Customer Service 101: How to Keep Your Clients Happy, Part 4

We noted in the previous post why communication plays a vital role in keeping customers happy. But if communications requires good people skills, the third “C”, creativity, requires good lawyer skills.  Clients are happy when you solve their problems.  When you’re solution oriented, not a “deal breaker.”  That’s hard to do when you don’t have experience in the area.  “There should be a nexus of some kind between your core practice and any supposedly ‘outside’ areas,” comments IP attorney Daniel Abraham.  “Otherwise, you’d better be armored against malpractice,” he adds. Creativity is more than just “winging it.”  You have to know the rules before you can bend them.  This served Abraham exceptionally well when negotiating on behalf of a graphic artist client against a major pharmaceutical corporation.  “My client had been approached to design cartoon characters for an advertising campaign,” he related.  “The corporation proposed a relatively low buyout.  By intimately understanding the concept of ‘exclusivity,’ not to mention copyright laws and licensing, we had a huge win.  We retained significant ownership rights, secured additional…