If you believe John Remsen Jr., the most important thing you can do to attract and keep clients is to excel at customer service.

Being a good lawyer alone doesn’t cut it, the law-firm-marketing guru explains. “Lousy service is the number one reason clients fire law firms, and there are dozens of surveys and reports concluding that most lawyers don’t do a very good job in this area,” he writes in his June report.

Click here to read Remsen’s eight rules of thumb, which he says come straight from the mouths of in-house counsels at a panel he moderated.

Among his reminders:

-Clients hire lawyers, not law firms. “That means you – not your firm and not your marketing department – need to get out there and cultivate relationships.”

-Be there when they need you. Expectations have risen dramatically in recent years; 24 hours might not be an acceptable time frame for a response.

-Be nice to the staff. Your clients’ secretaries, paralegals and staff have more influence than you might think, and you just never know where or when you’ll run into them in the future.

Thanks to sister blog The Michigan Lawyer for the link.

JACKIE SAUTER, Web Editor

Via the ABA Journal blog, a law professor says he was denied communion because he backs Barack Obama, an abortion-rights supporter. The prof, Pepperdine University’s Douglas Kmiec, writes a column for the Catholic News Service and used to be dean at Catholic University.

A spokesman for Cardinal Roger Mahoney has confirmed the event occurred in the Los Angeles Archdiocese and called the priest’s action “absolutely indefensible.”

What do you think about this?

CARYN TAMBER, Legal Affairs Writer