Quarles & Brady’s Commitment to Client Value

Your business exists for a direct, if not simple, reason: to create value for your customers. Your customers, however, come in all shapes and sizes.  To create value for them, you make an enormous investment of time and resources in understanding their needs and their desires.

While some of our colleagues in the legal profession disagree, we believe that our business is just like yours; we exist to create value for our clients. To do that, we persistently seek to understand what matters to you. What we’ve regularly learned during this search won’t surprise you: Every client views value through its own lens, its own set of business objectives, its own risk factors and sensitivities. What’s right for one client may not be so for another.

To direct our efforts, then, we have created our own set of benchmarks that we call our “Client Value Standards.” Not a statement or a form, our Value Standards instead serve as a starting point for face-to-face discussions with our clients. During these discussions, we tailor the Value Standards to meet each client’s specific preferences and expectations. By doing this, we aim to make our service valuable by the client's definition, not ours.

We emphasize six Value Standards. They are: 1.  Understand our client’s objectives and expectations. 2.  Provide substantive expertise that meets the client’s needs. 3.  Bring efficiency and effective process management to our work. 4.  Communicate from the perspective of a business partner, not a vendor. 5.  Budget and manage our work in a way that makes the client’s fees predictable. 6.  Execute with the first aim of delivering the results our client desires.

You may well have noticed that our Client Value Standards track the Value Index rating criteria created by the Association of Corporate Counsel (“ACC”) in part of its “Value Challenge.” As a strong proponent of the Value Challenge, we affirm its goal of refocusing the relationship between corporate clients and corporate counsel around certain principles that have long distinguished the profession, including strong communication, meaningful partnership, focused responsiveness, purposeful efficiency, and wise counseling — all delivered in a manner that serves common-sense notions of value. (For more information on ACC’s Value Challenge see www.acc.com/valuechallenge.)

For more on Quarles & Brady’s commitment to client value, please see the following article from the Wisconsin Law Journal: ACC Program Aims to Improve Relationships.

If you would like to speak further with us about our Client Value Standards, please contact our Managing Partner,
Fred Lautz, at (414) 277-5309 / , our Chief Value Partner, Mike Ostermeyer, at (414) 277-5521 /  or our Director of Client Satisfaction, Ruth Strekow, at (414) 277-5741 / .