In-House counsel reveals how outside counsel become valued and trusted advisors

Mareza (“Rez”) Estevez is a highly experienced in-house counsel. Through the years, she has seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of working with outside counsel.

She recently published an article called 5 Tips on Becoming the Go-To External Lawyer. Because I help attorneys with their business development strategies, Rez’s article naturally caught my attention, and I asked to interview her.

During our interview, Rez kindly shared her deep insights about what makes outside counsel pitches more effective, and the behaviors and attitudes that allow outside counsel to become a client’s valuable and deeply trusted advisor. 

Without further ado, here’s Rez in her own words: 

How to pitch: If it’s something I can look up, don’t bother me with it. Don’t rehash information I can find on your website. I don’t want to know what schools your attorneys attended. I need to know why your team is the right team for my project.

It’s not about how fabulous you are, it’s about the value you’re adding.

Before the pitch, ideally, there should be an exchange of information so outside counsel is prepared to discuss what is the conventional and the cutting-edge thinking on the issue facing the client. Discuss the risks and constraints, and where you think the issue is going to go and why.

It is also important that your team be balanced across strengths areas. You’d want someone who has a deep knowledge of the client, and a deep knowledge of the industry. I’m sad to say that it’s the minority of outside counsel that has an awareness of this need.

Finally, remember that to say that you could be wrong is not a lack of confidence. On the contrary, it is a mark of supreme confidence. To be able to say ‘here’s where I think this is going and here’s why…but I could be wrong’ -- that’s deep. That will get my attention.

Understand your client: You need to understand why your client is in business. What is their plan? What is their vision? How are they planning to get there? What are the risks that they’re experiencing (including those of which the client may not be aware)? What is their appetite for risk mitigation? What are their hopes and fears?

Outside counsel need to understand that law firms are very different environments from their clients. Lawyers speak law, but their clients speak MBA, IT, and the particular language of the individual company. It’s important to learn a little of those languages, too.

And then there are the soft skills – how does your client prefer to receive the information? Some people prefer the information metricized. Other people prefer a more qualitative approach. The question outside counsel should ask is “what works for you?” That’s when the client feels like outside client really gets it and is looking to best serve the client’s needs in the manner that the client prefers. That’s when trust goes up.

Strive for a true collaboration: The best relationships I see between outside counsel and in-house counsel and business people is when the relationship is truly, truly collaborative; where the dividing line between lawyer and non-lawyer gets ignored a little bit. Everybody shows up at the table, contributing to the solution, focusing on the problem or the challenge that the team was assembled to resolve.

What is wonderful about being able to practice law in this intimate fashion with your client is that the amount of trust goes up, and the questions discussed change and they now go to the heart of what the client is trying to do. While no one is indispensable, you become more and more valued. And when the invariable mistake happens, there is a greater understanding and a likelihood of a better resolution of that mistake.

Create clarity on what the assignment is: I never have an attorney go off and work on a project without first having complete clarity as to what they’re going to do. This is borne from experience, where misses result from a miscommunication. Sometimes I wasn’t clear on the question I was asking; sometimes the attorney misunderstood.

I know that attorneys strive to be of service and to do the exactly right thing for the client, and to be appreciated for it. It’s a very painful experience for external advisors when they realize that they missed the mark on an assignment.

Now, when I work with an outside advisor, we spend a lot of time on pre-work. You need to craft the right question, and in crafting the question, I not only give direction, but I’m also seeking advice. It’s not a dictatorial process, but a collaborative one.

After we craft the question, I explain to the external advisor the specifics of the work product that’s needed: format, length, citation format. I need to get a document that I can use exactly how I need to use it.

Not many outside counsel proactively seek such level of clarity, but they should.

Write to solve a problem: Writing for the value-added model takes more work than standard legal writing. And it is the exception when I see an attorney write to business people in actionable terms. That’s unfortunate.

It’s not a skill taught in law school, and many lawyers are disconnected from the reality of how they should communicate with business people for clarity and for value-added advice.

There is great value in being brief, and it takes a lot of hard work to get there. To get to the one- or two-sentence upshot means that you finally understand the crux of the issue, and what we need from it.

You can’t start with writing the upshot. The upshot is the culminating value-added proposition of the writing process.

Last, but certainly not least - Invest in technology: When you’re having a conversation with someone, they give you cues, sometimes to a truth of which they, themselves, are not aware. Perhaps through tone, perhaps through body language and gestures. And in an important relationship, we need to be sensitive and observant of that.

This sensitivity is going to be easier the more we communicate with technologies that enable us to see each other. But law firms, generally, are decades behind where the business world is thinking and operating. I’m hoping that law firms will catch up with this technology soon, but I’m not seeing a strong push to do that.

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In short, as Rez put it in her article:

The common thread here is deep observance of clients’ needs and thoughtful, proactive solutions to what ails the client.