Lawyers and customer service

Posted by Nancy Rapoport.

Has our society changed its tolerance for the quality of customer service?  I’ve just spent the past month wrestling with customer service problems at Large Overnight Package Delivery Service and Small, Ineffective Garage Door Company, and it caused me to wonder if lackadaisical customer service is now the norm. 

Or it might be the norm outside the legal profession.  What I’ve seen recently, at least in large law firms, is the uber-customer-service model, where firms pull out all the stops to serve their clients.  Their lawyers and legal assistants are on call all the time, even on vacation, and — in some places — it’s a point of honor to bill massively long yearly hour totals. 

There has to be a happy medium somewhere, right, between no customer service at all and such intense customer service that the burnout rate is excessively high?