As we appear to be coming to the other side of a pandemic that, in my lifetime, I never thought I would experience, it has me considering all that I do and what I’m going to do differently moving forward.
This led me to the book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life, which has resonated with me for several reasons. It discusses how we establish the right gauges for how we measure what we value and what is important to us. In turn, this helps us continue to grow. It is a guide to setting aside things that are not as important and focusing on what really matters — essentially, how to free up the time we spend focusing on insignificant things so that we can concentrate on what we care about most in our lives.
I can see how this relates to my own life with how we focus on work and volunteer commitments. We’ve found ways to get work done differently this past year because we had no other choice. In all honesty, in some cases, we got work done better than we had before — we’ve made so much progress in the way we work within our legal organizations. Now that we are nearing the light at the end of the tunnel (hopefully there’s not a train coming toward us), the challenge of meshing the old ways with the new arises. We must focus and address this so we can keep making progress.
One article in this month’s issue focuses on a particularly pressing topic — how do clients perceive value? Clients have been tightening up budgets since long before the pandemic. Now we are entering a phase where many companies have seen their profits cut and lost income as a result of the pandemic. In other words, efficiency in cost will be even more of a factor for attracting and maintaining business. This doesn’t mean we need to discount our legal services — but it does mean we need to up our game in how we explain our value to clients.
“It’s an exciting and uncertain time as we try to get back to what we all enjoy and appreciate about our world. This provides a great chance to look at everything through a different lens.”
We have been making the effort to do things more efficiently to save money, but do our clients know what measures we’ve taken? “Keeping Clients Informed About Value” explains how we can not only get better at showcasing the expertise at our firms but also get better at explaining the processes we have in place to save time — and, ultimately, money. There are a number of ways to do this: from personal phone calls to emails providing important and timely updates to making sure we clearly spell out these details on our websites.
It’s an exciting and uncertain time as we try to get back to what we all enjoy and appreciate about our world. This provides a great chance to look at everything through a different lens, to reevaluate what we are communicating to our clients so we can remind them why our services are invaluable. As the article notes: “If you’re not efficient and you’re not innovative, providing really tangible value to the client, you’re in trouble.” This perfectly aligns with the book I previously mentioned, which says: “It’s time to focus on what’s meaningful.”
We have a tremendous opportunity to shape our own futures, as well as others’, through our work and this Association. We can continue to make our worlds better — so let’s get started!
