Welcome to The One Minute Manager. Our goal is to provide you with quick tips that will enhance the success of your practice. Within 60 seconds you will gain an idea that will increase your profitability or simply ease the burden of a difficult management issue. We hope you will find this a valuable resource.

The One Minute Manager . . . . .

The 2007 Annual Institute of Continuing Education of the Ontario Bar Association offered some shocking news during their session entitled ?Don't Look Now: Non-lawyers in the Real Estate Deal?.

Attorneys Richard Patterson and John O?Brien related the U.S. experience where real estate agents, developers, title insurance companies, and a host of non-lawyer service providers have effectively shut out lawyers from the residential real estate deal in the western states. The trend is rapidly travelling east and they warned of a similar threat to Canadian lawyers.

I had an opportunity to speak during the session and speculated that the root cause may be the lawyers? inability to market their value proposition to their clients. If clients perceive your value as simply providing the paperwork, then they will seek out low cost providers. If they are unconcerned of the need for quality representation, then they will undervalue the lawyer?s counsel.

Every lawyer is aware of the dire consequences that lurk in almost every legal transaction if the client is poorly represented. Yet this is not evident to clients, if you represent your services as merely papering the transaction. An important tenet of client satisfaction is that you provide value by offering deep legal experience to secure their interest. Yet lawyers do not communicate this important value that they bring to the transaction.

This principle applies to all solicitors and not just real estate lawyers. If you do not advise the client of the potential problems and their implications, they will not appreciate the full value that you bring to their interests. Process is cheap ? knowledge and experience is what you should be selling. In the end, effective salesmanship will keep the non-lawyer competition at bay.

Pablo Picasso was approached by a woman who asked that he sketch her picture. Within a few minutes he sketched the picture and asked her for 500 francs in payment. Why so much for just a few minutes she enquired. He replied ?It took me just a few minutes to sketch but it took a lifetime to know how?.