The organization I work for is a very small law firm, consisting of one attorney, one paralegal, and myself, the business manager. In the Chalk Talk, we learned that market orientation has three components: 1) customer focus 2) competitor focus 3) cross functional teams. The "lifeblood" of market orientation is market research.
Our firm, Champion Law Group, is strongly client focused. The Bar Association as well as most attorneys would frown upon legal clients being referred to as customers. Indeed, many attorneys bristle at the idea of law being a "business" at all. The firm's attorney is very much in touch with what clients and potential clients need. To that end, in light of current economic circumstances, a retainer is rarely required and flexible payment plans substantially increase legal access for those who might not otherwise have it.
The firm is not very competitor focused. This is mostly due to the abundance of clients; by waving the retainer and allowing payment plans we have more potential clients than we could possibly take on.
As for cross-functional teams, in a three-person organization we really can't help but have cross functional teams, while we all have our own areas of responsibility, and there are some things only the attorney can do.
Market research has been largely ignored, again due to the abundance of clients. As it is my plan to grow this firm, this is not an area that can be ignored much longer.
As for how my colleagues would respond to some of Drucker's ideas, I have been thinking about that quite a bit since beginning Cohen's book. The idea that the goal of business is not profit maximization resonates strongly in this firm. Having an explicit goal of profit maximization might even violate the Rules of Professional Responsibility, which could result in our attorney being disciplined by the Bar Association. However, the proposition that the goal of our business is to create a customer/client does not sit well either. Lawyers are essentially professional problem solvers (and professional secret keepers) and so "creating a client" could be interpreted as creating problems the lawyer then must be paid to solve. It may seem like semantics, but most licensing jurisdictions' Rules of Professional Responsibility allow an attorney to be disciplined for doing something that creates the appearance of impropriety; actual wrongdoing need not be proven.
The mission of CLG is to solve clients' problems with integrity, efficiency, and humanity. Perhaps we could adapt Drucker's principle to the goal of our business being to create repeat clients. That gets us closer to what would be acceptable in the legal world, however I think the problem is with the word "create". There is an argument that it reasonably implies the lawyer is somehow contriving client problems to increase the lawyer's fee, which is partly what the Rules aim to punish. Remember the standard is the appearance of impropriety not actual wrongdoing.
While word choice is very important to a lawyer, I do not think Drucker would worry too much about the exact verbiage. I think that what he was getting at is that businesses ought to be people-focused and not money-focused. This dovetails nicely with the mission of CLG.
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