TL;DR: Net Promoter Scores provide a clear, simple opportunity for law firms and clients to cut through the obfuscation and marketing nonsense of the legal industry, and understand who really delivers.

From my earliest days of law school, I knew I was going to have a little trouble relating to my chosen profession. Virtually all of my peers were devoting large amounts of their non-class time to something called “blue-booking,” which means learning a bunch of arbitrary rules for proper formatting of citations in legal journals, and “spotting” the errors in a long list of citations; a kind of hazing ritual to get onto a journal. I simply could not get over how the entire thing looked like a spectacularly boring, unproductive waste of my time. I was the only law student in my class at Harvard that I was aware of (I’m sure there were a few others) who never even applied to a journal or law review, and never touched a blue book.  I’ve done alright.

This “WTF are you all doing?” feeling carried on post law school. Moving into a large law firm setting, it was absolutely breathtaking how backward the workflows of lawyers were, and how powerless law firms, as institutions, were to change it. Why are they powerless? Here is my core diagnosis for the “problem” of most large law firms: they are not really firms. Or perhaps better said, no one is really in control. The vast majority of large law firms are decentralized, weakly unified collections of fiefdoms, each controlled by a partner who isn’t truly accountable to other partners, or a central hierarchy. Within a “firm,” a small group of people may have a great idea, or tool, for implementation, but absolutely zero ability to get it adopted firmwide.

Combine that with a power structure concentrated in the hands of (usually) traditional 50 and 60 year olds, and the fact that you usually have dozens of totally unrelated practice groups with independent needs, incentives, etc., and you see that the inertia and inefficiency of law firms is structural and cultural. People who blame the billable hour are focusing way too myopically on one thing, and ignoring the broader, deeper problem. Most law firms are simply too large, too broad, too decentralized, and too lacking in institutional brand power relative to the personal brands of their old school partners to implement needed changes. The only solution, in many cases, is a reset button.

So joining and building out a small boutique firm was my opportunity for a reset button, and I got it, along with an AMEX card to buy what I needed, without having to ask anyone for permission. Starting with a clean slate, and supported by a handful of senior partners with the right mindset, I was able to build a law practice that cut out all the bullshit and delivers what good clients want. What do clients really want, btw? Here are a few examples of what they don’t want:

• Bullshit marketing about some whiz-bang rube goldberg machine piece of technology that doesn’t really solve important problems. See: Luddites v. Tech Utopians
• Bullshit about all the awesome industry / investor contacts you have, and how if they’ll just use your services, you’ll unlock the keys to market success. See: Why I (Still) Don’t Make Investor Intros. 
• Bullshit about how because you’re so close to their VCs, they’ll save legal fees in the long run by letting you “streamline” deals. See: How to avoid captive company counsel.
• Bullshit about how if they don’t hire the law firm working on IPOs and billion dollar acquisitions, they’re going to fail. See: The problem with chasing whales and Lies about legal fees. 

What isn’t bullshit?

(i) awesome lawyers with specialized expertise,

(ii) who are responsive and DON’T LOSE E-MAILS,

(iii) provide real strategic insight and not just paper pushing,

(iv) are transparent about costs (w/o BS-ing that legal can be cheap), and

(v) can demonstrate their consistent efficiency and quality.

In building out our firm, I searched for a single, objective metric, minimally exposed to BS, for building accountability and clarity around our mission of delivering the above, and I found it: the Net Promoter Score. Our most recently calculated NPS is 77. Apple’s, Amazon’s, and Costco’s NPS range from the 70s and 80s, depending on where you check. Is it as high as we want to be? No. Every year we learn more, and iterate as we scale sustainably. The beauty of NPS, in addition to its simplicity, is how every client’s voice counts. Many law firms have built their brands around the 1% of their clients, with the complaints about slowness, low quality, conflicts of interest, costs, and other issues of the 99% drowned out.

NPS imposes a level of transparency that punishes anyone who isn’t disciplined with what clients they take on, to ensure consistent quality. It actually forces you to focus, because the needs of an unfocused client base are so broad, that you can’t deliver consistency. NPS punishes bloated, unfocused, overly extended scale. 

While we don’t have the structural problems of large firms, we definitely deal every day with the training, recruiting, technological, cultural, and business development challenges of any high-end service provider that handles complex, high-stakes human (as opposed to automated or manufactured) services.  But what matters most is that we have a score for today, for last year, and for next year, to gauge whether we are doing our job, instead of the 100 other things that other people love to talk about, but are not actually our job.

And what I’ve found most interesting, and compelling, is how when you focus your strategy around NPS, the competitive advantages you build are durable. So many of the ways that law firms try to compete in the market can be easily bought: a piece of software, a key lawyer with a big book of business,  a sponsored event where influencers get together, a side deal to a market player in exchange for referrals. But by being purchasable, they’re also easily replicable by anyone else with money.

Delivering scalable, consistent, long-term quality – what results in a high NPS score – is infinitely more complex and time consuming to build, especially when you’re dealing with lawyers. There’s no main “secret” behind what we’re doing. It’s 1,000 little insights and implementations, compounding daily.

My advice to lawyers contemplating starting their own firms is to always, first and foremost, get absolute clarity around (i) what clients they want and don’t want, and (ii) then ask those clients what they want; then start building, and collect your NPS regularly. Focus, and the ability to learn and iterate quickly, is the core strategic advantage of the boutique law firm ecosystem.

And my advice to potential clients when diligencing lawyers is to start out with one question: “What’s your NPS?”  The answer, even if it’s not a number, always speaks volumes.