Navigating Client Communications

Welcome to Accountants LawPod, where accounting professionals and law firms converge, hosted by Linda Artesani, Sarah Prevost, and Steven Libhart.

Welcome back to the podcast, everyone. Hi, Steve. It's so good to see you.

We missed you.

Hi, Sarah.

How are you?

Good, good. Yeah, we've missed you. Now we have Linda out and you're back. So I'm just solo.

I'm sitting up at 6,500 square feet at Ridgeway, Colorado in the rain. You can see another Airstream behind me. I'm sitting in the Airstream recording today.

I can.

We're getting ready for a rally to start at 1 o'clock today and about 15 Airstreams coming and it's pouring rain. It should be fun.

It should be fun. Yeah, I feel like I've been like the solo one as far as like, okay, your turn this week. Last week was Linda. You all are traveling. Yeah.

Well, this is our last rally of the year for the Colorado Club, so.

Oh, nice.

Yeah, then, then it's gonna start snowing, you know.

Yeah. Yeah, you have the, the crazy weather state is what I call it. It's just wild.

Yeah, no kidding.

No kidding. You get some chance.

But it's been nice and cozy. I got here yesterday. I'm staying at a friend's ranch. Along with some other Airstreamers before the rally starts. And sweet, the rain started about midnight last night. And so we're in the Airstreams all cozy and the pitter-patter on the roof. And I love it, except there, I was telling Tierra, there are bears around here. So they were like, do not go outside at night. You

know, disclaimers.

When I take the dog out, it's like, hurry up and we're going back inside.

Yeah. Hector needs a quick, quick move there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So what are we talking about today?

Today we're going to talk about communications with clients in general, relationships, and just overall from the perspective of what we see with attorneys and their clients and vice versa with us and our clients, which are attorneys, and sort of maybe some defined Discussion around boundaries and just overall communication, I feel like.

How to communicate, sure.

Yeah, yeah. It's definitely, it's interesting because we get challenged, I feel like, in waves in the firm where, you know, maybe some changes are happening in a firm and the client is not communicating well enough for us to help them. Or simply the— I love this one and I don't know how you feel about it. I'm being sarcastic. The quick, The quick question.

So, sure. Well, you know, the thing is, let's just take, you know, we cater to the legal industry, obviously, but let's just take that out of the equation real quick and come right back to it. But let's talk about business, any business, the accounting function and the operations function. It's very easy for those 2 to kind of clash from time to time. Because in accounting, on the accounting side, we're all about the rules and keeping the numbers straight and trying to prevent problems and keeping the IRS from getting involved and all those sorts of things. And on the operations side, they want to cater to their clients and they have to be more of the yes people to the clients than we do when we're trying to keep everything in line. So sometimes that happens. It doesn't matter what kind of business. Now let's come back to the legal side. attorneys are trained, and I mean this in all honesty, they're trained in law school to challenge things, to ask a lot of deep questions, to ask a lot of whys and how-tos and why are you responding this way and all that. And so when you realize that, and in my own experience, having worked in law firms as much as I have, when you realize that and accept that, a door opens. It's like they're not attacking you Personally, they just want to know. And when you're saying, no, we can't do it this way because let's use the example of tax deductions for client entertainment, client development, in-house firm meals, those sorts of things. When you say, well, it's got to go to this bucket or that bucket. And they're like, well, I don't want it to, but you're like, it has to. That's where the finesse comes in.

Yeah. Yeah. I do. I want to kind of play a little devil's advocate moment because this happens, respectfully. Understandably, like you're saying, there's operational functions and accounting functions. They do coincide because you need accounting to help substantiate some of the decisions, maybe.

Sure.

So when something is moving and changing, and I get this, like, oh, I have a quick question. I really just want to ask it. Sometimes it's just nice to know what the quick question is or some sort of context to it. Yeah. I admittedly am— I do that myself. And then I've, as I feel like I've, as I've kind of matured through the entrepreneurial road, the quick question a lot of times can be taken kind of harshly in the sense of like, Really a quick question right now, like the timing or the nature of it. It's not that we don't want to answer, and I see this, and that's my question to some of our attorneys out there, is when you get the quick question, what does that mean to you? How do you structure that? I would imagine you structure it with, okay, give me some context, similar to what you're saying. They're, they're in a space where they want the information so they can understand because they're trained to do this, right? Right. And then, um, What style of a meeting will this be? And I think about it in the sense of back to accounting, is it a flat fee style? So does it account for enough of these quick questions? Or if it's a divorce attorney, how is that structured? How do you bake that in for yourselves? And I think that's the balance of that that you— yeah, right?

I mean, like a divorce attorney or a family law attorney probably gets a lot of those

Of

course, naturally, right?

But then you think about like this big, big disclaimer out there of like, oh, get away from the hourly, and understandably so. But then you're left with some of these things, and respectfully, you don't— you may know the answer, you just want to allow for the proper time for it, right? You want to make sure you're giving adequate time and un— You know, untethered from everything else so that you can listen in and be able to assist the client or understand. Like maybe, like you said, it opens the door for the next communication. But it it is difficult because, like managing attorneys and firms, you can't control what's walking through the door for your associate attorneys. What comes to you? How do you manage that? Same thing for us. I saw this morning some dialogue, and there's some. Kind of, I have a question about, okay, how did we step in the space of class accounting versus just recategorizing to a ledger? Because class accounting takes a lot more effort and energy.

It's very granular. Yeah,

very granular. And it's not something that's in the service scope now. So, you know, it—

But that's a great opportunity.

Yes.

To discuss. And so, you know, Go for it. On both sides of the fence there, when I call somebody, and this is a tool that I use a lot, and I think you probably can vouch for me because I've done it with you. When I reach out, I'm like, is this an okay time? Instead of saying, I have a quick question. You answer the phone.

That's a very respectful way. Yeah.

Is this an okay time? And then that gives you permission to say, well, I can't right now. But your call is important to me. How about blah, blah, blah, whatever the solution is.

Yes.

Yeah. And then to your point with the class accounting, that, you know where I'm going to go with that? That goes back to my scope creep ledger that I keep track of. It's like, okay, you might be ready for that, or maybe you need to know more about what that means. So I think we should set up a time to talk about that. And then That gives you time to really think about why they might be doing that. And if they want to move into that environment, that is another source of revenue for you as the law firm accountant.

Yeah.

You know, it's all how you, how you move through that exercise with them. So

you

kind of slow the boat down a little bit, but you make them feel very important because they are.

Truly, they are. And there's another thing I thought of as you were talking. So when we go the opposite way for clients, for the attorneys in their firm, and there are probably areas that are very cleanly defined, that's a new engagement or a new scope of work that needs to happen because it might be like the family law thing. It might be something more like it started out with a simple, okay, we're going to do a Divorce proceeding that sounds pretty clear, but then complications became—

There's always something behind the curtain.

Something behind the curtain. Yeah. Immigration, the same.

You

know, you start out with one set of forms or indication of how you're going to work, and then it changes because maybe a government rule changed. So now that changes or circumstance changes. And those are just simple examples. Business, of course, is different. You start out with maybe a simple operating agreement and then something else comes up and then something else comes up and then before you know it, you're giving advice on quite a bit of stuff that are hypotheticals and you're not sure. It's similar to us. It's very similar to us. We got to entertain this. We got to talk about, like you said, the operational part of the business. And so there are things like for us that we have to define in our scope, our engagement. That says what we will and will not do. We don't— we're not going to audit. We're not auditors. We're not going to do that.

Clearly explained in the agreement, you bet.

Exactly. Um, another thing is, um, is, um, oh my gosh, it just escaped me. Oh, um, we're not going to do business evaluation. There's a protocol and etiquette for it. We'll present the numbers, we'll work with whomever it is that you would like to be able to kind of reclass or do things if a business evaluation is necessary, but that's not something we're going to just openly give or provide or do. Like, in additional services, it kind of like layers from there. And I feel like that's the same with our clients. And so opening the door to, do you have a moment or a quick question, it does help to understand the context of what those are so we can better prepare for that. I don't know how you prepare for, okay, could be pie in the sky. Like, I don't know. What's the quick question? You're going to buy somebody?

You know, give yourself permission to not have to have an instant answer because we always want to please, you know, and again, um, we have control of that when that comes in. Can I have a quick, a minute for a quick question or whatever? And, you know, it's all in how you handle that. Um, and, and Sometimes you have to stop and think about it over a weekend or whatever before you respond, you know, on whatever the subject is. Um, I have a, an example. I have an attorney that I've worked with for years and years. Love the guy. He's great. But man, is he busy. And, um, I could not get him to use software that, you know, where we can send him questions and upload receipts and different things. I just couldn't get him to do it. Same. Still wants to stick with the spreadsheets. And then I sent him the spreadsheets and he didn't want to do that. And, you know, so finally I just started posting the things to owner's draw and that got his attention.

Yeah. Unfortunately, you have to set a boundary like that to be able to get—

You do. And that's a great boundary example.

Yeah.

And so he recently asked me, he said, why is this an owner's draw? I don't understand. And I was like, bingo, I got, I finally got the response I needed. It took me almost a year to get that response though, but I worked with him patiently when he would kind of melt down and say, I'm not going to look at this spreadsheet. I'm not going to send you the blah, blah, blah. Okay, then it's a draw. But now I've got his attention and he's working with me on it, which I really like. And he even sent me an email back after I explained it to him. He said, oh, now I get it. I don't want that to be a draw. I've got to answer this. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. No, you're making me kind of think a little bit on a couple of things because it is hard to know for You know, legal. Sometimes things are coded. The names in which things come across aren't clear enough.

Yeah.

Banks change the way they code things, and you're right. It does. You know, if you have a big number at the end of the year for owner's draw, you're going to want to dig through the treasure trove of that. And in order for us, we do this a lot to set. Not so much boundaries, but a clear cadence. If we're not getting responses to what we need, we will send a preliminary. So it's understood that we are preliminary reports at this stage until we can get those final answers. And at that moment, you know, and it's maybe not a question about a transaction. Yeah. It could be that we see that you have a new bank account or a new credit card and we don't have access to it yet. Those do sometimes take time because of obviously the protocols around it. But there's ways. Now I think about it too in the sense that's an ongoing relationship when we're onboarding for clients on the bookkeeper side. We do like to set some sort of cadence and understanding of what that looks like. Life does happen, things come up. You know, it may not align with your timing or it might, something has switched on our side. But I do think about what does that look like for an attorney, depending on the type of case they're getting? What does the onboarding look like, especially if you're a busy attorney like you just brought up? Does— do you have a paralegal or somebody dedicated, an admin dedicated to ensure that that relationship is being, you know, held fine for the first few weeks of the engagement? And what's the expected outcome? I'm not sure what that looks like. I've never thought to— I see it in production and I ask about it on the operational because my brain works like that. So I want to know where retainers and funds are, but I don't know what that looks like as a client, you know, for a firm. I'm not sure if you have perspective on that or— What it looks like for a client newly onboarding and to a firm?

There's a lot of, in some cases, fires that have to be stomped out.

Okay.

Sometimes there's a lot of emotion. Think about it, legal case. There's going to be emotions involved in it. We don't, we don't, on our side of the fence in accounting, we filter more than we deal with emotions.

Yeah.

Um, but on that side of the fence to onboard, it's a very careful process in the law firm of explaining what you're going to do for the client and learning the nuances of their situation and getting all the information. And it's, that's not a one and done thing.

Mm-hmm.

You know, so they, they deal with some of the things that we deal with, and that's the last minute things that pop up. The scope creep things, for lack of better wording, um, that can pop up. And, um, you know, they're dealing with a bunch of clients that need quite often action quicker than we do on our side of the fence, unless it's a, unless it's a last, you know, end of the year cleanup, the emergency situation, but on the books. But, um, so they've, they've got all that extra stuff to think about. When they're onboarding on that side of the fence, you know.

True. Yeah. You know, when you think about in the areas of employment law, which can move really fast or slow depending on what's happening. So that's a valid point. I'm sure the workers' comp style cases that go on, just thinking of different practice areas that could have like what you're saying, these peaks. Where we try to, like you said, we're dealing, we want to kind of even it out a little bit. We want to get the flow working to a cadence that is a predictable cadence for the most part. Whereas law is, you're saying right from the beginning, you're dealing with emotions a lot of times.

There are a lot more unknowns on that side.

Yeah. So that onboarding might look a little different. Um, so yeah, I never thought to really— I'm engaged with it quite a bit with some clients, but I've never thought to think about like, what does this process look like? I've seen it as a client. Um, for—

When do you bring on a firm administrator or when do you bring on an administrative assistant or, you know, when do you— I'm coaching a firm right now on that. Doesn't necessarily want to have Uh, a firm administrator.

Yeah.

In place, but should have some sort of administrative person in place that can really help herd the cats, juggle the calendars, do all those sorts of things, and prove that while they're a cost to the firm, they are also helping the attorneys generate more revenue and pay closer attention To the clients when they're not caught up in all the minutia.

Okay. So in that kind of idea, and let's say that the client's difficult to work with for the firm, like what we get sometimes, it's just, it's difficult. It's life, right? So you have to deal with that. So how do you step in? How do you empower your team to help handle it? I would imagine the way I—

Don't take it personally. That's the first step.

It's the first step.

Do not take it personally. Be very organized. Don't feel like you have to—

Good point, Steve.

Be very organized. Follow the procedures, follow the SOPs. Know when to ask for help.

You

know, know who your support network is when you're dealing with those types of situations. I mean, those are some, some pointers there. I mean, you don't, I think that's the one thing I run into with, with staff more than anything else is they feel like I'm stuck in the middle here. I've got this person who owns the accounting firm is my boss. And then I'm serving this law firm and the company, and I've got to keep both sides happy. And if we can, if we can decipher that for them and say, well, hold on, you're right, but you do not have to answer everything right now. You know when to ask for help.

Yeah. Yeah.

But Here's one other quick thing.

Yeah.

A great tool is if it's a problem that you really perceive as a problem, think about from the other end. Let's work backwards on it.

Okay.

What's the solution? How are we going to get there? And then when I go to my supervisor or whatever we call it, I can say, I have this challenge with this law firm client. This is the solution that I'm thinking of and I need help. Because that helps us. That helps us solve the problem when we know how they're thinking and how the client's thinking before we get involved.

Yeah. I saw this recently. I saw a client, looks like they're bringing, I don't know what the term is for this individual. And there was some communication. Back and forth. Our staff member didn't ask anything of me other than just some clarity on how to resolve a few pointers that she needed. And I looked at the dialogue of communication and red flags went up and I didn't like it. So I drafted a message and said, I would feel best if you sent this message. As you. If you don't like these words, feel free, change them. But we need to address what is underlying issue that I'm seeing through these threads.

Gotcha.

The message went out, nothing was said.

Who did? The employee sent the message out?

Employee sent the message out, crafted it suited to what their comfort is. I'm not going to tell you how to write. If you ask me my opinion, but I needed as the owner to I could see it. I could see what was going on. I didn't hear anything. And so on a correlating message that I was on, I wrote and said, I saw that this individual wrote, our staff person, not seen a response. Let me know if there's anything else you need.

There you go.

Totally different. Same parties, totally different people though. There's like one had a little bit more within the other. And I, I did that because for one, and I'm sure that this is how firm owners are, especially managing ones, you're like you said, you're always dealing with things like client communication, client. You want to make sure, especially if you're a new attorney and you know a new law firm owner and you want to bring on an associate, you trust that that work is being done a certain way, but you also want to make sure that things are being Communicated in the style that you want or that you have access to the communication to understand the underlying issues. Yeah. And I say that in the sense of like there was somewhat of a boundary line that I wanted to be placed there. The employee couldn't see it the way I saw it, but I saw it very clearly and I was like, no, we have to draw the line because I can see scope creep happening. I can see continued issues. I can see questioning of things that are not necessarily okay to question. The work is being provided, the work is being done as best to the ability of the information being provided. And so I feel like in general, as a community, as an accounting community, we can see when things are wrong in the books, right? We can do the best we can. We don't know what the other impact is, like you said, the other Um, emotional impact. Maybe the relationship isn't good between you and this other person. Who knows? Who knows what's going on in there? And I do feel like in communication and setting boundaries and sort of building relationships, you can have these dialogues with clients, but then when the client introduces somebody else into the fold and you're not used to that, There's got to be a better way to monitor it. So my little spidey sense always goes up like, oh, we have a new CFO, we have a new COO, we have a new coach, we have a new whatever. Let me see what's going on in there. And it's not because I think the employee can't handle it or the associate attorney, let's say, can't handle it. I just want to know what the context of the conversations are to better support the relationship. And I use our example because this is kind of recent and we're in the throes of extending deadlines. And so everyone wants to be a priority. Everyone wants to have a quick question.

Yeah.

Like, uh, what? So I don't know if you've encountered things like that yourself. I'm sure you have. Yeah.

Sure. I've, I've had a situation where an attorney said, take this employee off of my account, you know, because the personality. Personalities just weren't working. Um, and I had to do some soul searching myself, like, okay, was I giving this employee the right tools to ask the question? And I think it just was a situation where it wasn't going to work. And long story short, I worked with that client for a few months and finally had to let them go because I saw what was going on. And, you know, so you have to know how to, how to, how to know when to let go too, if it's not working right. Yeah. And there's nothing wrong

with Yeah, I think that's the difference too, because it is like you said, the employee is sandwiched between or feels that way. And we have— we see it, we're business owners, we see it. Yeah, yeah. You know, and it's, it's same as firm owners, accounting, or, um, or lawyers. Uh, they have underperforming attorneys. They have— actually, we can see it sometimes just in the billing. We can tell when an attorney is underperforming because if there's a cadence to billing—

I'm glad you mentioned that because sometimes, yeah, it's like we see it before they do. Like when, let's say we're doing a trust transaction on a bill for them or something. And we go in there and look at it and it's like, oh, this doesn't look like what the owner does. You know, it's interesting how, yeah. Yeah. That was a big aha for me this morning. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know these conversations stir a lot. They do stir up some good things and yeah. But I think overall, I think you're right. The kind of the thread of this is learning the communication and we're in a day and time right now where communication is great for a certain age group. We have a younger age group that's coming in and it's not the same and it's very different and that's harder to work with.

You know what? I, this, oh geez, I just have to throw this in here.

Sure.

I went to get all 3 of my hairs cut the other day and I was sitting in the barbershop and this guy comes in and they obviously knew him really well. And this customer was sitting in another chair getting his haircut. And he looked at the guy and he goes, aren't you Mr. Smith? He said, didn't you teach at XYZ High School or whatever? And the guy goes, yeah, I did. And he goes, the guy in the chair goes, do you remember me? And I'm thinking, he's not going to remember you. And the teacher said, no, no, I don't remember you. And the conversation went on and on. And after this customer left, I said to the teacher sitting there, I said, I bet you get that a lot. And he said, yeah, I do. And I said, and how do you control kids nowadays? Because I said, you know, this generation, and he said, here's the deal. This current generation has so much information being thrown at them. He said, the anomaly we have is that they are silent. They sit in class and we can't get anything out of them. Yeah. And he said, whereas in the 1990s and when we went to school, It was a very good exchange of information that would happen. And he said, we're in trouble because these kids nowadays just sit there and look at you. So to your point— Yeah.

Well, and they have what I call in my mind, because I was thinking about this, this is interesting because I went to an event and there was a public school teacher there that was speaking about, I was asking about how classrooms are. They have what I call expandable deadlines. This younger generation presumes that a deadline provided is not real and that they have the ability to negotiate it further.

Oh yeah.

And we have an upcoming clientele base that's going to have a problem. They're going to want instant gratification because that's where they're at, less work. They have a lot of data coming to them, to your point, so the The level of communication will be very different. And then in addition to that, they have just expandable deadlines, and those expandable deadlines are to whatever they feel, and it's not until the penalty hits. I happen to have seen this, a business owner that was, um, came on and was very vulnerable, and I applaud this woman for doing this. A certain style business that she runs in Washington State, and she thought Probably because she checked not so deeply as she should have, that she had the ability to not have to charge sales tax. Oh boy. And her offering was excluding that. And then it came up in a review, and so it came up no, and it came up that there's some back items that are owed. I'm not sure of this individual's age. I'm not making judgment at all. I felt for her. But the thread that I took from it was it was a hard lesson and that you shouldn't think of those as basically, I'll call them expandable deadlines because they're not. There's severe consequences to those decisions.

Well, that circles right back around to what we were talking about in the beginning. You know, on the accounting side is more granular and structured. On the legal side with the clients, it's more fluid.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it all comes to communication. And honestly, a lot of firm owners, there are different levels of communication that they offer us. Some people are amazing and they're great at it. Other attorneys you'd think that they'd be great at, they're not. And that's just the way that they are. No judgment. We just have to find a good medium to communicate.

Sure. Sure.

You know, so, well, Steve, this has been great. This is a good conversation.

I really enjoyed this conversation this morning because it's, it's a good one to come out. It's a good one to put out, out front, out there. In fact, any attorneys or law firms or accounting people that service them, if you're listening to or watching this podcast and you have some input, by all means, you know, I can share it and, and Let us know what you think because it's real.

Yeah, please do. We'd love to hear it too. We'd love to hear feedback on what your thoughts are on this topic, how you've gone through it. Just would love to hear stories if you don't mind sharing.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, thank you everyone.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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