The November Carnival of Trust Is HERE!

If you have not had a chance to read the monthly Carnival of Trust for November ( a summary of blog posts on trust and related topics), you are missing the boat. I've written recently about my Las Vegas lunch meeting with Ed from Blawg Review and our, well, 'anonymousness'. (Interesting enough, it was not our only topic. Trust was not an issue.) As part of our talk, we went over some of the issues people face in these kinds of trust situations and the discussion took a life of its own after that. Well as a result, I picked up an interesting book, highly recommended from Ed, The Trusted Advisor. This book is written by Charles H. Green, who incidentally started the Carnival of Trust. You can review his blog posts over at Trust Matters for a daily and in depth discussion of 'trust' and its related topics.

I know, this sounds like a commercial. Maybe a little too touch feely for you? Well, shame on you. If you are any kind of an attorney, counselor or consultant, you are heavily invested in your clients' ability to 'trust'. If not, you have nothing. I'm showing you guys the way here. Frankly, I should keep it a secret and buy up all of Charles' books and burn them. Not because I have some desire to rid the world of hot & sexy book that have no redeeming moral validity. Quite the opposite. Because as Charles' book becomes more widespread, attorneys should improve their ability to trust and be trusted by their clients. This will create true competitors for the legal market. So, I'd burn the books to keep my competitive edge . . . I know, not very trustworthy.

While there is heavy competition in the legal market now, it is on a different level. It is mostly competition over price and result, it is not about trust. You throw trust and trustworthy into the mix and its not like you're competing on the same basis. The other guy concerned about price and result doesn't stand a chance against you. If your clients' trust you, to the extend Charles advises, you will be your client's last attorney, ever. He will never go anywhere else again.

Currently, I get weekly clients from all of the 'crappy' attorneys here in town as they fail to follow through, as they are brash & abusive, as they are more concerned about getting the bills to their clients than they are concerned about helping the client trust them and understand the case. OK, that's it on that. Go get it from the horse's mouth, Charles.

My small experience with Ed has only scratched the surface of this issue and the other related topics on 'trust'. In fact, Charles recently wrote his own post about Ed & I meeting in Las Vegas, anonymously, Do You Trust Anonymous? That post gathered some very, very interesting and in depth discussion about some very real feelings over anonymous meetings. Charles' Blog posts date back to 2002 and shoudl be published in a book, alone. So, you better hury and read a copy of them all. You'll be better for it.

First, head on over to Law21.ca and get a taste of the Carnival of Trust that was written by Jordan Furlong for November. This Canadian's perspective is incisive.

My favorite Blog that Jordan brings to our attention is Adam Smith, Esq.'s The Billable Hour Debate Is Not About The Billable Hour. Jordan states and quotes saying, "Bruce discusses the storms raging around the question of how lawyers bill clients, specifically the age-old practice of selling legal services by the hour, and reaches this apt conclusion:

'Sadly, for too many of us, clients don’t trust us with their money and we don’t trust them to reward us fairly. If you hark back to those old-fashioned typewritten bills 'for professional services rendered,' didn’t they positively reek of a close, trusting relationship? The lawyer would no more exploit the client than the client would expect (hope?) the lawyer would price representation at bargain-basement levels. This seems to me to be the enormous unspoken issue in today’s debate over the billable hour. If you don’t trust someone, you want something quantifiable. And you want the 'most favored nation' rate and 10% discount on top of that. If you don’t trust someone, it’s all perfectly understandable. And uneconomic. Is this what we’ve come to? So perhaps more than anything else, I find the seemingly perpetual debate about the billable hour sad. Because I can’t think about it without thinking about forfeited trust.'

Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Then, get back to me latter. So, trust is related to your billable hours as you grind away at your desk? Are you surprised?

Maybe now with the recession, we will take the time to develop trust. I'm finding that more attorneys are changing their perspective toward being one focused on trust, not money. We should be making ourselves trustworty, so we can be trusted. The work and the relationships will follow.

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