Collaborating with Clients to Deliver Exceptional Service with Mitchell Sterling, Chief Client Development and Relationship Officer at Blank Rome

In this episode of On Record PR, Jennifer Simpson Carr goes on record with Mitchell Sterling, Chief Client Development and Relationship Officer at Blank Rome, to discuss how law firms can collaborate with clients to best serve their needs. Mitchell works closely with Blank Rome’s leadership and attorneys across practices and geographies to identify and pursue opportunities for revenue generation and exceptional client service.

Jennifer Simpson Carr: It’s great to have you here today. We had the opportunity to meet at Marketing Partner Forum, and you led this great session about impactful collaboration between law firms and clients, which I was excited to attend. And, I am excited to talk to you about this topic today. Can you tell us your idea for leading that session at Thompson Reuter’s Marketing Partner Forum (MPF)?

Mitchell Sterling: Marketing Partner Forum has always been one of the best venues to hear what people in the industry are thinking, what the latest and greatest things that are happening are, and especially in this post-post-pandemic world, what are we seeing. During the pandemic, I wrote an article with a colleague of mine in the legal practice management space about collaboration and the intersection of business development and legal practice management in a law firm and how it can deliver better results for the firm and better results for clients.

When Sylvia Coulter approached me with a topic that was related to collaboration, it felt easy and natural. It’s something that not only did I write an article about some time ago, but it’s also something that I’m living and breathing on a regular basis in terms of how we better ourselves for clients and how we generate revenue at a large law firm.

Jennifer Simpson Carr: Our listeners may hear “Blank Rome”, an Am Law 100 firm with offices throughout the U.S., but what I appreciated and valued about the session that you presented was that, first of all, the strategies and tactics were fantastic, but they were also scalable. I’d love to ask you to touch on your point about this COVID shift that we had and then this post-COVID time that we’re in.

Given the massive shifts and the way that law firms had to collaborate with clients over COVID, can you share some examples of how you’ve seen law firms successfully adapt their collaboration methods, particularly in the context of client engagement strategies?

I think that can happen in a few different ways. In terms of working with existing clients and bringing them a little bit closer, I think that it’s always been essential for law firms to understand their clients’ businesses, as well as the specific industries that those clients are in. In the old days of the early 2000s, it was enough to just be an excellent lawyer and to see all of the issues within the challenges that you were tasked with and that you were billing for. In my time in this world, which began around 2004 as a lawyer and in 2007 as a legal marketer, I’ve seen that change a lot, and the trusted advisor status is where things have evolved to. That means understanding a client’s business from the inside out and through collaboration, driving better business decisions with legal acumen, and there are a lot of different ways you could break that down and a lot of different ways that you can say that. But the fact that our lawyers are the subject matter experts on legal issues, whether they are regulatory, transactional, or litigation-oriented, those are important things happening at the company.

I’ve seen lawyers continue to bring themselves closer to the client to better understand how their advice and counseling around legal issues is impacting the company and the client’s business. A key aspect of that is industry understanding and knowledge, and it used to maybe be enough for a lawyer to say, “Okay, this is a False Claims Act issue, this is a non-compete issue.” Well, that’s still important, but understanding what that issue means in the context of the client’s industry – is it a government contractor, and does a non-compete or intellectual property issue mean something different there? Is it a life sciences client – where there’s a different regulatory environment that’s operating in the background?

In order to make any legal decision or to provide advice around any legal issue, you need to understand what’s happening in the background. I’m now seeing lawyers go not just to state bar association conferences and things like that, but they’re going where the industry is. Maybe they’re among only a few lawyers in the room, but it’s important for them to understand the business environment that their clients are operating in. It not only translates into better client service and legal advice, but it also drives the opportunity to generate more revenue and to just be 5% ahead of the client on a particular issue and say, “I see this thing coming down the pike. It’s not necessarily related to what we’ve talked about in the past, but I was thinking about you and it’s something that you should know.”

That’s a really important type of collaboration – being able to anticipate client needs and having worked closely enough along the way to understand what it is that your client isn’t asking for yet.

Jennifer Simpson Carr: I agree. That’s amazing feedback, and it’s certainly what the market expects now. Some of our team members had the opportunity to attend American Lawyer Media’s (ALM) Legalweek a few weeks ago, and ALM reported on the top five areas that General Counsel (GCs) expect. Two of the things that you have mentioned are two of those five, which is that they will differentiate themselves to me if they understand my industry and how that impacts my business and if they can look around the corner for me and let them know that they’re thinking ahead for me.

Mitchell Sterling: I think those two concepts inform one another, and since I’ve been at Blank Rome, I’ve been charged with building out our industry initiative. It’s been a great way to bring lawyers from multiple disciplines around an industry because they all have a different take. The regulatory lawyers have one set of facts, the transactional lawyers know what it’s like to be in the trenches and know the market in this industry, and the litigators are able to find creative solutions for managing risk. All three of them working together under the umbrella of a specific industry has been not only beneficial to the firm, but beneficial to clients as well, in terms of knowing that we’re positioned to think about things in that holistic way.

Jennifer Simpson Carr: I think that diversity of perspective probably also gives each of those lawyers the confidence that they’re bringing the best advice back to their clients.

Mitchell Sterling: Absolutely. And it creates a nice opportunity for fluidity among the lawyers in a 700-lawyer firm with 15 offices. We are moving as one, and I think clients are impressed when you’re bringing somebody on to a call who not only has knowledge of their specific industry, but you’ve talked about it before, you’ve had those phone calls, you’ve fleshed out what’s coming, you’re reading the industry publications and saying, “I think this is how this is going to impact our clients.”

Client in-house legal departments, while they are growing, have to do a lot of things. They’re as busy as outside counsel for sure, but the difference between outside counsel and in-house counsel is we’re seeing these issues play out with multiple clients in that industry. I think that one of the real value propositions that a law firm can bring is tapping into that and saying we’re not just seeing this at this one client. We’re seeing this at 5 or 6 or 10 clients that are preparing for this specific issue, and this is something that you should think about. Of course, it’s important to maintain trust and confidentiality, but leveraging that broad and deep knowledge set to the advantage of the in-house legal team is where I think law firms should be going.

Jennifer Simpson Carr: It’s great to hear that you’re leading that industry effort and that it has been so successful, particularly at a firm of your size and across so many areas.

What trends have you observed regarding the preference by your target audience (GCs, in-house counsels, C-Suite executives, etc.) for traditional in-person interactions versus this new hybrid virtual world that we’re all still navigating?

Trends is the right word because it feels like it changes by the week. We’ve seen it ebb and flow. I think there was a time after restrictions were lifted when everybody was eager to get back together. The law firm world saw that and maybe programmed too much programming to the point that there started to be some loss of interest and some attrition. We had the growth of webinar technology and webinar-driven content certainly throughout the pandemic, with the volume of webinars that we were doing, not just on pandemic-related issues, but any issues. There was a hunger and a desire for that content and people were glued to their screens and wanted to hear what’s next and what’s around the corner.

I think we’re in this moment in time where in-person events and in-person content delivery need to be intentional. I think we’re past the days of a six-hour CLE program in a hotel ballroom where you check the box, you sit there, and you listen to lawyers and very bright people talk at you. We’re seeing a trend towards in-person content delivery, but it’s a little bit shorter, it’s a lot more focused, and we’re coming back to the era of delivering that content in a bespoke way to a client as opposed to a large-scale event that is focused on the CLE and nothing more.

To the point of collaboration, we’re asking clients, what would you like to hear about? To the point of business intelligence, we’re saying, “Here’s something we think that you should hear about,” and building CLE opportunities and in-person engagement opportunities with clients around that. That’s not to say that there’s not a market for in-person events, but I think that with so many people working in hybrid situations, it needs to be an actual draw. The draw isn’t the content itself.

There are different ways of delivering that. You could go to the client and deliver it, you can do a series of webinars where people are very used to sitting in front of their screens, maybe for an hour or two at a time. We’ll do it in a series of an hour a day for five days. We’ve done programming like that, but if you’re going to put real pants on, then come into the city and park, it’s not enough to sit in a room and hear about the changing regulatory landscape. The best lawyers are delivering a lot of that information in real time anyhow. To the extent you can do something fun and interactive, I think that there’s always going to be a desire for that.

That’s where I think there’s the most interest right now. If you are just to set the table with a 30-minute dialogue around hot-button issues or just some talking points around it and then you give people the opportunity to attend a cocktail reception or a lunch right after, you’re setting up those conversations around those issues where people can talk to one another, people can talk to the lawyers that were on the panel, and it can be much more interactive as opposed to a one-way system of content delivery.

People want to have fun again, and we’ve had nice events with musicians, we’ve had smaller group gatherings around a theme or an event that’s taking place in a specific city, and especially in this post-pandemic world, they still want to gather. They still want to be engaged and interacting with people in their network or adjacent to their network and making new contacts. We want to create a forum for that. It just looks a little different than it did in 2019.

Jennifer Simpson Carr: You mentioned many critical points, but something that resonates with me is asking your clients for feedback – not assuming what they want to be doing, but really asking them and then providing the opportunities that meet their expectations and needs. It’s such a critical part of this and part of the success.

Mitchell Sterling: Making the effort to create a bespoke set of content for a client goes a long way in terms of showing how serious you are about wanting to understand their business and wanting to give them what’s important to them. Clients are so busy, and taking an hour out of their day to hear a general session is not moving the needle. It needs to be: one, we’re paying attention to your business and industry, and here’s what we’re seeing. And two, asking, “What is it that we’re not telling you that you want to know about?” and creating a program in advance of that is a great way to open that dialogue up. It’s a two-way street of us telling you what we think you need to know and you telling us what’s on your mind to the extent that we didn’t already guess. Being able to help you see around those corners.

Let’s take a look ahead. What do you anticipate as the future trends in client collaboration, and how do you think firms can position themselves to stay at the forefront of innovation in these client engagement strategies?

What’s old is new again, and I think that client feedback is always an important measure. We’d like to think that we have a firm understanding of a client’s business, and we do. But listening is as important as talking in a lot of cases, and I think that client feedback will never not be an important measure of, or at least an important baseline for, any exercise in collaboration. Giving a client an opportunity to share what’s on their mind, whether that’s specific about the interaction that the firm and the client have had, or whether that’s something that’s changing internally at the client.

You don’t know if you don’t ask, so we come back to some of those traditional tools of client listening and client feedback. That can obviously take many different shapes and be done in many different ways, from using an outside professional services vendor that does nothing but client feedback to sending the leadership of your firm to build that relationship and to listen. That is not necessarily a trend, but it’s something that any conversation around client engagement and collaboration would start with.

Another trend in client collaboration is taking a holistic view of it from the law firm perspective – business development. My team usually drives these exercises internally working with our lawyers and our leadership to understand things like client feedback – how we do it and how we incorporate the feedback that we receive, which is honestly the most important step. It’s determining who the client is that you should speak to, having the interview, and then incorporating the feedback. Internally I think that there’s a lot of movement towards broader collaboration across departments. I touched on this when I was talking about that article I had written about legal practice management and business development. I think that continues to be true, and it’s only continuing to grow. I work very closely with other chiefs at my firm. I work closely with our chief innovation and value officer, and I work closely with our chief technology officer because the data that we’re using to make decisions about collaboration with clients is so essential. I have regular interaction with our terrific chief technology officer to build dashboards, to understand what I’m talking about regarding industries. Where is the revenue coming from? How has it grown? What impact are we having, and how is that going to move the needle on future efforts and collaboration around the industry and working with clients in that space?

Similarly, working with our chief innovation and value officer, we’re able to look at what’s driving this. Where are the hours coming from in the work that we’re doing in different industries for different clients? Where are there opportunities? I don’t want to turn this into a conversation about cross-selling, because that’s not what this is, but it’s almost a white space analysis of, “This is interesting because this client in the life sciences industry is using the firm in areas A, B, and C, but this client is only using us in C, and another client is using us in LMNOP.” By looking at the data and how the work is being done, we can create better solutions around delivering value to clients in different ways.

We can look at bundling services, whether that’s bundling them along industry lines, or whether that’s a flow of a service offering where it starts with an audit of some sort and progresses into a risk analysis. There’s just so much that we can do, and just as we’re seeing different aspects of business and industry issues play out with multiple clients, the departments within a law firm are seeing different facets of the relationships with the client and the relationships across the firm. That’s something that I think is going to continue to grow as each of our departments has gotten so much more sophisticated.

To see where we’re going, we have to look at where we were. When I started doing this in 2007, it was, “Okay, can you fix my bio? Can we pull a brochure on this?” It was more than that, I’m speaking in a little bit of hyperbole, but it has evolved so much beyond that in terms of the things that we just spoke about, whether that’s industry teams or looking at client value delivery.

If it’s true in the business development and marketing world of moving from a brochure to very sophisticated client-centric industry teams and client teams, it’s happening in technology. It’s happening in innovation. It’s happening in HR. All of these things are very different than what they used to be, and as business professionals in these various departments, we see that, the lawyers see that, and the clients understand that their relationship to the firm is evolving too, as the firm has new capabilities across it.

Jennifer Simpson Carr: It sounds like we started in the industry around the same time, and something that I’m super proud of is the way the amazing professionals in our community have helped transform not only how we’re viewed as strategic partners to our lawyers, but also the resources that we have been able to secure to support more strategic and innovative work. To your two points of client feedback and data, both of those things are critical in helping teams like yours make informed decisions and vie for where those resources are allocated based on what you’re hearing from the clients and what the data is showing. Those are two trends that our listeners absolutely need to be looking out for if they’re not already exercising those activities at their firm.

Mitchell Sterling

Learn more about Mitchell Sterling

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mitchsterling/

Learn more about Blank Rome

Jennifer Simpson Carr

Website: https://www.furiarubel.com/our-team/members/jennifer-simpson-carr/

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jennifersimpsoncarr

Instagram: @jsimpsoncarr