Expand Your Role

In the world that we live in and practice the law in, the media; free, objective, unbiased or otherwise is not in the business of telling your side, your law firm's side or your client's side of; the story, your story or any story for that matter. It is in the business of selling papers and you just happened to provide grist for the mill. This leads to the following reality: the story will be told the way the media sees it and to be frank, you are quite content during other times when they provide you with so-called objective, unbiased opinion. Now imagine your client is the current embattled governor of Lagos state, Akinwunmi Ambode who is being called all sort of names. As his legal advisers you have to give a position to right the wrong as you see it to his dedication and service. What to do? The rules of engagement mean you must look at history for similar cases and what worked in those cases a d how you can apply them to the current dilemma and do remember that in his age of the free press, censoring may not always work.
The point of this example is, what is your legal advisory approach to publicity debacles other than waiting to sue and placing an ad in the paper? How can you anticipate and be on top of the situation, form solid partnerships with key stakeholders in the client account so you can funnel your value add, legal and otherwise to manage the situation. Prima facie, it does not have the appearance of litigation but you cannot fold your hands while your client gets creamed, however remote the situation is from your legal expertise, unless folding your hand is the strategy. This kind of situation will fall under your scope as a client adviser and not a mere legal expert for hire and if your law firm does okay and makes a truly valued contribution be it hand holding, offering support, ideas, general context, it most certainly will lead to you being seen as more than 'legal' and you will conceivably be part of decision level conversations with a full seat at the table and not merely receiving instructions down the pike.
In the event that this wide-level approach to practising the law seems like meddling, a word of advice, you really have to keep expanding your role, taking on responsibilities that are above your pay grade so you are well positioned as a firm for a long term profitable future with the said client. Or as it is said, I be lawyer, trouble na my work.

Say It

Wetin lawyer dey talk sef? If you are one of the learned that inspires comments as in 'what confusion are you spreading now' then read. Slowly. Communicating is really a big deal in legal. In general life, true and in legal especially. So the better you are at it the more success your law practice will be so a few ideas on it will help. Whether you call it having a command of language, being charismatic or being articulate: the ability to direct an audience like a conductor at the orchestra (think Bill Clinton ) has immense practical benefits.
Speech is a presentation of ideas so it is about expressing meaning, having an internal connection yourself with what you are thinking and want to say and presenting it in the most effective way you can. The key word here is, ideas. At the pith of your presentation what idea are you passing across. And since the effective presentation of your ideas is complex and difficult you have to be engaged in the preparation process so you put in a bit of your individuality which is what qualifies you and helps you kill it when you are speaking whether it is to one or to many. You will thus be authentic, moving and will connect to who you are talking with.

Non-legal Professionals

The practice of the law is in many ways a relationship business primarily because the service is delivered in person by a person , legal marketing is by referrals and the bedside manner of the firm's lawyers significantly affects the level of influence with the clients. It is just like the hospitality business or being a consultant, you have got to have serious social and emotional intelligence. And on that note let's look at a vital aspect of relationships: those with non-legal professionals. We're talking accountants, PR, marketing people and others who are not in the legal sandbox. The good news is that the connection between some of these guys is natural and even sanctioned by law such as accountants, then the line between legal and financial services is blurry as legal is very fluent if financial services (think UK and US law firms),as is the connect between legal and consulting and finally between legal and all sorts of business. They sometimes seem joined at the hip.
The potential to secure and generate business, influence and goodwill is there and it is major so what is your law firm about on this front? Is there a program, are you winging it or is there a mix? Recently at the NBA-SBL roundtable with the CAC, the chief official at the CAC made a telling point on the issue of planning. He said that a reason lawyers lack a consistent client base is lack of follow through, noting that after lawyers had initiated and completed company incorporation process very few ever checked back to file annual returns months later when they were due. The general laughter of derision and sullen silence from the lawyers present was a stark demonstration of this insight. But he had a point and we at IBARU-McKENZIE further venture to add that a lack of a client engagement plan and framework is why this happens. How do you plan to stay in touch, how do you plan to apologise, how do you plan to expand your share of business from the client, what investments will you make to make this happen?
And the very same thing goes for working relationships with non-legal professionals because out of sight is out of mind and these professionals are potential clients, major clients or can make referrals.
The Chinese call it Guanxi and for good or I'll while relationships are sometimes used for cronyism, they also make you aware of potential, potential problems and potential opportunities.

Talk Across Business Units

In business it is said a lot of the time that the customer is always right or that the customer is King. A soccer version could be that when the team is doing badly no one sacks the management or the team owner, it is always the team coach who gets it. What this means for your law firm is that the type of clients you have, matter. From the perspective of the level of fees they provide, their level of sophistication, their skill level, risk appetite and so on. Let's say, your law firm is young and full of cutting edge practitioners all under thirty who fast, energetic and full of push. If it so happens that you are dealing with a blue chip company your firm will learn the value of patience, due process and bureaucracy. Now compare that to another client that is as wild and feeling as your young Turks are! You will both be competing to see who stays up all night more days in the week.
The point being that unless your advice is taken, used you really will not thrive as a law firm because you are in the advice business, a global trillion dollar industry. And your client will not 'get' it, you will, so getting your client to place value on and use your advice is where your law firm is headed and this is after the 'we just offer advice, they decide whether they use it or not' phase and the box of 'we only deal with legal matters'. In point of fact the key to getting your legal advice used is demonstrating that you have value outside legal matters, that you can place issues in context with over different areas of operation because of the value you have demonstrated, that you can offer insight and mental Infrastructure to issues outside legal matters to the point where you are being asked 'are you sure you guys don't want to leave legal?'. Getting your legal expertise used is about building influence. Not political nonsense but going out of your legal sandbox to play with the other kids, to establish points of contact that mean your client reaches out to you outside of legal matters. And this idea of looking outside your sandbox doesn't just affect law land. Sir Martin Sorrell over at WPP has frequently said that one of his three pillars is getting his people within WPP to communicate with each other across different units and not remain in their silos. Marketing talks with manufacturing, R &D talks with sales etc. And let's face it most of the exciting business problems are business business problems. How to make ABC happen and not legal, litigation, litigation all the time.

The Pressure, The Pressure!

Not to flog a dead horse here over and over but this is the situation; there is quite a lot of pressure whether intense or not, it is there. Corporate clients are squeezing costs and running forensic audits on law firm fees, they are consolidating all their work with a few service providers and those that lose out get stuck with the work that no one really wants to do because it pays badly and taints your reputation. You probably have your own version of 'slides of the holy land' ; things were better in the old days, everyone just cares about money, no loyalty etc.
Now that we are done with that let's move on to a tangible solution your law firm can put into play to roll with the punches and thrive because it really is a jungle out there. Napoleon Bonaparte,the great emperor and military strategist regularly trounced armies that had more money, men and even better battle formations than he did,that is, he did very well in David vs Goliath situations and his explanation was that he was an opportunist. And this did not mean outright deception and evil at the expense of anyone and anything as is connotes today but it meant 'how can I make the most of what I have? How can I use it to better effect? This is the answer to your law firms wishes of 'if only we had more money, knew the CEO, had more time or whatever reason you can come up with. Making the most of what you have is how you will be a truly sharp and street smart firm that addresses its opportunities and generates ideas.

THE McCONAISSANCE

Matthew Mcconaughey is an Oscar-winning actor in Holly wood and is the subject of a media phenomenon called the McCONAISSANCE. The idea is that he was a certain kind of actor doing romantic roles, not too serious and gradually going on to have a humdrum career when he stopped this direction, did no type of his previous roles resulting in an acting drought of three full years (he kept rejecting scripts) and transformed himself into a bona fide heavy weight actor. Hence the Oscar.
From a mild fellow to an Oscar winner.

For lawyers the analogy is between being a generalist and being a specialist. The major challenge you will have is letting the generalist work go while you are holding out for or chasing specialist work. Pre-Oscar Matthew was a generalist and when he sat up to join the men, he became a specialist. Flowing from this, there are lawyers you reach out to when there's a problem with the environment , others when you need a tax loophole e.t.c.
You have to specialize in something (s) as a law firm by investing in that area and presenting yourself to your clients, your competitors and the government as the firm to go to for that. Without this investment the world will know that you are not serious about it. Or put another way, what is your law firm selling and if you are like every other law firm, how can you command million dollar fees?

About said investment, John D. Rockefeller Sr. invested in acres of land near Lima, Indiana containing millions of barrels of crude oil that was, at the time he made the purchase, unsalable because it had a horrible smell (it was called skunk oil) and remained so for years after. He then had the chemist, Herman Frasch work on the oil to make it marketable.
Mr Rockefeller also offered to use his personal funds to make the purchase of the vast Lima oilfields because his business partners on the Standard oil board of directors refused to support him.

Making the decision to specialise is a major one and while the marketplace looks full of competition, being a generalist is a worse fate.

SHOW UP

William Jefferson Clinton got it very right when he said half of life is about showing up and, attracting the business to your law firm means you have to show up. You have to be present and you have to do it regularly. The idea is for you to be present with something clients care about, are interested in or are responsible for addressing. You can even expand your scope of impact by working on and offering insight on matters that do not concern you or your current scope of work. Note however, your law firm cannot do this as part of slick advertising or trying to trick the client into having a false obligation to hire your firm by offering 'free' and then turning around to hit the client with the full payload (bait and switch) in the final bill.
We are referring to a genuine attempt to be useful not an attempt to create your own solution and then begin to look for the perfect problem.
This approach will backfire.

The only way this method of expanding your scope of work will work is if you become a law firm that practices in this manner and not just one that does it to lure in clients.

The central skill to showing up as concerns attracting clients for your law firm's book of business is to become as informed about your clients industry as well as your client is. In a sense, you sound like a member of her industry and you are able to discover insights you can put to your clients.

USING PROJECT MANAGEMENT

The reason you are a god is that you have the standards of a god.
The reason you won an Olympic Gold Medal is that you stuck to the Olympic Gold Medal-level training system.
There is no mystery or magic to it. If you put in the work you get ahead.
Now to define the work: it means the mental labour, the emotional labour, the physical follow through and the regular checking back to see what is what.

One gathers that the idea behind project management is to have clear standards of accountability so if something is not done by such and such a date we know who is responsible and we know why.
Human nature will resist external accountabilities preferring to rely on self discipline. If you have the right habits or a team to keep you on the up and up then you are good. But note the Marines training program where groups of soldiers who get together for support and strength tend to make or through to the end of the program rather than individual soldiers without accountability or support.

It is not enough to aspire and to dream you must be responsible for what happens if your dreams do not come true or you fail and miss the target. It cannot be swept under the carpet or rolled on to next year's budget.

An external accountability means that you can only speak about what you are prepared to pay for. You must back up your words with action and examples. You can't just preach on the benefits of client service at your law firm or taking initiative by associates? Do you reward or punish accordingly when these ideas are demonstrated or violated? Any suspensions, raises, VIP tickets to see Saro, The Musical?
The only things that tend to happen are what you reward or closely monitor.
It is just like raising kids, you cannot utter empty threats and when you say 'if you cross this line I will smack you' and the child crosses the line, the smack must follow or else you confuse the child and you show her that you do not mean what you say.

In closing the three core parts of Project Management are
1. Project definition: State the project, develop objectives, breakdown work to achieve objectives, identify resource requirements.
2. Project planning: Assign responsibility, set schedule for completion of tasks and delivery of resources, prepare to address roadblocks.
3. Project implementation: put clearly understood objectives into play, monitor actual performance with the project plan, modify as necessary, evaluate after completion.

A BRIEF REMINDER

Every lawyer knows/should know that the ability to generate business and keep that business determines her salaries and chances of career growth and yet law faculties and schools everywhere have not addressed this Atlantic ocean of a gap in the legal education system.
One wonders what things of street value are actually being learnt in them law schools.

The marketing of your legal services, the relationship between you and your client is constantly evolving.
The wide range of marketing tools are necessary for you to serve your market and let clients know of ways you can assist but after a certain level you do not follow them so religiously as you are well established and have a hold in the market.

WHAT COULD BE

That's the thing with potential and possibility, you never know how good you could be if you do not push it or go crazy or whatever for your law firm. You just never know.

This is the argument of potential. If you had opened the door would you have walked into more than you know what to do with or would you have been shot in the head.
Every step to lead to growth in your law practice is about choosing to explore the potential of what could be. In the present there is only current reality but with potential you can become.
However, law practice gravity is against you, human nature is against you and the odds are truly stacked against you choosing to explore potential.

The clients business can produce $5,000 dollars more if you sit down and look at it thoroughly and with a Business Development Professional. Your firm can be a board member of the Security Services company if you put in that expensive 3 year plan to manage the relationships on an institutional level.
There is more juice in the law firm's library but you have to sit down and arrange it and codify it and think about how to apply it to the streets of your locale.

Potential usually is uncomfortable in the present because you already have a long term plan which will probably help you to just get by but it is preferable to pursuing the potential that will give you sleepless nights and reduce your waistline. It may even fail so you say to yourself why even bother?

Here's why: when your law firm's day of reckoning comes, and it will, you will be swept away slowly and can't really do anything about it. Nobody saw GFC 2008 sub-prime mortgages coming and by the time it was over previously indestructible and truly giant institutions were bankrupt. You can choose your actions but you cannot choose the consequences because its a two-for-one deal: Pick action A and it comes embedded with consequence A.

TALENT

An obvious but not apparent roadblock to selling your legal services is that you are really selling yourself, presenting your case in the best case possible and selling through your talent. This really means selling through your people. They are not lifeless chess pieces to be moved at your whim. This may seem unfair to you or you may plainly just disregard it. After all, you are the boss and are paying them. But the fact that your people are not lifeless chess pieces is a fact of nature to be addressed so do get on with it.

A team with better talent, tougher standards and spirited contributors to the team who actually do so contribute to their law firm will crush your lifeless chess pieces six days a week and twice on Sunday so you are really left no other option. Witness the shock of capitalist democracies when confronted with the spectacular scientific achievements of Russia in the 1960's which were mainly because the Russian children were made to work extremely hard at school with no softening or inflation of grades leading to a vast pool of solid-gold, talent forged in the fires of excellence from which the highest posts in public life were then filled and the ignorant masses were allowed no say in public affairs.

Selling through your talent is enforcing tougher standards, it is indirect, behind-the-scenes support and maintenance work just like cleaning the pipes to make certain the oil goes through from the oil fields to the refinery. So you do things like make certain purpose is clear and there is follow up of decisions made; clear up things that can cause frustration; relentlessly build up the confidence of the team especially when doing so makes them ambitious and difficult to manipulate or manage.
You are a premier law firm and this is how you treat your people so they deliver at their best.

ACROSS THE BRIDGE

The law firm is on one side of the divide and the client or business is on the other side. There is a chasm uncrossable between them both and a bridge is the only way to get across. It is our opinion that this bridge is Law Firm Marketing.
Generally, bridges are made up of several materials such as concrete, cement, stones , water, metal rods, rail guards, tarmac and white wash and the Law Firm Marketing bridge is composed of several materials as well.
Once the bridge is firmly in place and well maintained then the law firm can get its value to the client and the client can receive value from the firm. Every one is happy.
The aspect of the several materials that compose the bridge is an indication of the fact that there is no one solution that covers the entire process of presenting the law firms services to the market place rather what you have are growth drivers and a cluster of initiatives you can adopt based on the demands of your law firm's current reality. You cannot snap your fingers and wish it all away. There may be a major foundation upon which everything else is built say for example, the iron rods that form the core support structure of the bridge but the said core support structure needs to be fleshed up to make the road motorable and able to generate its maintenance costs and profits for the owners or concessionaires of the road.

On the importance of marketing you can take a cue from successful companies like IBM who have usually had a killer marketing unit (the blue suits) to cross the chasm and slaughter the competition. Then the BMW group which focuses on three arms of operations: product design, procurement of resources and marketing which have made it the best selling luxury car maker worldwide ahead of Mercedes-Benz and Audi.
A current attitude is generally pervasive that the bridge should not be or is not a law firm marketing bridge but rather it is a Technical competence bridge hence the exclusive emphasis on production and the contents of production in legal education and the continuous emphasis on technical knowledge CPD. The following questions address the law firm growth process more professionally than the overwhelming emphasis on technical matters.
What is your value, who is your market, how will you get to your market and how will your market get to your law firm?
The law firm needs minders who keep the peace generally, grinders who labour on the details of the deal and finders who bring in the business These three roles build the law firm reputation, book of business and have proven effective in other services businesses such as financial services. The Lazard Finance house with its Great men who saved entire countries from financial disaster, initiated monumental financial restructuring and projects as full partners with its clients during the Andre Meyer era and used heavy finders skills to be a part of every major and even minor financial transaction over a twenty-five year period and then to become a fortress in financing during the Felix Rohatyn, Steve Rattner Era (1970s to 1990s).

Why Clients Call

The underlying problem that your law firm can solve and offer assistance with is your Calling Card. Literally.
It is what will make those you hand out your cards to and meet or who know about your firm actually call you. For example if assets need to be recovered from a foreign jurisdiction, they specifically know that you are the law firm to go to and not just a law firm.
Extending the idea of the Calling Card to a logical conclusion and in a move at out-managing the competition, you can even divvy up your practice by underlying problem instead of practice area so that related problems tend to get processed together, said problems are tangible to grasp and solve and you avoid the omnibus 'practice areas' which are vague and imprecise universes that whole economies of value and cash get lost in.

Tie your law firm's services to the problem you can solve, the assistance that you can offer in a specific transaction. This means that you study, you note and you review. For example, to build a terrace house how many problems come up, you list them out one by one and then place your law firm services in the event of their happening side by side. From this you understand the matter on a basic level, you can explain the matter in overwhelming persuasiveness to the clients and you can use the insights and confidence gotten from the detailed breakdown process to persuade clients to hire your law firm. This is the Breakdown method of business development and it is very important to do it in excruciating detail, especially if you've been at it for years, the matter is boring and mundane or you know it so well. This is not finger wagging or hortation, it comes from painful experience.

To further encourage thee to engage in the level of detail that this process requires: it is a fact that the level of thought and study that you give to any matter before you, will determine the amount of intelligence and superior performance you will bring to it as a lawyer. Kobe Bryant shoots 800 times in the morning 5 days a week and you wonder why he wins and plays so much. 800 times.

And one for the road. One of the first things artists learn to do is to stare at a dead fish for 8 hours straight and almost without fail they get impatient and frustrated after the first thirty minutes 'there is nothing else to see' but when their boredom and irritation subsides they then go on to produce drawings from the same fish that are mind-blowing in detail, in beauty and which were impossible to create before and which go on to win prizes.

Darwinian For Clients' Sake

Attracting clients to your law firm is a lot like the theory of Natural Selection. You take in a lot of data, you process it and put your conclusions into play. After repeated exposures, successes and failures, what survives is your own law firm's unique formula. It is a result of the natural selection process where the natural process of trial and error has produced a successful formula for attracting clients. For example, Nelson Mandela in his own view was a middling student who lacked the ability to 'learn things easily'. He knew he had to put in hours of work to grasp the material and so his eventual exams-passing and material-understanding formula was; long hours of repeated study.
Some law firms are great at coming up with novel defences, others at making connections with clients and your law firm must find its own way. As a reference, have you considered deliberately learning how to get referrals so that in 3 years 50% of your business will come from referalls? The Samsung CEO said that he expects 70% of his business in the next ten years to come from products that are not in existence today. So clearly he is building an innovation strategy.

So, you inform clients of matters you can address, problems on which you can offer insight or assistance so that when such matters come up, people in your network twice removed know you are in play for the action and can take the ball across the touchline.
This referral idea at its core is simply that whenever an issue comes up because you have taken the effort to be identified with it, the client or whoever is sent to you.
You can also address it as the underlying problem your law firm can help solve: your law firm's Call-Card.

Law And The Rest Of Us

Here in Nigeria, the local blogging space has a lot on politics, entertainment and sports but there really is the need for the rational, cultivated legal mind to contribute to issues on a more useful and practical level absent the drama and fuzz.
That is, man cannot live by cotton candy alone, she needs a proper diet.
Reference is not being made here to analyses and commentary on Guri v Hadejia Native Authority or PDP v INEC that too many legal blogs engage in.
Those analyses seem to be written to be read by legal practitioners or because the authors believe that is what lawyers should go on about.
That analyses is very important but we stress and refer to a mind that has had the benefit of legal training talking about issues of consequence to the general population in a manner that is accessible to the general public and which gives instruction for action.
It is like putting forth Michael Jordan to talk about the process of building a sports team; others, talk show hosts, radio jockeys et al will say something but he will tell it to you from his ideals, beliefs and failings. His obviously superior insight can then be applied to other fields of endeavor outside of just basketball.

A lawyer setting up a maritime blog and approaching it from problems that exist, how they can be clearly understood and using the actual legal position as a very light reference is preferable to the Domesday book we came across the other day. It went on for pages, it was like a Supreme Court Judgment where all the Justices gave their full opinions, with dissenting judgement in full without adopting anything previously said by my learned brother! Going Domesday once in a while is okay, there needs to be depth legal, analyses. But all the time?
It is less about seeing the law as the answer to everything the same way a man who has a hammer sees everything as a nail but more about making that vast legal intelligence open to the rest of society through the way you apply it to matters of consequence to the general population.
Especially if it is politics, entertainment and sports.

Books Of Business

As a legal professional you need to be aware of a certain dynamic that occurs in the law firms of our friends in the City of London and across the Atlantic. What they have done in the face of the brutal and bloody competition is that they have largely thrown away traditional ideas of a law firm partnership and have replaced it with a 'Star' system where whoever has the largest book of business is king. In fact they seem to encourage very much this system.
A local analogy would be what is happening in the Ikoyi area of Lagos where new money is displacing the tastes of old money and turning the sedate residential area into commercial property with the usual effects.
Since the said law practice trend will eventually find its way to the Nigerian legal services space (if it is not thriving here already) you need to learn to develop a book of business that you significantly control and are responsible for, to get you the partner seat or a big fat profit sharing arrangement.
Adding this specific skill to all else that you are doing right now will be trying and if you keep reading this blawg and put heads together with two or three other professionals you can find your way to make it happen.
The summary for all this is that you get to eat what you kill at your law firm and not just on a selfish, personal level. You will build skills during the hunt, you will take some of the pressure off of your managing partner and you will earn some elbow room at the practice.
And if that was not clear enough, this: your law firm will appreciate it if you produce ideas, make great things happen when your MP is not looking and not just process the work or grind out the analyses. It will keep members who carry their weight and nothing is heavier than having your book of business.
Don't let the analogy of hunting and killing turn you off, it's something our friends in the City and across the Atlantic contributed to the global legal space.

Lucky You

The first challenge you will probably have to get out of your legal mind as concerns attracting clients to your law firm is one that is peculiar to most lawyers. And it is this; in general, many lawyers do not understand or appreciate the time , dedication and effort required to attract clients on a regular basis.
The entire process is a complex one that requires certain things to be done and others avoided. And then there is the concept of luck, which tends to follow those law firms that have attained their own formula of attracting clients.
Another way to put this point across is to look at those who exercise regularly and are fit and have well-toned muscles.
There is really only one way to get that kind of result and this is exercise. If you exercise regularly then you get that way and if you don't then you don't.

So here's to making your own luck as far as you can take it;
1. Go to meetings/conferences that the leaders/members of the industry that your law firm wants to work with, go to.
2. Read what they do and what they read so you get a sense of how to work with them and what they find relevant.
3. Write about what you know in a way that is relevant to them and take the time to find out what is relevant to them and work to address it.

If You Have It And They Want It.

While having a reputation for being a dismal lot, economists have offered spectacular clarity to the business of running your law firm: the law of supply and demand.
Thus, if your law firm's knowledge and expertise with a high-impact problem is in high demand by clients and clients perceive that your expertise is in relatively limited supply, you have a price-fee advantage.
Simply put, if you have it and few other law firms have it and clients want it, then you have leverage to get paid twenty Indian elephants. On the flip side, if the said expertise applies to a mature matter you really haven't a price fee-advantage, where mature means that the problem is well understood by clients and other law firms and there is little risk of bungling no matter who handles it.

One reality that then affects your law firm as part of the sweet package of the law of supply and demand is: the issues that are right now limited to few law firms will be open to a whole lot more as other law firms acquire said expertise and clients understand the issues from regular exposure so your law firm needs to be searching for new issues.
It then does make sense for you to focus your law firm in areas where you can have the most impact i.e. where they ain't. Eric Silverman began in project financing in the 80's when in his entire law firm, only one partner was involved so Eric got to manage client relationships as well. Fast forward to 20 years later and project financing contributes ¼ of the entire law firm revenues.
The point for your law firm is that you will always need to compete and sometimes that will mean leaving the majority and going to empty places you can dominate. It helps if the laws of competition (namely, you don't have the resources to go head-to-head with the bigger law firms) compel you to develop neglected areas of practice.

Lawyers and Sellers

There is some sense to a lawyer is an artist is an architect is a president. The sense is that the ends to which your knowledge are put are different but the skills are largely the same and are transferrable so as concerns selling your law firm's legal services here are a few clarifications. See if you can spot the difference between these basic selling techniques and the practice of law.

1. You do not offer advice until you understand the problem.
2. Ask questions until you understand the issues involved.
3. Alert the client based on additional concerns that you have noticed based on your experience.
4. Confirm that you and your client have a shared understanding of the said concerns.
5. Describe the solution you offer and the effects of putting not into play.
6. Confirm that your client agrees with the solution.
7. Set up the schedules and put them into play.

Winter Is Coming

If you are convinced that your law firm is on solid footing on the client attraction front, what would you do if the economy lost ½ its value in a recession or an economic crisis? Our friends across the Atlantic faced the same issue in 2008 when a 50 year boom in the sale of legal services came to an end. Thousands of law jobs vanished, law firms went bankrupt and law firm partners who could not bring in books of business were de-equitized i.e. kicked out of the partner table.

The primary challenge was that during this 50 year boom of abundant business for the law firms, the needs of companies were obvious and they were actively letting law firms know they had needs and law firms could pick, choose.
After the slump, law firms had to learn to uncover value, to unlock it because the abundance had vanished and they did not know how to uncover needs. Unlocking said value was a strong skill to have because in the drought all the streams and rivers had dried up so wells had to be dug by law firms.

Your law firm is probably not under the gun yet but you will be at some point in your long and hopefully, illustrious career. Will you wait for the Central Bank to force you to raise your capital to $25 Billion or go bust?

Sit At The Table

If your law firm wants to be welcome in the discussion about the future, you have to be able to add something to the conversation. The very first step is by making your self relevant by taking ownership of the issues that those who hire legal counsel and those whose jobs depend on addressing those issues must care about.

For example, the local economy is an oil based one so your law firm will be aware that all sorts of issues relating to oil will perennially come up. How about setting up a war chest for the refinery business where you are one of the go-to firms on anything that refers to refining or how about the business of oil subsidies? You can take lessons from the Oil Depletion allowance used in the American oil industry to make a contribution.
Many other oil based economies have addressed similar issues and your law firm can access this information and build a proprietary strategy asset to create and have conversations with industry members and leaders on several fronts and from different points of view.

This is just one example that your law firm can address out of several.

All This Theoretical Pablum

In the current Nigerian public life, there seems to be a general disdain for theoretical stuff as is evident in the placement of theoretical government bodies in the outskirts of the national capital and this attitude has naturally come to law land as is evident from the state the CPD movement is in.
Legal professionals feel 'what on earth is CPD going to achieve for my practice when weighted matters like bills being paid are on ground? It extends further to vital matters of running the law practice, namely, attracting clients.

To attract clients to your practice there is a plan or a strategy and planning or building a strategy involves lots of theory and this is where the previously mentioned disdain comes to bite lawyers in the rear. Because you do not respect theoretical frameworks, you do not understand them or are able to access the value that they offer you. The result is you do not have any practice planning to attract clients or even worse, you are handed some paper and told to make it happen. What!??!
Without the plan you have failed already. Everything else is just going through the motions and soon enough the reality of your failure to plan will catch up with you and your law firm.

This disdain is not a figment of our imagination as players in the local legal services place. For your thinking pleasure: listening to a speaker from Germany at a training session, he observed that the locals refused to study the body of work that the entire world had produced, they refused to access the knowledge and the result was that they could put aircraft together at the factory but the said planes never, ever took flight.

'Nuff said.

You Are Going Global

As a local law firm that is intent on participating in the global market place you have the home court advantage in the sense that global clients prefer local expertise rather than legal and other affairs being handled remotely by foreign counsel.
And before you get into a bother about your capacity levels remember that the USA was unable to execute its Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in the '60s simply because Fidel Castro knew the area of invasion intimately, in fact he went there regularly to fish and the Americans did not know the area.
So, the move for your law firm is to have an active presence on the internet.
You begin by writing your articles, blogging, making sure that those who are searching or looking into the country will come across your material. This is a first step to becoming a player in the global game.
As an observation, we have noticed that a popular approach taken by local business law firms is the 'Doing Business In Nigeria' PDF file and its placement up on the web. We strongly suggest that you come up with your own firm's position paper on the subject so you are accessible to your potential and actual clients and you handle the enquiries from there.
And remember, as long as you are competent you needn't bother about the competition. Yet.

When Selling Fails

When your law firm has put its ideas into play and the client chooses another, you must always remember two facts familiar to those of us who have embraced the bosom of the sales business.
Selling is a numbers game and you will make many attempts and have many failures. As you learn from your failures and make the adjustments you will succeed as you keep practicing selling your legal services (See Nick Murray's Game of Numbers, it costs $50.00 dollars).

Second, clients make decisions for emotional reasons and justify them with rational ones so work to address the emotional aspects of the selling process as well as the technical and treat your clients as though they are people, not just dispensers of choices.

LOCAL COUNSEL

How can your knowledge of the local jurisdiction you practice in be an advantage to your law firm in the global economy that you compete in? Prima facie, it appears a bit silly but it has happened quite frequently that locals get nothing or the barest minimum from all investments in their local space so your law firm needs to address the matter of local advantage.

In the beginning the first step must be some sort of protectionism while local capacity to perform and to compete with foreign players is being built but that is more the establishment's work.
So what can your law firm do? The answer to this has really been to mobilize your resources for the work ahead, to go and see how others are practising their own law e.g. the Arabs found oil in the 60's and evolved into sophisticated negotiators for it so that they were able to capture most of the benefits to improve existing infrastructure and provide for future development while African states largely failed to achieve this so going over the approach the Arabs used and working to adapt it to local circumstances is one benefit of seeing how others have solved the same problems your law firms face from foreign competition.

It is essential to organize how your law firm does its work so it does not throw away its competitive edge (local know-how) in a bid to integrate and compete with the larger legal environment. But most importantly, you need to build your own organic approach to the way the law firm is organised because this is what will sell your legal services. Organic means embracing the peculiarities of your local environment as an advantage and using it as an edge to promote your work and not dismissing your home court advantage as inadequate.

Local knowledge means that you can navigate the system, you understand it and are paying attention to it. The good news for you is that all this comes to you as being part of your local legal space and the bad news is that you have to deliberately appreciate it, specifically sharpen it and see it as special for it to translate into an edge when you compete with outsiders.
The reason is this: No man does well in a business he does not respect.

One more challenge as a local is having capacity in terms of sufficient money, skills and strategies to compete or to turn your tools to strengths. So if you have low levels of finance, skills and strategies you will have to make up for it with lots of thinking and creative ways of making the most of what you have.

EVERYTHING DEPENDS ON IT

What the environment you operate in thinks about your law firm matters. This does not mean you begin chasing reputation management, it just means that you have to take the natural consequences of your actions into account and decide how you want to address how they affect your reputation. Repeating it again, it is more important for you to be the best lover and have the reputation for being the worst lover than to be the worst lover and have a reputation for being the best. You simply have to choose carefully and deliberately.

One reason all this matters is that it heavily affects your marketing efforts and your ability to get business. You cannot market a bad product, what will be your pitch? If word gets out about your firm and the hype is not in agreement with what your firm can actually do, then you have a deep problem.
In addition there is the matter of peace of mind, namely, enjoying your work. People work for you to get paid but they work for intangible things such as a sense of meaning, the idea that they contribute to society e.t.c. When the society firmly believes your law firm is crap no matter what you say to the contrary, your people hear the crap talk and it drains their energy levels if you have an inadequate response.

Your response is first internal by showing to your people what your law firm is through your actions and explaining to them why you take certain actions. The external response is that you then put your own case to the general society and help them to understand your law firm's position.

In the past in many realms of business, stony and haughty silence mixed with the use of armed force were the usual responses to reputation problems but those days are dead and gone. Now the tools of communication, lobbying and image laundering are the way: they are all forms of making your case.

A final example of how this works is drawn from the world of business. The wealthy elite in business were largely hated for possessing economic power, for paying terrible wages, for causing artificial rises in the price of goods and for all the ills in society. They responded with stony silence and some form of oppression and the hate got worse.
However as times got harder and they were looked upon as devils, frequently abused, attacked in their offices and homes, they changed to the approach of gradually explaining their position, presenting themselves in a better light and engaging in massive amounts of philanthropy and good works. They were now well loved.

Human nature has not changed and your law firm will do well to remember it.

ONE-MAN LAW FIRMS

In the local legal services space there are literally thousands of solo law firms made up of one lawyer and one secretary and while the life of the solo lawyer offers all sorts of benefits and drawbacks, the main thing is that you have no map and must make it up as you go along.
Another way of expressing this is that you are responsible for it all and there is nowhere to hide and no one to blame if things do not work out as planned. The good news is that if you get the business, it is yours to take in any direction that you can. You can turn it in a billion dollar operation like Joe Jamail Jr. and you do not need a thousand lawyers to do it.

An example to compare the life of the solo lawyer to would be running the national government. It is very difficult, thankless and tempting work and millions of people depend on you to make it happen but if you don't run the government some other fellow will run it and you may not agree with his direction but you have to endure it. In plain terms, you give up limitless freedom to receive security and protection from being held accountable for making hard and scary decisions.

The solo lawyer also has to be disciplined in the sense that the controls that exist in larger entities are mostly absent and must be replaced with other type of controls. The work load and responsibility to be ahead of other lawyers in knowledge and ability to do the work is still very much there. All this means that the level of planning and organization in a solo operation will be epic. It does not have to be rigid, it just has to be in place.

There is also a word on flexibility, meaning your time is your own or you can show up as you like or you are the boss. In our view, flexibility is more about hitting the areas that you need to than about showing up from 9 - 5 but you must have a routine that allows you to build some form of flow or momentum that you can work with and that can help you crush the competition .
Remember, solo or no, you will be held to the same standards as a larger entity so excuses and incompetence will not suffice.

And you chose to be a solo.

ALL WARFARE IS BASED ON DECEPTION

At some public forum a few years ago, Christopher Kolade made a comment about how governance was really about managing different interests. Well, there is a government at your law firm so you have to be apt at managing different interests. Coming across this idea of managing different interests was a eureka moment and paying attention will help you to understand the irrational behaviour of management and the resentment of employees. It just sometimes seems that both sides never agree no matter how good the intentions they profess are.

At your law firm the issue can be posed like this; what is the primary interest of management, what is the primary interest of employees and how much and to what extent can we make these interests happen.
Before going into the details of any firm crisis or problem, you should look into what interests are being promoted and who stands to benefit. It will not really help to couch self-interest as concern for others. This tactic has been tried and is not working.
Once interests have been clarified, you know what choices you have. For example, WalMart the retailer, paid hourly workers very badly in the early days. It denied them stock options and used them as much as it could. Little wonder that the labour unions found a great home with its workers for a while. This was largely because management really did not care for hourly workers.
What was the solution? Pay them better, give them stock options and listen to their complaints with the intent of addressing them.

If your law firm management is bent on treating its employees badly then it should expect employees to scram at first light. And if employees are shiftless and lazy, they won't be around for too long.
The point is, as long as both parties do not want the same things absolutely or largely the same things, then all words are mere deception.

JUST ONE THING

One wonders what the single most important and valuable asset to have as a lawyer or a law firm is? The idea is, what can give you the greatest shot at that partnership you lust after or what can convince that law firm to make room for you?
Since this is a platform all about marketing legal services, it is little wonder that we strongly suggest that,selling, is the answer.

We know, we know, selling is difficult, getting paid on it is hard as well. Plus it has a sleazy aura about it especially for legal practitioners. Oodles of rejection, lack of monthly security BUT the thing is that once you embrace it you can get better at it to the point you deem fit.
Reading an interview by Senator Udo Udoma of UUBO, he actually said that at the start getting the business was rather difficult but they stuck with it and thirty years later UUBO is a heavy weight. Hard to believe but I read said interview myself.
So relax, you just have to apply thyself.

In pure play commerce, the chaps who have business savvy, the practice of learning where the oil is and very importantly, how to capture it tend to be the ones we all read about and on another level, who have the most security.
Selling legal services, as a skill that you can apply, means freedom to move as you please and flexibility to go after all sorts of heavy ticket business. If you want to know how difficult it is? Look at how rarely it is ever mentioned or promoted. All success in the law is supposedly predicated on dreams and hard work but all activities for your law firm are aimed at being able to make a sale either directly or circumlocutously.

If you can present yourself , prepare yourself and persuade other businesses and clients of the value of your offering and you can do it regularly and predictably then you are on easy street. But this entire process is short term plus long term plus difficult plus simple.

It is like the quote on acting: the most difficult part is honesty, if you can fake that you've got it made.

LEGAL EDUCATION

There seems to be a disconnect between what is taught in faculties of law and what needs to be known and used in practice. So this post is a pointing out of current realities and a pointer to the next step of evolution in the practice of the law in Nigeria.

There are fundamental business realities that do not come into the mind of the law student unless in form of the vague idea that she must get a good job in a law firm. This disconnect is not restricted to the law alone but the law is what concerns us here at THE IBARU-McKENZIE BLAWG.

The most basic of these fundamental business realities is that the law is a business and from this reality everything else flows. Think of this idea as the foundation of it all and some of the old timers who went through hell to find this out and now keep this insight from the younger ones are the ones who give senior lawyers a bad name.

Teach the law student the value of the ability to look at the law as a business and the general quality and hustle of the individual lawyer will step up. The individual will always matter and a lazy lout will be a lazy lout. But what Nigerian lawyer is lazy? Just look at the effort they put in. It is when they see no light at the end of the tunnel or they see that they really have a snowball's chance in hell to access the big leagues that the tricks come in.
In a sense, they were doomed from the beginning in the sense that legal education left out vital skills that they would need in the marketplace. But you may point out that others go through the same system and come out great. This response defeats the purpose of an education system and is like saying because an individual has a strict personal moral code there is no need to enforce the public morality because whether the public morality is enforced or not the individual with the high moral code will do the right thing.
If the legal education system cannot transfer productive knowledge to its wards then how will we ever have billion dollar law firms to compete with Skadden, Latham, Dacheng et al?

The reality is that history shows that the conscious or conscious cultivation of elitism slows everyone down just like a monopoly that sees limited uses of its products and the size of the market and is convinced that because it has achieved its monopoly then its word is correct. Introduce some competition and see new uses, products and markets extended.

When you have seen the deficiencies you face and insist on leaving it be or letting others go through them just because you did you have lost a great chance to make an impact and to leave your name on the sands of time forever.
There are only so many ways to become immortal and solving this glaring challenge of a deficient legal education is one. Make it a fixed principle that law students from day one, know that the practice of the law and the law firm is a business.

This leads to our own contribution, showing lawyers how to sell and answering the question 'How do law firms get clients?' Nigerian lawyers are already bent on becoming lawyers entrepreneurs in the thousands and this trend of solo lawyers should not be looked down upon. It should be actively encouraged as a phase in local legal development that can be turned on its head to spread legal services and develop the market.
Solo legal practitioners are everywhere already and cannot be legislated out of existence. However, some are currently giving Iegal a bad name and reputation and must not be left to their own devices. The knowledge of how to sell legal services will deliver them, will deliver us all and is the only viable alternative. It is like converting a virus into a cure by introducing an antibody where the previously naughty solos are now preaching the gospel of higher law practice standards.
This is a market reality in developing a services economy that must be embraced and the good thing is that to a large extent legal runs its own show and can really do wonders.
The challenge is leadership. Whether by virtue of achievement, election and by opening a law office, you are in a position to lead the way to the promised land and it will not do to ignore this chance for immortality.
Some lawyers have access to certain resources that enhance their work and others have access to different resources so everyone has the responsibility to make his own contribution but at a certain point fundamental realities of the limitations of individual effort must be addressed and a systemic solution must happen so go to the source and provide a useful legal education.
Teach lawyers that the law is a business and not an opaque priesthood and more importantly teach them how to market, how to sell legal services and we will all have received double promotion in half the time.
It could be instead of using six full years before learning anything about the jungle, you could do it all in four years and that would include a heavy dose of getting clients so when the lawyer gets to the jungle he is ready. After all this is what an education is for, to prepare you for the world.

All of the above advocates a systemic response in the way lawyers are educated and addressing this how to get clients issue systemwide is more effective.

HOW CAN I HELP?

Selling your law firm's services, getting the business, marketing your firm is about offering ways you can assist clients, about showing you can be useful and more than a mere collector of a transaction that must be carried out by lawyers. You don't say 'this is a legal transaction and needs legal support, the client must give someone so she might as well give it to us'.

Marketing as difficult as it may seem at first is not about mere puff, making outrageous claims and finding ways to entrap the clients. Marketing is high level intellectual work that requires heavy brainpower. That it has been practiced without this element is a large reason for the soddy reputation. But your law firm needs to do it and to do it well if you want to stay in business for any meaningful length of time.
It is a big idea in marketing to focus on the client and understand her position before figuring out how to assist but the point is spelling out clearly what you can do, how you can help, what service you are placing, how you will respond to unexpected chances, how your law firm acts e.t.c.
Having locked this down clearly means half the task is done and applying this all to your client means the victory is complete.

FUTURE TENSE

The children of a nation are its future everyone says it and invokes this truth when it needs to be and so it is. Looking at the general crop of national leaders in Nigeria, they were largely children of the state in the sense that the state gave them an international education, development plan, feeding program. Adolf Hitler for all his choices made very sound choices as far as the children of Germany were concerned; preserving their cultural identity and contribution.

What does all this have to do with legal. Well, in my fourth year of legal studies (400 level in local lingo) it came to my attention that boys were doing global programmes like ICSAN (for company secretaries) and afterwards hopped on a plane to Heathrow, JFK and Jo'Burg for a foreign degree to JumpStart the illustrious legal career. So after a while they came back or finished the ICSAN or whatever and worked in a law firm for a few years. Then a while later, THEY LEFT THE LAW.
Simple reason really, the finances were off and they usually moved to finance houses like banks , asset managers e.t.c. I find their decision to be admirable and a true expression of capitalism and the mobility that owning your own means of production gives you. But from a legal ecosystem perspective we must stop the bleeding or else in the years to come we will have no blood left.

These transferees are sharp, ambitious and fortunate enough to be able to afford an expensive education and they should be a high return on investment to legal directly. The idea being that this gives law firms an advantage, an added cachet to your firm and your culture but if these people are leaving why go through the trouble? So this is really about the legal pipeline.

The football club FC Barcelona has its marbles straight on the pipeline issue. They have got this football academy that produces talent for the future needs of the team so fairly recently they've been killing all sorts of other teams and dealing best ayer awards and championships with the quality of their players.
The pillars of all these achievements came from the football academy who had been playing together for years.

The good news about this is that the system by itself will weed out the weak and the incompetent and unproductive. So forget any mollycoddling to cover your incompetence or lack of spine as a law firm. But whatever is left will be leaner, meaner and ready to achieve anything in sight.

THE SKILLS A LAWYER'S GOTTA HAVE

Let's get into it. For said lawyer to get ahead she has to be able to do some things and the good news is that while said things are constant and fixed in concrete, the HOW to do them are as flexible and varied as personality types vary from lawyer to lawyer.
To get a stumbking block out of the way, there is the prevalent notion that all the lawyer has to be is as bright as a pin and all will fall into place but this is incomplete. There are other stuff that will be helpful to have and they force you to be able to do better stuff.

The skills are:
A. The ability to show the client you understand the problem.
B. The ability to have a meaningful conversation.
C. The ability to learn how to think.
D. The ability to convince clients to give you their business..

Let us stop in at these four to explain further.

The idea is simple; building a mahogany table means four legs and a table top. The quality of each piece of wood used for each part fixes the quality of the final table.
In your law firm you already use the four skills in various ways with different levels of success but what we suggest is sitting down and putting your mind to what these skills mean and the only way you know you have locked it down is when you can do it effortlessly without struggle, when you succeed at it and most importantly when you accept that the excuses you give for your failures are just that.
Excuses.

IN ENGLISH, WHAT SERVICES A LAWYER CAN ACTUALLY OFFER?

The detailed answer especially as it appears for particular industries to a question like this are infinite. Just visit the online presence of any full-service law firm to look at their offerings and you have an idea of the infinite and virtually endless mix. Then go to a Global 100 law firm and see the ingenuity to which the full-services concept has been really put to.

The services a lawyer offers are:
LITIGATION; which means anything that has to do with you having an argument with another party, how to resolve it and going to court about it.

SOLICITORSHIP; which is basically paperwork and has everything to do with creating and looking at issues such as creating or drafting business documents, preparing wills, transfer of property rights, their meaning and effects.

ADVISORY: which is brainpower and the combined effects of legal knowledge, productive experience, terrible mistakes and the specific application to a particular situation.

EXECUTION: this is the actual doing of the task and not the legal terms which means specific things must be done to make an agreement valid and binding on parties to the agreement. This sort of execution makes certain that all your legal plans are put into play in a way that makes sure you win.

GOVERNMENT: while we are at it let us remember the ever present a d ever increasing presence of government and what the lawyer has to offer. He looks at engagements the government is likely to or has gotten into (The Bakkassi Peninsula agreements) and uses his understanding to make sense of it all and get the plumbing working so the water can flow through plus he makes sure it stays working.

POLITICS/STATESMANSHIP: for a lot of reasons law has always been a foundation for politicians and statesmen.

These are the fundamental pillars upon which the myriad of legal services offered to the general public are based. The specific application of these fundamental pillars have led to things such as specialization by industry, which is how the industry itself is organized e.g. Hospitality practices, or the law firm divided the territory geographically and only works from a particular zone the same way a bank has local territories for better use of resources.

WHO SHOULD DO YOUR FIRM'S MARKETING?

Marketing is too important to leave to the marketing department.

The way the marketing process works is that from production to delivery there are tiny nuances and insights you pick up from being part of the process that make you massively confident and able to actually sell your legal services to the client and she sees this clearly. In short, you know it is cold outside when you go on outside and it is cold.

A marketing department helps you craft your message and organise your selling advantage so you can put your self out there in the best light possible BUT you are the product.

An associate once remarked 'for law firms your service is the brand, it is the marketing tool, it is what the client thinks of when your firm comes to mind'
The reason this concept is tricky for you to get is that you probably assess your firm on things that matter to legal and to a lesser extent, outside legal. This is a common phenom but it slaughters your market savvy and severely limits your reach. Your challenge is to win on both fronts.

The opening line is something Mr Bill Hewlett of HP said.

RAINMAKER OR RAINCATCHER?

Have you heard about the rain makes worms theory of marketing professional services (law, accounting, consulting e.t.c.)? The idea is that whenever it rains we see worms on the ground therefore it is the rain that makes worms. Whenever we do ads or public meetings we get clients so ads are clients. It sounds ludicrous now but when you take this idea and place it in a selling context for your law firm's services it sounds really valid. But it is not.

There's more: adverts , networking and brochures bring in clients so put your money in that and you will have a truckload. As you are already thinking there is more to building a client base for your law firm than that and that more is the substance, the message behind your business. What are you saying to the client?

The 'marketing' is the tools while the message , the why, the what is the actual marketing. Do not fall in love with your tools, the warm glow you get when you see yourself in the papers or on the news and the publicity they give you and leave the main work.

SELLING SOME MORE

You are a legal practitioner and at some point you will have to sell your legal services, to actually convince a client that you should work on their business. Not an associate, not a brochure, YOU. At this point you have a few choices namely; get to it or duck the issue.

Ducking the issue is a favourite here in legal (I know, I'm from legal) but the other option of getting to it means moving obstacles out of your way because marketing is not so much as pushing your law firm out there as it is positioning yourself to be where the ball is going so you can receive it. The rain always falls so you have to place your bucket right to get the water.

First off, marketing your law firm is being in the people business and this is less about being super nice than being able to communicate your opinion, your view, your assessment on how the engagement should be structured.
Clients should be told and shown what you can do for them and what you can offer. Don't be shy about it.

Then talking about learning and CPD. I mean we are all for it but working on interesting and complex pieces of business you are able to access with your marketing savvy is an entire world of CPD plus it pays for official CPD which gives you points.
Also the way legal skills tend to be transferred from ancient times and ancient guilds to now, is by the apprenticeship model where you grasp the work and watch the master doing it and emulate.
So it is one feeding into the other just like a charmed circle with no end, where your marketing savvy helps with actual and knowledge-based CPD and then official CPD programmes shows you the new knowledge (plus the points).
And since we are focused on your going out to actually secure the business (so is your boss/associate) we strongly urge you to go out and OFFER ways to assist. You can do this by actually asking the client about her business and then looking at what you can offer based on what you've heard. That is the basic approach and it has a thousands applications.

Marketing for law firms is about having a product (study, think, read, research) and then presenting it to the client as a solution to her business. It helps if you are connected all over the place as well but that only goes so far, gets you in the door.
At some point you will have to bring actual results to your practice.

IS SOMETHING WRONG?

So I am in court and a client with a worried look on her visage asks her lawyer 'Bidemi, is something wrong?, when it looks to her that things are moving slowly and her lawyer is getting up and down plus other lawyers on the team are not present. Then Bidemi gives his explanation.

This exchange reminds me of the opportunity you have to use client communications as a way to show you are on top of your game, are worth your reputation, exorbitant fees e.t.c.
Why don't you try telling the client what is on ground BEFORE she starts worrying and ideas begin to enter her head? This is very intangible and you are a busy lawyer but the pros that I know, know this. Plus your client lives in a different time zone and headspace from you. She is not a lawyer and does not live in your mind and if you assume she can read your mind then your association will be as rocky as marriages where one spouse expects the other to mind-read and fails to express needs and complaints.

Bad or good, tell the client. Do not leave her in space because this exposes her to all sorts of wonderment. Check out Joe Flom over at Skadden who was always turning over the clients issues over in his mind ad nauseum. He was always asking his people 'have you informed the client, have you told her the memo is on its way, have you sent the mail telling her what you've done or where you are at?
The simple idea behind this is you create a deep well of trust and competence. She feels you have it all locked down and nothing slips through the cracks.

A word: it is tempting to go forward and put this idea into play for your special,pay the bill clients which is admirable but limits the reach of this idea. Try it out on everyone and make adjustments as you get used to how it applies in your affairs.

For your law firm HOW you do your work is also as important as what work you do.

THERE ARE TWO WAYS ABOUT IT

Let's talk about two approaches to attracting business for your law firm; the first is plan and project then the next is kick and follow. In both approaches there is planning involved but to  plan and project; this approach is detailed, it is rigorous and it is designed to catch problems before they become problems and to provide the answers. The bad news is that it is boring, it lends itself to enduring current reality and shuts of possibilities. The good news is that when it works it is a beauty to behold and it convinces everyone to give you all sorts of things. In a word it is impressive.

 

Kick and follow is self explanatory. You kick and then you follow, you put an idea into play and then you see where it takes your law firm. You get in a random conversation and then enjoy it and see what happens.

You are a legal practitioner. Now tell me plan and project is not what you aspire to, what your friends across the Atlantic will swoon over? Reality seems to strongly favour a Kick and follow, Plan and project mix. This means the size of your law firm is not planned, the territory has no maps and it is only when your feet touch the ground that you know how deep the vein of oil goes.

Planning is great but too many inventions and achievements were mistakes no amount of planning could have produced.

IT'S ALL ABOUT YOU

12-time NCAA championship winner and legendary basketball coach John Wooden has a lesson that is very relevant to the business of marketing your law firm. He said that as long as you have prepared your self, it really doesn't matter how solid your competitor is. If you go with your full self and make the most of your resources then you've done really all you can do and all that is left is for you to enjoy the game.

For your law firm this means understanding yourself, knowing yourself and taking this to the client and to the competition. Relax on the focus on the competition, the copying and lemming-like attitude; you can adapt boundarylessness later.

 

The process of doing this means examining your entire firm and using your strengths and weaknesses to your advantage. You can start with something really important; what business is your law firm in? Selling legal services or solving problems or servicing clients? The days of giving some generic 'oh, we do all that' answer are dead and gone. If you do not have a specific and deliberate way of getting this done that is a clear advantage for your firm then forget it. How are you any different from the chap down the street?

The answer to the question will explain the current reality of your firm and it matters because the answer sets limits to your levels of excellence and the type of clients you seek to work with. It takes a serious attitude to consciously go after Multinationals of foreign origin and not just as local counsel.

 

All this really means understanding how you will approach the client and market opportunities and because you are in a rigid, ultra-conservative profession you have to work within its rules and turn its confines into advantages. While this is not a pleasant situation, it is our reality and wishing for wild haired innovation may take a while. Just look at Geoffrey Chaucer who wrote the Canterbury Tales. He was bound by the rigid rhyming structure that all writers had to abide by and used those strict bonds as an outlet for of full expression.

 

Go ye and do likewise.

WHO HAS THE LIGHT?

It has to be said and said loudly that with the explosion of knowledge and information plus the notorious unwillingness of legal practitioners to do anything remotely disruptive, we are all equally matched. And yet some law firms seem to be doing well or better than others, how is this possible? Imagine two world class criminals going on a quest into a diamond vault and in the middle of the operation NEPA takes the light. One immediately takes out her laser torchlight and proceeds to raid the vault while the other is left in the dark, trips into a booby trap door and is found by the police in the morning. The lady criminal with the light won because she could see and so in a legal services space where the strength and capacity and rigidity  of law firms are basically the same the ones who see, who understand the market win.

This understanding of the market is the light in a dark place by which they navigate their way through innumerable local laws, customs, business practices and political choices. If you cannot see where you are going what does it matter that you went to Harvard law or some such place?

 

For your law firm this is a big, big deal. Understanding the market means you can raid the territory of the accountants, tax people, consultants (they've been doing it for a while to legal if you've noticed). You can initiate fancy footwork, your plans can make sense, you know if throwing money, more bodies or partners will be the optimal approach. If you understand what the lady (client) wants you can pattern your dating strategy (business development) leading unto the proposal more realistically. If intelligence will work, having financial capacity should be underplayed, even hidden.

 

If you take the effort to understand the market, you have the light.