Once you’ve had some opportunities to develop clients and generate some business, it’s critical that you start assessing your success.
Throughout your legal career, no matter what sector of the law you are in, you will need to think about marketing. If you are a junior associate in a law firm, you will first and foremost be marketing your work ethic, can-do attitude and eventually your skill set to the senior associates and partners with whom you work. If you are in a corporation or a government agency, you will be doing much the same.
After you’ve been practicing for a few years, you’ll begin to start turning toward marketing your own skills and expertise, both internally and externally. If you end up starting your own practice, marketing your capabilities will be essential to developing and fostering your business. Marketing advice abounds on the internet, in CLE programs and sometimes internally within your firm, especially if you have a marketing director or department. If you are in a smaller firm, one of the biggest ways that junior attorneys are schooled about marketing is by their more senior counterparts. Unfortunately, that can sometimes devolve into telling war stories, focusing on what worked for a particular individual in a specific practice. The better question may be, What will work for you? And once you have tried some things, you will have something of a track record to examine. You will need to ask and answer, What has worked for me?
Self-Assessment
A good starting place is to evaluate your personal style and preferences for determining the best ways for you to communicate your skills and expertise. If you’re a good writer, start to gain some experience by publishing articles, blogs
Don’t forget your public persona. This includes LinkedIn and other more informal aspects of your social media presence. As your skill sets grow and change, you want to ensure that your media presence is communicating where you are in your trajectory. Keep your profiles up to date, and if you are writing or speaking, make sure these activities are noted.
If you’re uncertain about any or all of your personal marketing options, spend some time doing them and see what feels like the best fit for you. Be willing to ask trusted friends and colleagues where they think you would get the most traction in your marketing efforts. While it is definitely possible to get better at something where you are not yet significantly skilled, many people will find that trying to excel in a space that runs totally counter to their personality and interests is unlikely to provide the best platform for business development. The difference between stepping out of your comfort zone and doing things that aren’t truly congruent with who you are and how you do your best work is the difference between worthwhile and thwarted efforts.
Activity Assessment
Once you’ve had some time and opportunities to develop clients and generate some business, it’s critical that you start assessing your success. Remember that repetition of activities is key to providing traction in your efforts. Writing a single article or participating in one CLE panel is unlikely to bring you the business that you want to generate. Repeat your efforts and remember that a particularly good source of client development is doing good work for your existing clients. As you develop a portfolio, these are some questions you should start asking:
- How have clients come to me or sought out my services?
- How have I tracked this process, and what tools am I using to keep an easily sortable record of referrals?
- What aspects of my marketing activities are yielding the best outcomes? Do they correlate to the effort necessary to generate the business? Think of this in terms of the time necessary to perform the tasks and the financial costs of doing so.
- What am I doing in my after-matter assessments to determine how clients came to use my services and their satisfaction levels with the services I am providing? If there have been problems, what are my weaknesses? How can I intervene on my own behalf in future matters to be more successful for my clients?
- In addition to gathering feedback at the end of a matter, am I making mid-course corrections if things are not going as well as I’d hoped? Perhaps I need to develop a mid-matter evaluation process to ensure that my clients’ expectations align with the way I’m pursuing their legal issue.
- How do I know what is working in terms of my marketing efforts? What can I do to measure them? What are the questions that I should be asking current clients to determine what mattered most when choosing an attorney?
- If referral by former and current clients is a significant source of business, how am I tracking which of my current clients is referring matters that generate the most revenue, and how can I foster the most additional referrals?
- Which of my clients
have been with me the longest? Do I know why they have stayed with me? - How do I know what is most important to my clients? While I think I have an idea, is it accurate?
- Where do my assumptions come from about client selection of an attorney? What would it take to confirm or change those assumptions?
As in many matters of feedback, we sometimes fail to ask questions for fear of what we will learn. However, operating on assumptions without actually measuring them against reality may cause you to continue a trajectory that is headed in the wrong direction.
Your Ideal Client Profile
Once you have a better idea of your best sources for generating business, which clients bring in the most revenue and those clients whose longevity has provided continuity, it can be helpful to generate a profile of the ideal client. Doing so can help you talk with other referral sources about the kind of work that you are looking for. This will, of course, change during the course of your career. As a junior
While this information sometimes spreads through the grapevine, it’s useful to take your successes into your own hands and offer them in other situations of opportunity. At some
As your knowledge base, experiences and skills grow, this will change. When you are managing your own