The Importance Of Managing Client Expectations

It is human nature to warm to pleasant surprises.  It is an axiom of legal practice that clients hate surprises, at least the “bad news” kind.  Smart lawyers do two things consistently:  they keep their client’s expectations realistic and they almost always over deliver.  In this vein, look at this post from Tom Kane in the Legal Marketing Blog.  My favorite part is this quote from Tom Peters.  “Formula for success: under promise and over deliver.”

There may be some who say “I don’t want my expectations ‘managed.’”  Don’t read “manage” to mean manipulated.  Instead, this is a variation on the “no bad news” theme noted above.  If you under promise and over deliver, the chances of negative surprises is drastically reduced.