“For successful partnership, clarity of communication is vital. You can only collaborate successfully when you both know what the end goals are and how you both are going to achieve it.” — Priti Shetty, General Counsel, ICICI Bank UK

There is a simple but important distinction between ‘goals’ and ‘outcomes.’ Goals are what the client wants. Outcomes are what the client gets. That’s obvious when you think about it, but still crucial. Why? Because clients have ambitions while lawyers have responsibilities. One of the tenets of being a ‘Lean’ lawyer is taking responsibility and being accountable.

Goals are the client’s ambition, but outcomes are the lawyer’s responsibility.

That simple but uncontroversial analysis explains why every legal project should start with planning, and why planning should start with defining outcomes carefully, meticulously, and always in concert with the client.

With that sobering thought, we can lay out a four-point proposition for all lawyers, commencing all projects, everywhere.

  1. It is imperative to understand the client’s goals fully; and yet
  2. Express a client’s goal as a ‘desired outcome’ and depict it within a range wherever possible;
  3. Arrival at the desired range of outcomes can’t always be guaranteed, but some level of probability analysis can usually be offered to the client; and so
  4. It is essential for the lawyer and client to agree these parameters before the lawyer launches into the project.

These seemingly obvious steps are overlooked at the lawyer’s peril.

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