My partner Sid was great at remembering names and faces. At one networking event, 15 people introduced themselves, spoke about their area of specialty, and shared something about their personal lives. After everyone had spoken, Sid said something like, “Let’s see if I have got this right,” and then repeated the details that everyone had provided. Sid was a great rainmaker.
Frank Ramos, a Miami litigation lawyer, writes intelligently on LinkedIn. Recently, he posted that potential legal clients are moving away from using Google searches, and toward AI, to find lawyers. His conclusion is that lawyers should stop worrying about SEO and start writing intelligent commentary so that AI will identify them as an expert and recommend them.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
~ Milton Friedman
I have a theory about lawyers who do not have much of their own client base, and that is that they would be better lawyers if they did have a client base. I say this despite having run across quite a few lawyers who were dripping with clients but sorely lacking in legal skills, and others who had great legal skills but few of their own clients.
I base my theory on the hypothesis that communication and the ability to persuade are important legal skills. If lawyers cannot communicate in a manner to develop client loyalty and persuade people to give them business, surely, they must be missing some skills that, if developed, would make them better at what they did.
Don’t be distracted by criticism. Remember ~ the only taste of success some people have is when they take a bite out of you. ~ Zig Ziglar
A friend of mine told me that my name had come up in a conversation with another lawyer, who said that some of what I have posted of a personal nature is inappropriate, bad, and blameworthy, and that by extension I am a bad, bad, man.
There is a plumbing company out in the country where I live, whose slogan is, “We answer the phone.” It should not be a big differentiator, but it is. I have no idea how good they are at plumbing, but they answer the phone. That tells me that they care about their customers. So, why not call them?
I think that lawyers should know who they are and what type of clients they want (and the answer is not “any client with a pulse.”)
Here is a great example from Maureen Mckay’s website (www.mckaylegal.com):
McKay Legal® has a select clientele.
You are the right type of client for McKay Legal® if you:
One day, quite a few years ago, I was out for lunch with a banker who I will call Neal. Neal was a commercial account manager at a large Canadian Bank. As I always did at such meetings, I asked Neal, “how can I help you?” (For those of you who need a masterclass in networking, this is how you do it. You don’t tell referral sources how great you are, how your firm provides better quality services at lower prices, and all of the usual boring stuff. You ask people, “how can I help you?”)
Law firm marketing comes in two flavours.
A friend of mine, who I will call Bill, was named as a Best Lawyer. Bill is a sole practitioner in a narrow specialty, and I am inclined to believe that having his peers vote him that award is meaningful. Unlike some of the multitude of lawyers in large firms who won similar awards, Bill did not have hundreds of colleagues to vote for him.
Unfortunately, you will not find Bill’s name in the online directory of Best Lawyers because he declined to pay the minimum fee of $1,595 per year (supposedly reduced from $1,850).
Way back before the cell phone, we had a telephone in our reception area for clients to use. At the same time, my doctor had a sign in his reception area advising patients that the doctor’s phone was for his staff’s use and clients could use a payphone in the lobby. The difference? We lawyers had to market ourselves to find clients and then convince them to pay our bills. My doctor worked under a government health care system and did not have to worry about either of those things.