Over the years, a number of highly successful attorneys have
provided me with anecdotes about landing key clients as a result of
recommendations from opposing counsel. Renowned advocates
have even described instances to me when a new client hired them
directly after witnessing their advocacy for an opponent or
competitor.
Little has been written about this phenomenon, but it makes
intuitive sense. Lawyers with professional conflicts who need to
make referrals, advocates who need to associate with local counsel
in a provincial town, and others who need to go outside of their
own firms to find a lawyer are likely to consider an advocate who
has impressed them as a professional adversary. Many clients
similarly are inclined to seek the services of someone who has
performed well as an opponent.
In fact, several chief legal officers have told me that they've
hired lawyers who initially caught their attention on the other
side of a bargaining table or courtroom. When I was a general
counsel, I too hired lawyers who had impressed me as opponents, and
I was hired by a CEO who sat on the opposite side of a table from
me. I know of other chief legal officers who were hired after
impressing their opponents as well.
Sitting on the other side of a negotiation or case provides an
excellent perch from which to gauge an opposing advocate's
knowledge of the law, ability to think quickly, communicate clearly
and come up with win-win solutions. That same perch facilitates
assessment of how responsive, organized and diligent opposing
advocates are, and those are all key factors in hiring or referral
decisions.
Conversely, it is obvious if an opponent is poorly qualified or
ill-mannered. In today's hyper-competitive world, laced with movie
and television caricatures of the law that accentuate aggressive
and dramatic clashes, combative behavior can seem acceptable or
even effective, but it is ultimately costly.
I know by reputation a commercial litigator in another
jurisdiction who thrived for a full generation, selling himself as
a razor sharp sword for slicing up opponents, and winning over
commonplace clients who thought of lawyers only as weapons of
conflict.
He was smart, extremely aggressive, threw lots of sharp elbows
and got more than his share of "wins," though most were costly. For
a while he earned a good number of client referrals. But his
reputation within the bar did not earn him any praise, and many
once satisfied clients eventually learned that ruthless victories
had long-tail consequences. As a result, the one-time big-ticket
lawyer eventually saw his business dry up, and his firm
dissolved.
Professional behavior and civility toward opponents are
particularly important in the age of social media, when there are
countless ways for reputations to spread via clients, employees and
even opponents. Online services for rating lawyers are
proliferating, and it is hard to monitor all of them, even with
internet reputation monitors that locate people with axes to
grind.
The fact is that every time you represent a client you are
making a statement about your brand to your opponents and all who
are watching. Your behavior is an advertisement for who you are and
how you achieve results, which is particularly important to
organizations that hire lawyers not just to be advocates, but
ambassadors for their own brands. Legal officers in organizations
that are frequently in the public eye and dependent on public image
- such as non-profits, government agencies, and professional
sports, entertainment or hospitality enterprises - have told me
that an outside counsel's behavior is as important to them as his
or her results.
For example, I know a successful lawyer who once obtained a
well-known sports club client by referral from a legal assistant
that sat opposite of him in a number of deals. She was reportedly
impressed with his truthfulness, cooperative nature and grace, as
much as his legal acumen, causing her to mention his name favorably
to her brother-in-law, the CEO of the club.
Thus, the way we treat an opponent's paralegals, secretaries and
support staff are also advertisements for our brands, for better
for worse. If you work well with someone on the other side of the
table, you just might land a prized client through referral or
direct hire. But if you play games with someone on the other side
of the table just to gain a questionable edge, you just might find
that it damages your brand, and there is nowhere you can go to buy
your reputation back.
John O. Cunningham is a writer, consultant and
public speaker. As a lawyer, he served as General Counsel to a
publicly traded company and to a privately-held subsidiary of a
Fortune 100 company. For more information about his work in the
fields of legal service, marketing, communications, and management,
check out his website and blog at https://johnocunningham.wordpress.com.