Legal spending was up during the pandemic, but so were expectations about the quality of legal services
Twenty-twenty was a vital year for law firms to cement their client relationships. For firms with large institutional clients, our sixth annual corporate counsel survey indicates just why this is.
For our article, we spoke with law firm leaders to make sense of their clients’ responses. Our sister publication, Canadian Lawyer InHouse, also analyzed the results but will provide insights from in-house lawyers instead.
What both kinds of lawyers have told us, though, is that legal spending was up during the pandemic, but so were expectations about the quality of legal services.
Clients did not want legal information thrown at them with no context or curation. As James Buchan at Gowling WLG says, there has been “almost too much” information on COVID-19 bombarding businesses daily as the government grapples with the crisis. “We had to organize it in a way that could be easily accessible to corporate clients,” he says.
One message that is not new but that in-house clients reiterated in the survey is that personal relationships were key. Most in-house lawyers say they hire the lawyer, not the firm.
As the relationship partner for corporate clients at Blake Cassels & Graydon LLP, Cheryl Satin echoed that. She says that, often, GCs would “just come to me and say, ‘I need to know this — who is the person who can get me the answer and put me in touch with that person?’”
Yet, in that scenario, the importance of the firm should not be discounted. Whereas Satin may be the lawyer answering the call, her team is working just as hard to get an answer after she hangs up the phone.
At Fasken, managing partner Peter Feldberg says his firm put additional emphasis on its Fasken Edge client collaboration platform in 2020. While Fasken lawyers no doubt fielded similar calls to Satin, their follow-up would have been much simpler for everyone with an effective collaboration platform.
Like it was for the entire world, 2020 was a difficult year for Canadian lawyers. But looking forward, it just may have cemented a relationship that could pay dividends for years to come.
