Archive for category: Coaching for lawyers

Pop quiz:  Who are your best referral sources?  List the top 10 right now. If you are a more junior lawyer in a law firm and don’t yet have your own clients, list the senior lawyers for whom you do the most work.

How easy did you find it to make this list?  This information should be at the tips of your fingers. If you don’t know who your top referral sources are, your activity this week is to find out.

How often do you talk with the people who most frequently send you business? One of my clients recently realized that his top three referral sources send him seven to ten substantial matters a year, resulting in several hundred thousand dollars of business.  And then he realized that as he’d become busier, he spent less time maintaining the connections that had help to build those referral relationships.

Sure, he sent business to his top referral sources, he attended meetings with them frequently, and he went out of his way to send a nice “thank you” every time one of them sent a new matter to him. But he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had lunch or played golf one-on-one with these people.  The business relationship was in place with each referral source, but the personal connections underlying it had grown weak.

Relationships, like anything else, are always in flux.  Are yours growing closer or more distant?  If you don’t stay consistently in touch with your contacts, the relationships will grow weaker and you may find that the support that you enjoyed shifts to others who are more attentive. There are no bad motives in play, but absence in business rarely makes the heart grow fonder.

Take a few minutes now to set times to check with the people who think enough of you to send you work. Make it a point to reconnect and find out what’s going on with them.  At the same time, express your appreciation for their referrals.  And then lay your plans so you can be sure to check in with them at least quarterly.

Like so many of my contemporaries, I’ve learned a lot from Oprah over the years. I’ve read books (fiction and otherwise) that she discussed, discovered one of my favorite songs because she showcased it, and internalized the safety tip never to allow a criminal to take you to another location.  But that isn’t all…

Oprah has established a media enterprise unlike any previously known, and so it shouldn’t surprise us that we can learn some serious business lessons from her example. Like so many successful people (including those you may look up to as consummate rainmakers), Oprah makes it look easy.  “All she did” for the last 25 years was to talk with people.  How hard can it be, right?

The truth, of course, is that making it look so easy requires many hours of work. Although practicing law is radically different from being a talk show host or media mogul, Oprah’s model offers five lessons for lawyers — even for those of you who don’t like Oprah.

1. Surround yourself with a highly-qualified, dedicated team. Oprah can’t do it alone, of course, and neither can you.  (Not even you, sole practitioner!)  Harpo Studios (Oprah’s company) employs several hundred people, all of whom work 12+-hour days during the show’s season and fulfill a variety of roles from idea generators to hair/make-up/wardrobe artists.  Even a few minutes of the Behind The Scenes show reveals how many talented people contribute to the success of each one-hour Oprah show.Fortunately, you don’t need all of that support for your practice.  You must, however, have administrative help of some sort (even if that means using technology rather than having a live assistant) and you must have a sounding board. If you’re doing everything in your practice, you’re wasting valuable time.  If you don’t have trusted colleagues and mentors who can help you handle challenges and opportunities in your practice, you’re missing out on feedback that could keep you from making easily avoidable missteps.
2. Trust your team, and delegate to them – but recognize that you hold the responsibility for their actions. There’s no point in having a terrific team if you ask them to perform only menial tasks that leave no room for development.  (That’s one of the top delegation mistakes I discussed here nearly three years ago.)No matter how good your team may be, you must always be aware that it’s your practice and that everything that happens in it is your responsibility. That can be a tough pill to swallow, but when you accept it and act accordingly, you’ll find that it also offers power.  Even if things go wrong and you’re required to take responsibility for a big mistake, you’ll know that you can also take responsibility for fixing the mistake and ensuring that it doesn’t happen again.  If you resort to blame instead, the power of correction lies with the person who made the mistake and depends on their willingness and skill, not yours.This lesson came across loud and clear when one of Oprah’s guests went AWOL between an afternoon rehearsal and the show’s taping the next morning. It would have been easy for Oprah to have played the diva and blamed the guest or her producers, but her focus shifted immediately to treating the audience to breakfast during the unexpected delay and managing the schedule for the rest of the day.  Of course she had help (per point #2) but her focus was directed to correcting the problem rather than faulting anyone for allowing it to happen.
3. Never, ever compromise on your principles. This lesson popped up when Oprah’s producers told her that Mrs. Obama would be a guest on a show dealing with children’s health.  Oprah was careful to ensure that producers had not leaned on her friendship with the Obamas to get Mrs. Obama to attend.  Although few people would criticize her for using a personal relationship to get a guest who would bring an even brighter spotlight to an important issue, Oprah’s personal code of conduct prevented her from doing so.  Watching the show made it clear that any producer who dared to call the White House to invite Mrs. Obama onto the show would have been in big, big trouble.Lawyers are bound by sometimes complex and counterintuitive ethical rules, but many decisions fall outside the scope of those rules. How do you talk about your clients and opposing counsel when they can’t hear you?  Do you talk about them?  You’ll face plenty of “grey area” decisions in business development.  Where the rules are silent, or when there’s a big gulf between what’s allowed and what may be tasteful, check your own compass and guide yourself by it.
4. Connect with people, and be yourself. The world began to fall in love with Oprah when she shared her story, her joy, her tears.  She quickly moved beyond reporter and host to personality.  We could see ourselves in her and her experience, and many drew courage from her example.Lawyers sometimes feel the need to crawl into a legal straight-jacket, to act as a lawyer “should” act, to speak as a lawyer “should” speak, to think as a lawyer “should” think. In some circumstances, that’s the only proper approach.  When it comes to business development, however, that’s boring and distancing.  Acting, speaking, and thinking just like everybody else makes marketing challenging because there’s nothing to distinguish you from others in your practice area.  Skill is and must be the bedrock of your practice, but being a genuine person will attract people and help you to build relationships of trust.
5. Love what you do. Doing anything for 25 years is an accomplishment, and even though the Oprah Winfrey Show has brought Oprah fame, fortune, and unparalleled opportunities, it can’t always have been easy.  She had to love it.Do you love what you do? It’s more than an idle question.  If you do, you’ll talk about it, engage in professional development, and be engaged with your practice simply because you enjoy what you do.  If not, you’ll have to push yourself to do what might otherwise flow more easily.If you don’t love practicing law, you have three choices:  find what you do love about it, compromise by compartmentalizing personal satisfaction from professional motivation, or leave the practice.

A potential client called to discuss how I might help her with her business development activities, and I asked what she’d tried. As I often discover in those conversations, she’d tried a number of approaches, all to no avail.  On her list:  writing articles, teaching seminars, advertising, attending networking events, posting her profile on various social networking sites, and so on.  But she had no results to report.  Not surprisingly, she was ready to conclude that she wasn’t meant to be a rainmaker.

If you see no results, it’s easy to conclude that it’s time to throw in the towel. It’s discouraging to work at something — especially something as important as business development — and get poor results.

This inclination to accept failure is even more common for those who believe that rainmaking is a skill reserved for a few special lawyers.  (As a sidenote, ponder this:  not every lawyer will be a superstar rainmaker.  But every lawyer can be a “mist-maker”, and depending on your practice setting, that may be all you need to shoot for.)  But should you accept failure as permanent and give up business development activity?  No.

Three mistakes are often responsible when a lawyer has worked hard at rainmaking without generating meaningful results:

1. The lawyer is measuring the wrong thing. New business is the clearest measurement of rainmaking success, but that’s like starting a diet and measuring success only by reaching goal weight.  There are all sorts of midpoints that indicate success:  making new contacts, developing relationships, building a strong reputation in your field, and so on.  These “interim successes” indicate forward movement — assuming, of course, they’re measured as progress toward the ultimate goal of bringing in new business and not as an end in themselves.
2. The lawyer hasn’t brought in new business…yet. “Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish,” John Quincy Adams observed.  In other words, don’t give up before an activity has had time to produce results.  Networking is a key place where lawyers fall short.  A single conversation is incredibly unlikely to generate new business, and mere membership in a group without any real involvement is equally unlikely to be successful using any measure.  Whether it’s networking or another activity, hopping from one activity to another generates a lot of motion but very little forward movement.  Choosing one or two marketing tactics is almost certain to bring better results — unless…
3. The lawyer is doing the wrong things, or doing them in the wrong way. No matter how persistently the task is undertaken, if it’s fundamentally flawed, it won’t work.  Let’s take networking again.  If your idea of networking is attending meetings, talking incessantly about yourself, your skills, your qualifications, and your experience, plus pressing your business card on anyone who happens within an arms’ length, you are destined to fail.  That’s networking at its worst and it’s unattractive to just about everyone.  Similarly, well-performing activities that don’t involve talking directly with potential clients and referral sources likely won’t produce business.  Bottom line:  good activity done wrong doesn’t work.

Your task this week: Are you making any of these mistakes?  Check especially to see how you’re measuring your success.  Because lawyers are trained to focus on the end game (here, landing the new business), this is one of the key mistakes I often see among new clients.

When a law firm hires me to work with a junior associate, very often one part of the engagement centers on the associate’s leadership presence and self-confidence — how he or she presents to others. (Of course, that focus is not by any means unique to junior associates.)

Although reviewers may use a variety of words such as proactive, poised, assertive, or self-assured, they’re usually looking to see to what extent the lawyer is able to present as a leader, as someone who is sufficiently self-confident to inspire others’ confidence. Such a person typically contributes to conversations, asks insightful questions, and is willing to express an opinion or espouse a position.

Interactions with someone who lacks this level of confidence tends to leave others (supervising lawyers and clients alike) uncertain of the message being conveyed.  Does a lack of contribution indicate lack of comprehension?  Boredom?  Something else entirely?  It may be difficult to interpret what’s happening, but the result is a lack of clarity and an unwillingness to rely on the lawyer whose self-presentation is found to be lacking.  The consequences can be significant, including unduly slow career progression (or even being fired) and difficulty in building client relationships.

For instance, I was working with one client (let’s call him Tom) who was hoping to make partner and entered coaching to strengthen his performance so he’ll be a strong candidate.  He’d picked up on some comments that made him question whether he was viewed as partner material.  I found Tom to be intelligent, personable, and funny.  I also noticed that when I’d ask him a question about his work, he downplayed the role he’d played.

It puzzled me, because I could tell from the kind of work he was describing that he was a heavy lifter on the cases, but to hear him talk he was simply supporting work done by others.  One day, Tom said that a particular concern he held about making partner was that it didn’t seem like anyone regarded his work as being important or notable. He explained the evidence for his feeling, and then I asked his permission to share an observation.

I told him that when he described his own work, he minimized and understated his contribution.  To hear him tell the story, he contributed little more than hours — and certainly nothing critical in terms of strategy or deep analysis.  But when I asked specifically and pressed, he’d tell me about tasks he’d done and decisions he’d made that were quite high-level.  My assessment was that because he was so careful not to overstate his contribution — and perhaps so uncomfortable being in the spotlight — he didn’t give a fair opportunity for someone to understand the kind and level of work that he was doing.

We devised a plan for Tom to share more about his work, and he discovered that when he changed his communication style and became more open about what he was doing, people began to appreciate the scope of his work and to understand what he was capable of doing. He got more and better work, and he felt that others’ perception of him was more accurate.

Michelle, another client, was upset to receive a review that indicated that some clients didn’t want to talk with her because they felt that she didn’t have a sufficient grasp of the right legal strategy to accomplish their aims. When pressed for details, a reluctant partner admitted that although he knew Michelle understood exactly what was at stake and how to advance the clients’ interests, her comments were so often peppered with words like maybe and possibly and her inflection was so often questioning that she just didn’t seem to be sure of what she was saying.

The result was that her communications undermined his confidence in her even though he knew she was almost invariably right about what she was saying. After making a concerted effort to notice the habits that the partner identified, Michelle started speaking with more authority and more clarity, which over time (and along with other changes that Michelle implemented) increased the confidence that others put in what Michelle said.

How do you know if your presence isn’t as strong as it should be? Here are three common signs:

1. You create “wiggle room” with your word choice or with your vocal inflection.
2. You feel the urge to speak up or to ask a question but you stop short — and then someone says what you’ve been thinking, and you feel frustrated. (Or you do speak up but your comments aren’t much noted, and then someone says effectively the same thing and gets more attention.)
3. You find that you generally speak much less often than others in a meeting. (But this can be a sign of strong presence if, when you speak, others give significant weight to your comments.)

If you recognize yourself in these signs or if you’ve received feedback that you need to be more proactive, perhaps we should talk. While learning to project more confidence and a stronger leadership presence requires stepping outside a comfort zone, the impact can be dramatic.  Your job and your client relationships may depend on your ability to inspire confidence.  Ready to take the first steps?  Contact me to set up a time for us to get acquainted.