Last week we were invited to lunch by counsel who are working with us for the first time. They’re with a mid-sized firm appointed by an insurance company. We’ve been impressed with the legal work. They have been working hard to find a way to dispose of the case without tying up our executives’ time. This is always appreciated, even when someone else is paying the bills.
We sat down for lunch, and they broke the ice with a nice compliment about my staff. This led very naturally to a chat about what keeps us busy, the size of the department, how our executives interact with the department, and what our major concerns were (peppered with a few examples of what’s bothering their other clients).
Sure, we already had a relationship (the litigation they are handling), but these attorneys came away with very useful information about our current and future needs. This translates to future business opportunities for the firm.
They created significant goodwill by not selling themselves. Instead they listened, learned what we needed, probed in the right areas, and suggested parallels to examples of other work they have done. We left the lunch feeling that in a very quick hour and a quarter, these attorneys understood our industry, our risk sensitivity and our culture.
This was a marketing lunch that worked.
In House Rants 