Posted by J Matthew Buchanan at April 14, 2005 11:25 AM

This post is the first on Anonymous Lawyer that didn’t make me laugh out loud. For some reason, I took this one to heart.

Anonymous apparently hates clients who need their lawyers to partner with them. Simply put, Anonymous wants to use his (and his firm’s) expertise to get in, fix a problem, and get out:

There are two types of clients. There are the ones who understand how this business works and let us come in, solve their problems, and get out. And then there are the ones who want something we're not selling. They want a therapist. They want a business advisor. They want someone to "partner" with them, and "understand their business," and "be a member of their team."

Anonymous is a big firm guy (BFG), so it comes as no surprise, really, that he’s not selling ‘partnership’ (what we like to call the Embedded Patent Attorney in our intellectual property sphere). He can’t. As a BFG (a BFP (partner), no less), the economics of law practice have put him so far into the stratosphere of the billing rate universe that he needs to jump from matter-to-matter (and client-to-client), getting in, billing the daylights out of the matter (and client), and getting out.

Having ‘Anonymous the BFG’ embedded in a company would be a financial disaster for all but a select few organizations. He probably could train some of his associates (read lower billing rates) to help them become embedded…trying to save the client some money and provide great legal service at the same time. And fostering a long-term lawyer-client relationship to boot.

Nope. Anonymous hates these ‘needy’ clients so much that his approach is to “assign the worst…associates I know…just to spite…[the client].”

I’m still not laughing. Which, of course, is a testament to Jeremy’s writing and his amazing ability to absolutely nail an issue.

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