Bay St Transactional Lawyers, How "Sophisticated" Are Your Clients?

[LegalPositivism]

I've been wondering about this for a few days, and now is the perfect time to ask this as I am sitting at my desk waiting for responses as a result of my client raising a crazy last minute request the late afternoon before the closing date.

I just started this year as a corporate lawyer at a mid-sized full service firm (see my imposter syndrome post last month -- at least that's cured because work's been so crazy that I don't have the time to doubt myself). We work on many deals with bay st firms on the other side; our clients range from individual business owners to larger corporations.

The ones I've been recently dealing with or involved in relevant files are individual/family business owners. Most of them are very nice people, but because they tend to have relatively little understanding about legal matter, or their businesses are not that structured to have standard procedures or specific ppl taking care of specific matters, it takes a lot of energy to keep them on the right track. Examples I encountered in these days include --  some trying very hard to get their bank to produce documents but wasted all the time on irrelevant topics, returning disclosure information in illegible, handwritten scans, or last minute fussing over pennies on an almost million dollar deal.

I'm certainly not imagining sunshine and rainbows for anyone at biglaw on the client service aspect; I won't be surprised if someone told me it's even harder. But on a recent call, a large bay st firm made comments about our client on that deal not being sophisticated (reeking of condescension lol). This made me wonder do large bay st firms mostly deal with sophisticated, institutional clients? What's the ratio like, 70%? 80%? And how's your experience with clients in general?

Edited September 29, 2022 by LegalPositivism

[KOMODO]

Probably about three quarters of my instructing clients are in house counsel at their companies, so I would consider them all to be sophisticated. Note that someone can be sophisticated and polished and still know very little about your area of law - that's why they hired you. The remaining quarter are split between sophisticated and unsophisticated business people, but generally at the less sophisticated end, there will be someone sophisticated at the corporation and I just happen to be dealing with someone lower level who isn't. If you're dealing with small family businesses (and especially individuals), it's not that surprising that the level of sophistication is much lower than what a typical biglaw Bay Street person is dealing with. 

[Rashabon]

Yes, a lot of my clients (most) are very sophisticated. Some might be ignorant of certain aspects of what I do (e.g. successful U.S. business folks trying to dip into the Canadian capital markets for the first time) but they are otherwise fairly sophisticated. For some it means my job is easier because they actually understand my advice and can give me instructions I can follow. For others, it actually makes it tougher because they think they know everything when they actually don't. But the latter group is fairly rare.