It isn’t what you said, it’s how you said it.
I confess: I’m one of the thousands and thousands of people who can’t get enough of the show “Friends”. The early seasons were especially clever, taking all kinds of language out of context for comedic effect. (Stick with me, I do have a business development point here!) In one episode, Chandler accuses Joey of becoming […]
Panic to Profit
The practice of law is a business. We all know that, and yet many lawyers also prefer to focus on practicing law rather than focusing on managing the business. Today’s article comes from Brooke Lively, founder of Cathedral Capital, a team of CFOs and Profitability Strategists who help attorneys with fast-growing firms across the country […]
Craft a more persuasive message
Regardless of your area of practice, you almost certainly spend a big chunk of your time persuading someone to do something. In addition to persuading a decision-maker (a court or opposing party, perhaps), during the course of a day you probably attempt to persuade colleagues about a plan of action (or a destination for lunch), […]
Avoiding a lawyer’s top obstacle
A client recently shared his worry about taking on new marketing approaches, which included an effort to become credibly visible in a variety of marketing channels rather than centering all of his efforts on a single marketing avenue as he had in the past. Nothing especially shocking, but my client (risk-averse, like so many lawyers) was almost […]
Why you MUST act
Overthinking can ruin your plans. One of the biggest mistakes I see lawyers make is coming up with a good, solid plan and then discarding it before ever giving it a shot. Overthinking takes the oomph out of a strategy, and there’s no better way to short-circuit than to let fear take over and reverse […]
Under pressure?
“Pressure is what you feel when you don’t know what you are doing.” – Peyton Manning This quote stopped me in my tracks. My first inclination was to disagree, because I sometimes feel pressure because of a deadline or because of the importance of some activity, even though I know what I’m doing. Digging a […]
9 Ways to Fail in Sales
I read a terrifically useful article years ago titled How You Fail In Sales that still applies today. Before you discard its relevance because of the word sales, remember that sales is partly persuasion (of any kind—see Daniel Pink’s To Sell Is Human for more on this) and partly conversation designed to discover a match between a potential client’s need and your […]