Read these two versions of the same anecdote told by a litigation support consultant:

Version #1

Sometimes losing is almost as good as winning.  Not long ago, a major power company was sued for breach of a twenty-year power contract.  The plaintiffs were asking for damages in excess of one billion dollars, the value of the damages hinging on the discount rate used in their calculation. 

Multiple experts offered the defendant ways to calculate the rate.  We spent many hours educating the general counsel on the credibility of the alternative ways to calculate a discount rate and persuaded him of the intellectual superiority of our approach.  When the arbitrators compared our estimation of the discount rate with the one provided by the plaintiff’s expert, they found ours more credible.  The power company ended up paying the plaintiff only $115 million, far less than they would have had to pay if the plaintiffs had won or one of the other experts’ calculations of the discount rate had been presented.

Version #2

Sometimes losing is almost as good as winning.  Not long ago, a major power company was sued for breach of a twenty-year power contract.  The plaintiffs were asking for damages in excess of one billion dollars, the value of the damages hinging on the discount rate used in their calculation. 

The attorney representing the company asked several experts to calculate the rate.  He spent many hours with the power company’s general counsel evaluating the credibility of the alternative ways to calculate a rate, and selected our experts’ approach.  When he took the case before arbitrators, they found his arguments both intellectually superior and more compellingly presented than those provided by the plaintiff’s attorney.  The power company ended up paying the plaintiff only $115 million, far less than they would have had to pay if the plaintiffs had won or one of the other experts’ calculations of the discount rate had been presented.

These are both accurate descriptions of what occurred, but the points of view differ dramatically.  In Version #1 the consultant is the hero and the plaintiff’s attorney isn’t even mentioned.  In Version #2 the plaintiff’s attorney is the hero and the consultant a helpful sidekick.

Is one version better than the other?  Why?  Might one version be preferable in some circumstances and the second in others?  What circumstances might they be?
If you were an attorney listening to the story, which version would you find most interesting and compelling?  Why?

If you used this anecdote describing your services to an attorney considering using you on another case, what different messages might the two versions send to him?

An anecdote is a simplification of a complex bit of history.  How you choose to simplify sends a strong message to the listener.  You should choose your words carefully.  It is especially important that you choose your hero for the story with the listener in mind.

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For more on this topic, please see the new edition of my book, Rain Making: Attract New Clients No Matter What Your Field. This is a new edition of my earlier, bestselling book, with about 49-percent new content.

My firm is fourteen years old this month. This anniversary is an appropriate time to reflect on one of the people who helped me get it going. When I started, I had one client, a large technology consulting firm. To gather information needed for my work, I interviewed a number of their senior partners, and one of them was Charlie. At the end of the interview, he asked me what kind of work I did. I told him, and he asked if I could help with a problem which he described. I said I could, and he signed up for a project on the spot. My spirits soared, I so needed the work, only to crash two weeks later when I got a call to say that Charlie had quit, so the project was over. I had met the man once in my life for an hour, and he had never seen the results of my work and was in some kind of career turmoil. I wrote off the whole thing to bad luck and thought no more about it.

Three months later, I sat at my desk, sick with the realization that the two small projects I was working on were coming to an end, and, having no leads, I had little prospect of starting any new ones. Looking at my contact list, I knew that I had worked it too hard and couldn’t call these people again, because it might damage the relationship rather than generate leads. To not call anyone was to admit failure, so I asked myself who else was worth a try. Among the seven or eight names on this grasping-at-straws list was Charlie.

I tracked him down through his former secretary, called him and left him a message. I can still remember the message from him I found in my voice mail the next day. In it he said, “I’m so glad you called; I wanted to talk with you and didn’t know how to reach you.” That call resulted in the biggest client my little firm had for its first three years. That client was the difference between success and failure. And, I could so easily have never made that call!

I learned several important lessons from Charlie and this experience:

¨ It’s always better to be talking with someone out in the marketplace than with no one. If you are talking with someone, something good may happen, but if you talk to no one, you are almost assured of failure. It’s easy to come up with reasons why it isn’t worth calling someone—you can eliminate your entire contact list that way—but if you don’t call a person, you are unlikely to get his business. Call discipline is essential.