Law departments may not like what comes back to them from a client satisfaction survey, but the unavoidable truth is that what clients believe they experience is for them reality. Justified or not, client perceptions are for law departments the hill to climb.
Likewise, ratings of employees on morale surveys may dismay managing lawyers in a department, but what the members feel shapes how effectively they work and interact – reality certainly follows from their perceptions. As a third example, if several law firm partners sense that a law department lacks decisiveness, clarity of instructions, or adept managers, quarrel as they might, law departments must live with and deal with those perceptions.
It simply won’t do to deny the logic of the other side’s evaluations, or patronize clients, employees or outside counsel as unable to perceive the truth, nor to shrug off their opinions as quirky, trivial, explicable, and unrepresentative.