to a query they had raised.

I think the same sort of thing happens to doctors. The patient is busy telling the doctor what is wrong with them and the doctor is busy typing on the computer. The patient sometimes gets the mistaken impression that the doctor is simply not listening at all.

Adding value – 1

Business clients were being sued for a substantial six-figure amount of money. The matter was quite complicated and it took some effort to extract the information from them to allow us to gain a proper understanding of the nature of the original transaction. The clients decided to concede the case and put us in funds to settle the full amount claimed.

Rather than simply throwing in the towel I pondered as to whether anything could be retrieved from the situation. I only became involved with the case a considerable time after it had started, and I had read the file from cover to cover twice over. I came to the conclusion that if it was a difficult case for me to deal with it was probably a difficult case for the pursuers’ solicitor, and he might not exactly be relishing the prospect of fighting the case all the way through the court.

Notwithstanding the clients’ decision to concede, I still felt that there was enough in their favour to make the outcome of the case less than completely certain.

I contacted the pursuers’ solicitor and negotiated a settlement at a discount to the full amount claimed, and I was able to give the clients a five-figure refund.

Adding value – 2 

A client wanted to buy a public house in a seaside village. The selling solicitors, whose office was about 62 miles away from ours, fixed a closing date for offers. We were not entirely convinced that there were any other interested parties, but the selling solicitors probably felt that we would not bother to attend the closing date in person so we would probably never know whether or not anyone else had offered. We did bother. There was nobody else at the closing date. My boss later did a deal on the telephone to buy the public house for £150,250. The offer which I had taken to the closing date and then taken back to the office was for £164,000. Simply transmitting the offer to the selling solicitors, rather than making the round trip, would have unknowingly cost the
client £13,750.

Do not hesitate to make an extra effort if you think there is a chance that it might benefit the client. They will not grudge paying a little extra on their fees if they can see how much they have gained.

Adding value – 3

A former employer of mine was a dab hand at negotiating property sales. If he felt that he could get an offer increased he would first of all say to the client: “If I can get another £2,000 on the price, can I charge an extra fee?” The client would invariably say yes to this suggestion. The extra £2,000 was simply being pulled out of thin air and the fee was increased by a modest amount. If this was not charging fees on the basis of “value to the client”, I do not know what would be.