There is something I’ve been pondering since I passed the bar in the late 1980s: Do people who think like lawyers gravitate toward law school, or does going to law school and practicing law change the way you think? In my opinion, the answer is a little of both. Law is a conservative profession and, as Larry Richard has demonstrated in his research, tends to attract people who are skeptical and risk averse. In contrast, people who choose a career in business are thinking more about opportunity than about risk. At the same time, what do lawyers do all day long? They help clients figure out what might go wrong and advise them on how to manage those risks. If you are already predisposed to avoiding risk, practicing law reinforces your risk aversion.
Helping clients to effectively manage risk is what makes for a great lawyer. Being skeptical is a way to tease out how significant the risks are for your client. Your job is to protect your clients from unnecessary risk. The problem is that the things that make you a great lawyer are things that can get in the way when you are trying to build your practice or navigate your career.
Of course, the world does need lawyers. We play a valuable role in society. If the world was only made of entrepreneurs, the world would be a much more dangerous place. But if the world was only made up of lawyers, nothing would ever get accomplished.
In the practice of law, there is an endpoint in your work. You are trying to get a deal done, file a motion, settle a case or help a client comply with statutes and regulations. You are looking to protect your clients from liability. Your linear and structured thinking helps you solve the client’s problem. Whether you are dealing with disputes, transactions, compliance or planning, you are helping clients achieve their legal objectives. As lawyers, we are good at creating the structure we need to deliver our services. We tend to be organized and like to follow logical steps and procedures.
Growing a law practice is a very different endeavor. It can take time to build your reputation in a niche. It can take years for some relationships to bear fruit. There is no starting point and no endpoint. And the path to success in marketing is anything but linear. Instead, you need to keep an open mind.
In the early years, it is important to keep an open mind and pay attention to the work you like and the clients you like to serve. The more you gravitate toward the things you enjoy and the people you like, the more you will be energized to find more of that work. Developing a niche requires keeping an open mind (possibility for many years). As lawyers, we tend to prefer closure, hoping to solve the problem and get to the end. In developing a niche, it is important to be more flexible.
Similarly, relationship building, which is the cornerstone of business development for all professional services, requires a lot of flexibility. You can create structure in your life that ensures that you are interacting with potential clients and referral sources (join a bar association committee, get active in a trade association, volunteer for a nonprofit cause you care about, coach youth sports, give presentations to community groups, etc.). But the relationships you build will probably not come from structured interactions; relationships grow more organically.
Whatever you choose to do, be authentic. Engaging in activities that you genuinely enjoy and feel passionate about can be significantly more effective than forcing yourself to participate in those you feel you “should” do. In essence, choose both a niche and marketing strategies that mirror your passions and strengths.
When your client thinks someone is violating his trademark, he doesn’t want to know where you spent your summer vacation (although that might come up in the conversation and could become a source of connection); he wants you to stop the financial “bleeding” and get an injunction.
Lawyers who place greater emphasis on facts, objective data and logic can see problems more clearly in a way that is helpful to their clients. Good analysis is good lawyering.
On the other hand, if you want to cultivate your business prospects for future business, that analytical thinking can get in the way of forming a genuine personal connection. The foundation of most trusted relationships is not a detached, data-driven exchange of information.
Building business relationships is more about “relationships” than about “business.” Finding areas of common interest, asking open-ended questions that reveal ways that you can be helpful to someone (beyond solving their legal problem) or learning more about their personal background is a much more effective way to build rapport and connection.
Our ability to analyze problems and weigh risk are the hallmarks of being an effective lawyer. But when it comes to implementing a marking plan, we tend to overthink things.
In marketing, slow and steady wins the race. If you are second guessing every LinkedIn post you write before you publish it or spending hours spinning your wheels about whether to follow up again with the banker you met at an industry function, you are not advancing your marketing plan.
If you keep procrastinating about sending out emails to past clients or deciding what to write about, you are missing valuable opportunities to reconnect with the people who already know, like and trust you.
As a group, lawyers rank high on skepticism. That skepticism is crucial in the practice of law. Great lawyers think a lot about what might go wrong for their clients, so they don’t take anything at face value. A lawyer who wants to do a great job representing clients needs to wear her skeptic’s hat when evaluating the other party’s position in a deal or in a conflict. A lawyer who wants an accountant to refer corporate or real estate matters to him needs to build trust, not be skeptical of the accountant’s choice of movies or restaurants. Skepticism can be an impediment to building trusted relationships. And trusted relationships are the key to building referral relationships.
A client of mine who is the managing partner of a major firm is organizing a 20th anniversary celebration for the opening of the New York office of his firm. The event will be held at a major sports venue. The plan is to have partners invite their clients, but the firm also plans to invite firm alumni (in-house counsel and partners who have lateralled to other firms), referral partners who serve their clients’ other needs and administrative staff.
It is clearly a great opportunity to showcase the firm and strengthen relationships. But some of my client’s partners are not happy about it. One partner asked why his clients would want to come (he doesn’t want to waste their time. Others asked why they were inviting partners who are now competitors or why administrative staff should be included.
While most of his partners are excited about the event (it’s in a great venue), some are not seeing the party as a marketing opportunity. They only see it as risky and expensive.
There is no question; lawyers like to argue. It is hard for many attorneys to take things at face value and showing how smart we are is part of that. Lawyers tend to qualify a lot of their statements, and while that may be good lawyering, it doesn’t build social connection and encourage conversation.
If you want to build a practice, focus on relationships. If you want to build relationships, try validating instead of challenging. You also need to keep in mind that in selling, listening is the key skill. You can’t identify your prospect’s pain if you don’t listen. People who are great listeners show they care. People want to hire people they know, like and trust. You’ll engender more trust and goodwill by being a great listener. That usually means listening 80 percent of the time.
There will be plenty of time to give your opinion if the individual hires you. If you don’t let your prospect talk, you may be rendering an opinion about the wrong problem. Listening in a nonjudgmental way is also a great way to increase loyalty with your referral sources and build client relationships.
Lawyers also rank high on the trait of urgency. Once again, having a sense of urgency is a good quality for a lawyer who is trying to meet any kind of deadline. But urgency may be a hindrance in social interactions.
A client of mine just landed his best client. He met her when they worked together in private practice. The lawyer had left their old firm 10 years earlier and went to a company that already had IP counsel. Periodically, my client invited his former colleague to meals, to panels where he was speaking and even invited her to be on panels. Ten years later, the client moved to another company, and she was finally able to send work to my client. That client is now his biggest client ever.
A successful rainmaker takes a lot of chances and fails often. In baseball, a superstar is someone who bats .300 (failing seven times out of 10). You can be a superstar rainmaker if you bat .050 (landing business from five out of 100 interactions you have).
This means that you will have a lot of “failure” along the way. Really, what this means is that business development is a volume business. To be successful in generating legal work, you want to be meeting a lot of prospects over time. Some will never turn into clients; some will never even return your phone calls or respond to your emails. But some will.
Professional identity can also be an initial barrier to selling. In my own experience, I was raised by a father who was a math professor. I remember my father calling businesspeople “operators.” Simply put, business was not respected in my household. Similarly, for many lawyers, selling feels dirty.
In my own 30-year journey, I’ve come to appreciate that selling legal services is nothing like selling used cars. If you like getting to know people, and if you like to find ways to be helpful, you can succeed in legal marketing. High-pressure sales don’t work with high-ticket items such as legal services. Providing solutions does.
Skepticism, risk aversion, urgency, competitive spirit and analytical thinking may make you a better lawyer. But turn off those tendencies when you are trying to build your network and strengthen your business relationships. While the quality of your lawyering will surely impact your career, being able to generate work, land the right job or lead your firm requires different skill sets. And, in the long run, those qualities will have just as much impact on your career happiness as your technical abilities.
