Recently, I wrote about what I called the Tier 1/Tier 2/Tier 3 challenge for BigLaw. Briefly, the Tiers are:

• 1: What everyone aspires to. Think Wachtell, Skadden, Cravath, et al. Good luck emulating them, or convincing the market you’re their peers if you’re not already so perceived.
• 2: Where everyone’s bread and butter work comes from. As described in my first piece:
  • Tier 2 – Mid-level stakes. These matters will have valid legal claims involving enough money that they require a reasonable legal response, but not at the level of Tier 1. This segment of the market has seen increasing price sensitivity. Two to three years ago the work may have commanded fees near Tier 1 level but not any more. Put this segment at 50-60% of the market and growing.
• 3: Nuisance work, with extremely high price sensitivity and dubious legal claims.

I promised another column on Tier 2, and here you are.

Why Tier 2? Simple: Tiers 1 and 3 are easy.

OK, they’re not “easy” in the sense that being Slaughter & May or a bulge-bracket NYC firm is not remotely easy, but they’re easy to describe and easy to delineate who belongs to those empyream clubs and who doesn’t. Likewise, Tier 3 is easy in the sense that being a law factory is a readily understood business model, and mixing the proportion of factor inputs between domestic/cheaper locations, foreign/really cheaper locations, highly disciplined adult supervision, and business process reinvention, is far less important than deciding to become a law factory in the first place.

No, I see Tier 2 as the challenging area.

To begin with, no firm is exclusively in Tier 2 land. Most have one foot in Tier 2 and one foot in Tier 1, with different weights on each foot as client mixes evolve and time goes by. This “two-footed” stance means different partners within your firm spend more, and less, of their time doing Tier 1 work and Tier 2 work. Some will live all but exclusively in one world or the other, and others will migrate between the two types of service, within a single day and without even thinking about it in this way (which is highly idealized, after all) but I bet if you asked them they’d be able to tell you which client matters fell where on the landscape.

The challenge, then, for a firm as a whole is this: Unless it’s a pure Tier 1 firm, it can’t and shouldn’t turn down anything that’s respectable Tier 2 work. So how does it position itself as simultaneously (a) better than its peers at Tier 2; and (b) eminently capable of handling Tier 1 when needed.

Tough job.

That, I suspect, is why so few law department branding campaigns are credible.

One more thought about Tier 2 work: I used a fuzz-phrase a couple of paragraphs ago, when I said it’s challenging for firms to position themselves as “better” than its peers at this type of work. What on earth does “better” mean?

Several possibilities:

• Cheaper. No, do not go there. This is not turf on which you ever want to compete, and if you do start competing there, you will find yourself on a fast-moving escalator to the basement.
• Higher quality legal work. In a word, fuhgeddaboutit. Superlative legal work is table stakes in this league.
• More responsive? Now we’re getting somewhere.

  If clients can’t judge quality of legal representation on a day to day basis, they can judge responsiveness.

  Small digressive anecdote, but I hope it holds a lesson: I’m president of our co-op on the Upper West Side, and last week we had to ask our law firm to draft a nasty letter to a supplier. I described the situation to the partner who represents us in an email, he replied that day that he’d deal with it, I got a draft from an associate the next day (the partner having already alerted me that he’d be out of town for 48 hours), I replied to the associate within a few hours suggesting some important corrections to the letter (for example, he had the name of an entirely different building in the “Re:” line), and I never heard a word from the associate. It’s now been 5 days.

  Am I upset that he  misnamed our building?  Not at all:  I know how these things work and I’m glad he economized and cloned a letter lying around instead of drafting one from scratch.

  No, what I’m miffed about, as a client, is that he didn’t have the courtesy to reply–perhaps even thanking me for catching his mistake–but simply a human acknowledgement would have gone a long way.

  For all I know, he’s a future Supreme Court justice, but he’s not an impressive 3rd-year associate.

• Know your client.

  If this sounds like the last point, it’s not.

  I mean know your client. If they’re a public company, this is trivial: Newsfeeds, 10-Ks, 10-Qs, all other filings, Reuters, Bloomberg, and DowJones reports, etc.

  Go to industry conventions; subscribe to trade journals; ask your client what’s going on and what their challenges are. Pay attention.

  Don’t brag about how qualified you are, your partners are , or your associates are. Speak to your client about what’s going on with them.

Now, does all this make you a successful Tier 2/Tier 1 straddling firm? No, but it’s a start.

Next up in this series: Who can pull off Tier 3?