Archive for category: Coaching for lawyers

I don’t watch much television, but while I had the flu I didn’t feel up to doing anything more energetic than staring at a screen.  As I was flipping channels, I happened across what I thought at first was a rather poorly done law firm ad… And then I discovered that it was a promo for Staten Island Law, one of the newest shows on the OWN channel.  You can see the promo spot here and another one here.

(If you’re from Staten Island and horrified, my condolences — I once saw a neighborhood where I used to live on the Real Housewives of Atlanta, so I can empathize.)

The Staten Island lawyers, Elura Nanos and Michele Sileo, are former New York City prosecutors who founded Lawyer Up to tutor law students on complex legal concepts using easy-to-understand terms.  Their book titled How to Talk to Your Lawyer is already on sale, with good reviews.

Staten Island Law is about mediation rather than legal representation as such, but many reviewers won’t catch that distinction, and those who do may or may not understand that mediation isn’t quite the same when it isn’t part of a reality TV show.

Why should you care about Staten Island Law?

Whether you represent individuals or Fortune 50 companies, the series portrays lawyers who appreciate their clients’ needs, which should be your focus as well.  When I speak, I often say that to be most effective, you must grok your clients.  Robert Heinlein coined the word grok, which means “to understand profoundly and intuitively.”  Although the word is most often used by programmers, engineers, and those who enjoy science fiction, it’s applicable to attorney-client relationships as well.

What does it mean to grok a client?  It means that you understand their needs and wants, you speak their language, and your interests are aligned with theirs.  Staten Island Law offers a great example of client-grokking in terms of legal language and colloquialisms.  If you watch some of the program clips available online, you’ll also see that the Staten Island lawyers move beyond the stylistic connection to understand their clients’ wants and needs.  For example, this clip shows them exploring why a woman is so opposed to the prenuptial agreement that her fiance insists on having, only to discover that their explanation of marital property rights puts his fears to rest.  (Don’t look to the specifics of the advice, just the conversation.)

Think about how you approach your clients:

• Do you speak your clients’ language…?  Or do you expect them to speak yours?
• Do you spend time getting to know what your clients want and need…?  Or do you assume and project?
• Would your clients say that you “get” them…?  Or would they shake their heads and sigh, “You know lawyers…”?
• Do you ask questions and explain concepts using examples that are relevant to your clients…?  Or do you use cookie-cutter examples that they may understand intellectually but not in any experiential way?

The more you can empathize with and relate to your clients, the more satisfied they are likely to be with your representation.  Demonstrating this same connection with potential clients will also make it more likely that you’ll get hired.

You may be wondering how you can come to grok your clients and potential clients.  Simple: build relationships and ask questions.  Even intuitive understanding requires a base of knowledge.

Whatever your client profile, make sure you spend time getting to know them and demonstrating that you understand and care about their perceptions and needs.  Your client relationships will be strengthened as a result, your referrals will grow, and you won’t have to wonder whether your clients are learning from books or ACCA meetings how to “wrangle” you.

Selling The Invisible by Harry Beckwith

You can’t see them — so how to you sell them?  That’s the problem with services… This book begins with the core problem of service marketing:  service quality.  It then suggests how to learn what you must improve, with examples of techniques that work.  It then moves to service marketing fundamentals:  defining what business you really are in and what people are buying, positioning your service, understanding prospects and buying behavior, and communicating.

Selling The Invisible offers targeted suggestions for marketing your services, using anecdotes to teach.  Divided into eleven sections with multiple one- to three-page chapters in each section, Beckwith’s book gives bite-sized lessons on what clients and prospects (that is, potential clients) want, expect, and find persuasive.  A few notable tidbits:

Serve your clients as they want to be served.  Beckwith criticizes lawyers who write a “really good brief” but fail to notice that the brief was “equally effective for the client $5,000 earlier” and that it “covers an issue that might have been avoided entirely through good lawyers.”  In other words:  don’t get so caught up in technical merit that you overlook what the clients see.

Marketing starts with you and your employees.  “Review every step — from how your receptionist answers to the message on the bottom of your invoices — and ask what you could do differently to attract and keep more customers.  Every act is a marketing act.  Make every employee a marketing person.”  For example, notice how you (or your assistant or receptionist) answer the telephone:  would you-the-caller want to talk with whoever answers your phone, or would you-the-caller have the impression that you were interrupting something more important?

Clients seek personality and relationships.  “Service businesses are about relationships.  Relationships are about feelings.  In good ones, the feelings are good; in bad ones, they are bad.  In service marketing and selling, the logical reasons that you should win the business — your competence, your excellence, your talent — just pay the entry fees.  Winning is a matter of feelings, and feelings are about personalities.”

Being Great vs. Being Good.  “People in professional services are especially prone to thinking that the better they get, the better their business will be.  The more the tax lawyer knows about the tax code…the more business will beat a path to [her] door.”  Beckwith cites examples in law, medicine, and financial services to prove that clients place relationship, trust, good communication, and other non-technical proficiencies above technical skill.  (I would add the corollary that technical excellence is a prerequisite rather than a pure competitive advantage.)  Beckwith’s summary:  “Prospects do not buy how good you are at what you do.  They buy how good you are at who you are.”  (But you still have to have the skills to deliver.)

Why should you read Selling The Invisible?

If you consider yourself skilled at selling your services (and you have the business to back it up), review Selling The Invisible for reminders.  If you’re new to marketing your services, this book will serve as a foundational text for basic marketing principles.  You’ll also pick up terrific ideas for client service and for contributing to your team’s or organization’s business development efforts.

Selling The Invisible is an invaluable addition to a marketing library.  It’s quick to read; one could even read the bolded summary statements at the end of each chapter to get the gist of Beckwith’s ideas.  But, as you read, be sure to implement Beckwith’s bottom line in the chapter entitled Fallacy:  Strategy is King, and “Do Anything” (preferably passionately) rather than creating and revising strategy endlessly.

Several times over the last six years, I’ve shared one of my favorite passages from one of my legal heroes, the Hon. Elbert Parr Tuttle.  Judge Tuttle served on the Fifth and Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals from 1954 until his death just a month shy of age 99, in 1996.  He’s remembered as a model attorney and judge, one who represented the absolute best in the profession.

Judge Tuttle was a champion of civil rights, both as a lawyer and a judge and, along with other members of the Fifth Circuit (John Minor Wisdom, John Brown, and Richard Rives) was instrumental in bringing effective desegregation to the South.  (The anecdote at the beginning of this story about Judge Tuttle illustrates not only how he came to play such a role; it also illustrates the power that parental example can have on children, and then children on the world.)  For more on Judge Tuttle’s life and accomplishments, see any of the memorials and articles written about him and read Jack Bass’s phenomenal book Unlikely Heroes.

Judge Tuttle gave a commencement speech at Emory Law School in the 1950s that defines professionalism.  It has informed my understanding of what it means (and what it should mean) to be an attorney.  I make it a habit to read through Judge Tuttle’s speech at least once a year.  It seems particularly appropriate now.  The full speech is not available on the Internet, unfortunately.  But here’s an excerpt, provided by the Washington Realty Group:

The professional man is in essence one who provides service.  But the service he renders is something more than that of the laborer, even the skilled laborer.  It is a service that wells up from the entire complex of his personality.  True, some specialized and highly developed techniques may be included, but their mode of expression is given its deepest meaning by the personality of the practitioner.  In a very real sense his professional service cannot be separate from his personal being.  He has no goods to sell, no land to till.  His only asset is himself.  It turns out that there is no right price for service, for what is a share of a man worth?  If he does not contain the quality of integrity, he is worthless.  If he does, he is priceless. The value is either nothing or it is infinite.

So do not try to set a price on yourselves.  Do not measure out your professional service on an apothecaries’ scale and say, “Only this for so much.”  Do not debase yourselves by equating your souls to what they will bring in the market.  Do not be a miser, hoarding your talents and abilities and knowledge, either among yourselves or in your dealings with your clients…

Rather be reckless and spendthrift, pouring our your talent to all to whom it can be of service!  Throw it away, waste it, and in the spending it will be increased.  Do not keep a watchful eye lest you slip, and give away a little bit of what you might have sold.  Do not censor your thoughts to gain a wide audience.  Like love, talent is only useful in its expenditure, and it is never exhausted.  Certain it is that man must eat; so set what price you must on your service.  But never confuse the performance, which is great, with the compensation, be it money, power, or fame, which is trivial.

…The job is there, you will see it, and your strength is such, as you graduate…that you need not consider what the task will cost you.  It is not enough that you do your duty.  The richness of life lies in the performance which is above and beyond the call of duty.

Elbert Parr Tuttle, Heroism in War and Peace, The Emory University Quarterly.  1957; 13: 129-30.

Burnout is a real issue for lawyers.  Just about every lawyer has at least an occasional period in which it seems that work is pressing 18-20 hours a day, and most of us know intuitively that it’s important to recover following that kind of exertion.

But what about the kind of day-to-day grind that can cause low-level burnout?  Especially in the economic environment that’s existed over the last few years, many of us are delaying or even skipping vacation and working as much as possible, in part from fear that even a tiny “misstep” could jeopardize an entire practice.

Back in 2007, Chuck Newton posted on the “Cure for Lazy Lawyer Syndrome”.  It’s a terrific article that describes with a visceral clarity what it’s like to struggle with low-grade burnout:

You know something is wrong.  You intend to get to work early to catch up, but fail to do so.  You just cannot seem to make yourself finish that brief that is due in a week.  You avoid phone calls you know you should take.  You take a phone call and you know you should make a note, but you just cannot make yourself get around to it.  Then you forget the necessary details.  You know you should call your client, but it is so-o-o-o inconvenient.  You start to feel overwhelmed and you cannot find a starting place from which to even begin to catch up.  You are just feeling tired, depressed and rundown.  Vitamins do not seem to help much.

Does that sound all too familiar?  As I’ve noted before, the issues that arise in consulting with my clients tend to be cyclical, and this level of burnout seems to be pervasive right now.

Low-level burnout is especially challenging in the context of business development, especially for reluctant rainmakers.  If you’re not seeing enough results (or not seeing them fast enough), it’s easy to get sucked into taking on more activity — often without pausing to create a strategic plan — that gets almost frenetic.  Without a good plan, it’s often random activity that leads to random results, which leads to burnout plus a sense of I knew I wasn’t cut out to be a rainmaker failure.

Chuck’s post offers a solution, and he’s hit the nail right on the head:

My suggestion is that you will feel better about yourself, your practice and your competence if you will concentrate harder on the practice of law for shorter periods of time.  When you are in the zone, be in the zone.  Focus, but not so long that you get eye strain.

***

Short times away from your work (and I mean absolutely disconnecting from your work) will help you to be more productive and energetic back at your work.

Chuck emphasizes that this advice is especially important for “home office lawyers, connected lawyers and Third Wave Lawyers”.  (As a sidenote, Chuck’s Third Wave Lawyer blog always has interesting observations.)  But to my mind, it’s critical for all lawyers, especially since most of us are now “connected” most of the time.

The idea of short periods of intense focus alternating with periods of complete disengagement can be applied in any practice setting.  The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz uses the analogy of sport to promote the proposition that “full engagement” requires selective disengagement from work.  If you’re feeling burned out, set aside a weekend to read and reflect on this book.

The risk of low-level burnout is that it makes everything less pleasant; it leads to reduced energy, reduced efficiency, and reduced productivity; and if left “untreated”, it can lead to major burnout.  My father, who’s practiced law since the mid-1960s, has given me much good advice, but one piece is especially relevant here.  Make it a habit — an occasional habit, but a habit nonetheless — to escape from the office midday, whether it’s to see a movie, to visit a bookstore or museum, or to take a walk somewhere.  Although the escape is great therapy to cure burnout, it’s even better applied to avoid it.

I’d intended to share quotes about recognizing reality as a path to creating change, but I keep bumping into powerful quotes from Jack Welch.  And so, I offer you these three quotes that are, in themselves, a good guide to business planning.

“Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.”

“Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.”

“Change before you have to.”

~Jack Welch