Archive for year: 2010

A relatively new client who hired me to work on business development asked me this week about using Twitter and mobile marketing to push blog and newsletter content.  Interesting idea, except that this client doesn’t yet have a blog or a newsletter!  When I pointed that out, she  pushed back at first, telling me that she wants to make the best use possible of technology. Fine, I said, but once you know what that is, what will you be able to do with it?  She was quiet for a few seconds, then she chuckled and said yes, but it’s much easier to think about how to distribute articles than to write them.  So true, isn’t it?

That reminded me of one of the keys to any kind of development:  build the foundation first.  As any of you who have heard me talk about business development (or who have read The Reluctant Rainmaker) know, I’m in favor of repurposing your work in as many ways as possible and getting it out to the widest effective audience possible.  With today’s technology, that can mean using so many different avenues.

A slight diversion — but stay with me, because it does relate.  This weekend, I decided to look for a fairly simple white bookcase.  I checked the Ikea website, and I found 16 pages of white bookcases.  Tall, short, with glass doors and without, with narrow shelves or deep shelves, and on and on and on.  I had so many options that I felt paralyzed.  How could I possibly decide among that many white bookcases?  All told, I probably spent 20 or 30 minutes browsing bookcases and comparing them, and that time was basically wasted because the choices were too numerous for me to get anywhere.  Without more context, the various styles meant nothing to me.

That’s what happens to some lawyers as they think about business development:  the options are so numerous that it’s easy to get paralyzed.  Should you focus on writing or speaking or networking?  If it’s writing, should it be in traditional journals or on a blog?  If networking, should it be with lawyers or in an industry group, or should you focus on social online?  Creating a business development plan is the first step I recommend, because it will help you to cut through all of those options without getting overwhelmed.

As you plan, though, I recommend simplifying and doing first things first.  Do you want to focus on building interpersonal relationships, which will lead to new business if built strategically and mined appropriately?  Or should you focus first on building your substantive knowledge, skills, and credibility?  Whichever you answered, what’s  the most important thing for you to do right now to reach that goal?  Do that.

In other words, before you spend hours on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn, meet face-to-face with a group of people who are your ideal clients or who can refer you to your ideal clients.  As fabulous as online networking can be, it rarely if ever will replace face-to-face conversation.  Before you explore how to use video to get your presentations online for the world to see, make some presentations in real-time in front of the right audience.  Build your foundation, and then expand it.

Am I encouraging you to forego technology?  Absolutely not.  But you must have a firm foundation built before you begin to exploit the wonders of technology.  Simplify, and master the simplest step before you expand to more complicated steps.

When you talk, you want others to listen, right?  Whether it’s a now-or-never event (making a key point in an oral argument, for instance) or one in a long stream of communications (talking with a colleague about some aspect of a representation), getting your point across and making some sort of advance in what you’re doing is probably at the top of your list every time you open your mouth.

How you present yourself, how you communicate, how you listen, how you connect, and how you respond to feedback you receive creates leadership presence.  Think about stage presence, that indefinable something that makes magic as soon as an actor steps onto a stage.  Leadership presence is the business version of stage presence.

Leadership presence can be cultivated.  Belle Linda Halpern and Kathe Lubar of The Ariel Group wrote a book titled Leadership Presence, in which they outline the PRES model.  To develop your own presence, consider these aspects:

P – Being Present.  Being “present” means being fully focused on what’s going on in the time and space you’re occupying, so that you’re able to respond to whatever happens, however, unexpected it may be.

R – Reaching Out.  Leaders must listen to others and build authentic relationships.  Emotional intelligence plays a significant role in reaching out to others in a genuine and effective way.

E – Expressiveness.  Use your words, your body language, and the tone and rate of your speech to express your message, and ensure that each of these routes for communication is congruent with the others.  We’ve probably all seen someone who shakes his head in a “no” gesture while saying, “What a great idea,” or a manager who stands in front of a group to announce an “exciting new initiative with lots of opportunities for us to do well,” while her body is slumped and her voice is halting and quiet.  Harness the power of communication and express your message clearly.

S – Self-knowing.  Effective leaders tend to be self-aware, authentic regardless of situation or circumstance, and guided by core values and priorities.  Bill George uses the analogy of True North in his book of the same title.  A leader who knows her True North and acts accordingly will exhibit a stronger presence than one who shifts based on context.

Practice using “PRES” when you speak over the next few days or weeks.  Notice how you feel and how others respond to you.  Notice where you feel comfortable and where perhaps you need additional practice.  And notice, most importantly, the effect your presence has on your leadership.

The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership:  Follow Them And People Will Follow You

by John C. Maxwell

 The subtitle of Maxwell’s book is “Follow Them, and People Will Follow You.”  Each time I read that line, I hear a rejoinder in my head:  “Don’t follow them, and people won’t follow you.”  Revised and updated in 2007 for the 10th anniversary of The 21 Irrefutable Laws, this book is rightly regarded as a foundational piece of the leadership literature.

As the title indicates, Maxwell presents 21 laws of leadership, all of which are free-standing and yet buttressed by one another.  You can learn quite a bit simply by reviewing the 21 laws with Maxwell’s brief explanation of each:

1. The Law of the Lid:  Leadership Ability Determines A Person’s Level of Effectiveness
2. The Law of Influence:  The True Measure of Leadership Is Influence — Nothing More, Nothing Less
3. The Law of Process:  Leadership Develops Daily, Not In A Day
4. The Law of Navigation:  Anyone Can Steer The Ship, But It Takes A Leader To Change The Course
5. The Law of Addition:  Leaders Add Value By Serving Others
6. The Law of Solid Ground:  Trust Is The Foundation of Leadership
7. The Law of Respect:  People Naturally Follow Leaders Stronger Than Themselves
8. The Law of Intuition:  Leaders Evaluate Everything With A Leadership Bias
9. The Law of Magnetism:  Who You Are Is Who You Attract
10. The Law of Connection:  Leaders Touch A Heart Before They Ask For A Hand
11. The Law of the Inner Circle:  A Leader’s Potential Is Determined By Those Closest To Him
12. The Law of Empowerment:  Only Secure Leaders Give Power To Others
13. The Law of the Picture:  People Do What People See
14. The Law of Buy-In:  People Buy Into The Leader, Then The Vision
15. The Law of Victory:  Leaders Find A Way For The Team To Win
16. The Law of the Big Mo:  Momentum Is A Leader’s Best Friend
17. The Law of Priorities:  Leaders Understand That Activity Is Not Necessarily Accomplishment
18. The Law of Sacrifice:  A Leader Must Give Up to Go Up
19. The Law of Timing:  When To Lead Is As Important As What To Do And Where To Go
20. The Law of Explosive Growth:  To Add Growth, Lead Followers — To Multiply, Lead Leaders
21. The Law of Legacy:  A Leader’s Lasting Value Is Measured By Succession

My favorite law, the umbrella under which all of the other laws fall, is the Law of Process.  Leadership can’t be developed in a day or a week.  Instead, it grows and becomes refined through a lifetime of self-management, skills acquisition, and relationships:

If you continually invest in your leadership development, letting your ‘assets’ compound, the inevitable result is growth over time.  What can you see when you look at a person’s daily agenda?  Priorities, passion, abilities, relationships, attitude, personal disciplines, vision, and influence.  See what a person is doing every day, day after day, and you’ll know who that person is and what he or she is becoming.

Often, when I speak to newer lawyers about leadership development, someone in the group will ask why a new graduate in the first few years of practice should be concerned with leadership development, since they’re at the bottom of the totem pole.  My answer is three-fold.

First, it’s critical for every lawyer to lead him- or herself and to develop a strong foundation in self-management.

Second, usually even “bottom of the totem pole” lawyers soon have an opportunity to lead something, whether it’s a document review team or a subcommittee.

And third, as Maxwell writes, “champions don’t become champions in the ring — they are merely recognized there.”  If a lawyer waits until a leadership position is on the horizon to begin developing good leadership skills, the position may never present itself, or if it does, the lawyer will lack the necessary skills to thrive in that position.  (Incidentally, point 3 is well illustrated in Maxwell’s first law, the Law of the Lid.)

What’s in it for lawyers?  Although each of The 21 Irrefutable Laws is important for leadership development, perhaps none speaks to the profession in quite the same way as the Law of Explosive Growth.  That law holds that leaders who develop leaders create an organization that can achieve explosive growth, since “for every leader they develop, they also receive the value of all of that leader’s followers.”  Imagine the potential for enormous and sustainable growth in a law firm in which leaders are developed.

Read one chapter a week and apply what you learn.  Without question, you will grow as a leader, and you’ll see the difference in your day-to-day life and practice, with clients, and in whatever leadership roles you may hold.

Through years of school and various jobs and activities, we’ve learned how to persist even in the face of difficulties.  Persistence is an important trait, since (in the words of one of my current favorite songs) “what’s worth the prize is always worth the fight.”  No fight may mean no prize, and we’ve integrated that lesson in our professional lives.  (Think back to law school, and I virtually guarantee you’ll remember at least one class that would have stopped you cold had you not been committed to fighting your way through.)

An opposing principle is the concept of diminishing returns, in which additional effort doesn’t produce additional results proportional to that effort.  For example, when you draft a memorandum for a client, the first and second drafts are generally critical to the end result.  By the time you get to the fifth or fifteenth or fiftieth draft (depending on the complexity of the matter at hand), you’re making only small changes and word-smithing.  A single word can occasionally affect the impact of an entire document, so experience is often required to know when you’ve reached the point of diminishing returns.

When it comes to business development, diminishing or even nonexistent returns may be difficult to see without qualitative or quantitative feedback.  For example, publishing a substantive article almost always represents a significant advancement because it adds to your credibility in your practice area.  However, it’s unlikely that a single article will result in a flood of new business, and it is possible that even a string of articles may not produce new billable work if the articles aren’t well targeted or if there’s no reason for readers to reach out to you.  When should you keep publishing, and when should you move on to something else, at least for a time?

The Groundhog Day problem is this:  how do you distinguish between activities that aren’t producing results yet and activities that are unlikely ever to produce the results you seek?  We all know that time may be required to show results, so we don’t expect every activity to yield new results right away.  But you have to know when to keep going and when to shift activities, or you can keep on working harder and harder at something, only to discover that all your effort has produced nothing.

Keeping track of the rainmaking activities you’re doing and the results you’re attaining is the only way you’ll know when to keep going and when to shift courses.  Set clear and concrete goals for your rainmaking activity.  Specific and time-based goals are helpful for measuring progress and staying on track.  Examples include, “my goal is to bring in $35,000 of new collaborative divorce business within the next 12 months,” or “my goal is to develop a $75,000 book of business made up of personal injury cases each with a value of $15,000 to $20,000.”  These goals provide a measuring stick for your progress, but you shouldn’t measure your success exclusively by the amount of business you bring in.

Landing new business is your ultimate goal and the reason for undertaking rainmaking activity, but you must also track interim goals.  Imagine that you hadn’t run at all since high school and you decided to train to run a marathon.  You almost certainly wouldn’t make that decision and then lace up your running shoes to run 26 miles right off the bat!  Instead, you’d set smaller goals.  Maybe running two or three miles, or even running for 20 minutes.  As you achieve those goals, you’ll also notice additional accomplishments along the way, such as not being sore the day after a long run when in the beginning of your training you could hardly walk the next day.  Tracking those smaller goals helps you know that you’re making progress toward the ultimate goal of running a marathon even though you aren’t yet running the full 26 miles.  The same principles apply for tracking your business development efforts.

For example, let’s suppose you have a relationship with someone who was employed by a client company several years ago, that she has moved to a new company, and that she’s now in a position to recommend outside counsel but does not have authority to hire.  If you measure success with that contact based solely on getting business from her, you will likely find yourself discouraged.

But you could instead measure the interim steps that move you closer to getting business from her.  A few examples of those interim steps might be getting introduced to the person responsible for making decisions, getting your contact’s feedback on what she thinks it would take for you to be awarded business, being invited to make a presentation to the company or a department on a subject related to the legal matters you hope to handle, and so on.

None of these steps is the same as getting the billable work, of course, but they measure progress.  If you notice that you’re working to grow the relationship with your contact over a period of months and years and you aren’t getting any business from it, you need to look at these kinds of interim steps to see whether there’s any progress or whether you should perhaps conclude that this contact is not as hot a prospect for new business as you had believed.  Tracking the interim progress and measuring it against your ultimate goal is how to avoid the insanity of continuing to plug away at activity that won’t ever produce results.

In other words, watch the ultimate goals of getting new business, but keep your eyes on the interim steps as well to be sure that you’re progressing toward that ultimate goal.  If you don’t see progress that is actually moving you closer to bringing in new business, then it’s time to ask yourself:  Is it Groundhog Day again?

Do you ever feel that you’re just one lawyer in a large sea of others?  New lawyers often begin their practices wondering how to distinguish themselves from the hundreds or thousands of other lawyers occupying the same niche.  And lawyers who’ve been in practice for some time may have the same nagging question.  Though the question may fade, it frequently re-emerges when a lawyer is preparing to grow her practice or is considering some shift in substantive areas.

Differentiation from other lawyers and law firms is useful in marketing and business development conversations.  So, how can you differentiate yourself?

While the options are potentially limitless, three examples may help you to create your own ideas.

1. Blog.  My background is in patent litigation, and when in practice I often referred to the Patently-O Blog by Dennis Crouch.  Patently-O is know for, among other things, its full coverage of every patent case decided by the Federal Circuit.  It became the go-to reference for what’s going on in patent law, and I’d venture to guess that an amazingly high number of patent lawyers and “civilians” who are interested in patent law read the blog on a near-daily basis.  I was astonished when I learned that Dennis started the blog less than a year after being admitted to practice.  He’s since moved on to academia, a move that was quite likely assisted by his blogging efforts as well as his other credentials.It may be a bit of overstatement to say, “blog it and they will come,” but it isn’t a bad starting point since blogging provides a platform through which a lawyer may share resources, analysis, and enough personal content to become known to readers.  Blogging is a good way to build your repurtation as an expert in your field.  It’s also a good way to begin to form relationships with other bloggers and, perhaps, with your readers.  I would not recommend relying on a blog as your primary avenue for bringing in new business, but it’s a good complement for many lawyers.
2. Create a unique experience for your clients.  What can you offer clients that other lawyers don’t?  The opportunities vary widely by practice area, but any value-added service is a good step toward differentiation.  Be attentive to the habit that may set you apart from others, including quick responses to telephone calls and emails, offering regluar case updates, and providing educational resources on topics such as how to prepare to give deposition/trial testimony or what to consider when getting ready to make estate plans.Another idea:  introduce your client to every member of your legal team who will be involved with the representation.  Even something as quick as an introductory letter identifying other lawyers, paralegals, and office assistants that is signed by each can offer a client comfort when contacting your office.  Consider, of course, what is appropriate for your practice:  what will impress a family law client may be radically different from what will impress the CEO or general counsel of a multi-million dollar corporation.Beyond adding value for your clients, look for ways to create value for them.  If your clients’ children often accompany them for visits to your office, have some books and toys in a kid-friendly corner.  If you become aware of a new issue or development that your clients need to understand better, create a presentation or an article that you can use to educate them.  What can you bring to an engagement that others can’t or don’t?
3. Become active and visible in the community.  Volunteering, serving on boards, or working with non-profits in other capacities is a good way to become known.  It provides a context for conversations that often makes it more comfortable for reluctant networkers, and it may present you the opportunity to offer guidance and suggestions that serve as a taste of the service you offer clients.  Moreover, you may have opportunities to speak or write through these channels, both of which will serve to raise your profile.

Be clear about what makes you different.  If you want to differentiate yourself from other practitioners, it’s imperative to connect with an internal compass that will point to what does indeed make you different.  If you don’t know what that is, you won’t be able to convince anyone else.