THE NOBLE PROFESSION AND ITS RUPTURATION

The challenge with creating legends for younger law firms and lawyers to copy is that as time passes, these legends are burnished to the point that they are no longer real people, so no one can emulate them.

There is no nobility in operating as the professional equivalent of the vulture whether Solo, MidLaw or BigLaw firm so the nobility of your law practice must be built on your legal insights and capacity as well as the VITAL ability to get the best value for them in the marketplace. The nobility is important for the souls of your firm so you all know that you are doing great work that matters and that you believe in or at the very least you can defend. Without this, you might as well be staring at the sky for all the difference THAT makes to the world.

There is a reality you will become very familiar with where you are unable or unwilling to generate business or win clients at your law firm, nobility or no:

1.You will really learn nothing about the law because you actually learn what you are about by working on a CLIENT'S problems so if there are no clients thee all art marking time.

2. Then you move on to the bullshit expeditions to 'get' clients which are largely exercises in wearing out shoe leather and shooting the breeze with the legal officer of the prospective client.
Now if you are on one of these there is nothing to be ashamed about, you just have to go with something valuable to offer or even better, you may think about it this way: Your law firm is going out to the marketplace and whatever it has to offer is the 'money' it will use to exchange for the client's business. Have you ever gone to the market without money? See how friendly traders will be then...
This is a reaction several law firms get and they seem mystified. There really is nothing to it because as long as the potential client sees something that is in it for his enterprise your law firm will always be welcome. For example, yours truly was sent out on a hunting trip to a real estate enterprise to 'follow-up'. Actually a storm of letters was rained on the said area to secure introductory meetings, upon meetings and upon speaking with the CEO who reluctantly and tiredly inquired 'what can you do for us? It occurred to me that we had not come with any 'money' .Ah, being a greenhorn salesperson (I mean, law associate)

3. The Empty Office Syndrome usually comes up at the starting phases of the law firm enterprise where the search for business, and employees to process legal work are the pressing needs. The solution to EOS is learning to generate business by finding ways to be useful as a law firm to the marketplace so as to have a steady stream of work and applicant e-mails. The mere passing of time will not get rid of the EOS but professionally marketing the law firm's insights and capabilities to prospective clients and employees (Yes, EMPLOYEES).

The good news is that if you are with a thriving concern a lot of the selling is already taken care of and you just have to process the work but this is really temporary. Here's why: For some reason lawyers, just love going solo or making partner and to have a decent chance at any of these two things you will do very well to develop the ability to professionally market your legal services and bring in the business. You thus have no choice but to be noble and sharp because one without the other just makes you a loser or a crook.

NO MYSTERY TO IT

Your clients are not crazy or vindictive. Your senior partners are not trying to sink the firm and no, the Managing Partner is not hoarding access to valuable clients , contacts and ideas.
If you've practiced the law to any reasonable degree, you might have felt or voiced these sentiments at one point or another, even if just to yourself. The feeling that these people are strange, illogical e.t.c. Everything a person does has a reason to support it and once you can hazard that reason then you can make progress in persuading her to your point of view.
This is insight is elementary but it is against human nature and can only be learned gradually.

Applying this idea to your efforts to generate business for your law firm sounds something like this. If the potential client does not clearly see the benefit you can offer or she feels she is above your offering, then you have more work to do.
You now need to uncover or discover what she needs, the consequences of her failing to go with the solution you offer, what matters to her, what will get her attention. And when you have this, the business of bringing into her attention and being hired for the work can happen.

As an example of the first step in the sales cycle, yours truly was expostulating on the services offered by IBARU-McKENZIE to a group of lawyers during a lunch break at an industry pow-wow and at the end of the talk I got the distinct impression that I would not be receiving an immediate rush for a sign on fee. The attitude of the lawyers was 'we have been managing before now and see no reason why we can't continue to manage'. The clear feedback here was I had more persuading to do to move the deal forward.
No mystery to it here. Just find what matters to the other chap and get on with it.

SO WHAT? THE MARKET CAN BEAR IT...

It has always been the way of the lazy and unintelligent law firm to transfer its incompetence to the customer. Well, not law firms only. Business in general.
A case in point is the car manufacturing industry of the West in the 80's before the rise of Japanese models. The union workers raised prices every year because they wanted to, because the market could bear it and because the companies agreed and added their own share to the final cost of the car. It was a nice party until the Japs showed up with low cost, middling quality cars that swiftly took over the market and then went on to become lower cost, higher quality cars. Toyota, Nissan anyone?

This is not finger wagging. It is a plot for your law firm to read the writing on the wall and move on it. Just because the market can bear your outrageous costs that have no connection to the value of your work doesn't mean it will always do so. And when your clients' get upset or the market prices shift, who will lose the most blood? The fat law firm or the lean, fit firm. This is not fear mongering, it is just that there is a more profitable option available. The option is value pricing.
If you connect value to your work and reduce the transfer of the costs of producing those services to your clients, your law firm must look for ways to be profitable, more useful, more intelligent.

So, yours truly was making a pitch for our most valuable services to a firm in the Ikeja area and when asked by the lawyers in this particular meeting 'why does this service cost so much', I laid out the benefits and also mentioned 'this service costs a lot to produce so...' Immediately the lawyer ( 13 years at the bar) pounced 'Oh, so you want us to pay for your costs abi?'

The point is this, this is the only profitable way for your law firm to earn any money or to get any intelligence worth anything about practicing the law: You must look for ways to appropriately your legal services by tying them to the value the client receives. Everyone pays for value and resents paying inflated, industry determined costs.

Another example, setting up a business generally costs less than $100.00 in the High Ease of Doing Business areas of the globe and upwards of $700.00 in other areas. The lack of businesses started, the failure of businesses started and the loss of potential are the costs of producing the measly $600.00. This translates to a poorer tax base and generally lower wages and a weaker talent pool. Nigeria is currently not in the High Ease of Doing Business Areas.
The governing authorities can only do so much to protect private companies from themselves plus it is no excuse to say 'that is how everyone else does it' This is even worse, you are making a case for the unprofitable practice of the law. And lawyers need their profit.

You know how proud you will be when you come up with a nifty pricing plan that means you get to do more legal work, you get into newer areas of practice and you crush the competition? Can you imagine the respect and envy?
That is why you put in those long hours at the table. You are not just boning up on case law or draining the coffee pot or keeping your people back at work. You are coming up with ways to crack the code of appropriately pricing your legal services in the marketplace you operate in by tying it to the value the client receives.

LEGAL EDUCATION: ACT ONE SCENE TWO

The reality on the groundlevel strongly suggests that elitism (the artificial selection of leaders which ignores the individual's potential, ability and achievement) in any form slows everything down,especially profits. It is just like the monopoly that believes it knows all the uses a particular product can be put to and all the limits that the product has : in essence it knows the market limits and uses its position to keep it that way. All you have to do is introduce competition and watch prices tumble and new uses of the same product go viral.

Where you have seen the deficiencies in a system and you refuse to address them you have lost your claim to leadership and even worse, you have lost the opportunity to write your name in the history books. Immortality is quite tricky to make happen but here are two options. Solve THE legal problem or write a great book: solve the problem of the professional marketing of legal services.

This leads to our own contribution: working with lawyers to sell their legal services. Nigerian lawyers in the thousands are already bent on becoming entrepreneurs and the nature of the legal profession encourages this. So the legal establishment can choose to look upon this phase of development as a trend that it can work with to do its own work, to spread the development of legal services and to expand the market.

Solo legal practitioners are everywhere and they cannot be legislated out of existence neither should anyone even try but they are blamed for giving the law a bad name so they should not be left to their own devices. The knowledge of how to professionally sell their legal services will transform the quality of their work and really eliminate the sharp practices attributed to them. It is just like converting a destructive virus (unprofessional soloists) into a cure (professional soloists)by introducing an antibody (knowledge of how to professionally sell legal services).

This is a market reality that must be embraced in developing the legal services economy and it must be embraced. The good news is that legal largely runs its own show so it can be organized to make the pie filled with eggs and cream and currants instead of just flour. The challenge is leadership: whether by election, by achievement, by passing the bar and hanging a shingle, you are in a position to make this happen and it would be grossly remiss to abdicate this responsibility.

Some lawyers have access to certain resources that enhance their work and others have access to different resources so each one has the duty to make a contribution but at some point the limits of individual achievement must be addressed and consolidation of effort must happen so: go to the grundnorm and make the legal education system provide abundantly for the professional marketing of legal services.
Teach the lawyer that the law is a business not an opaque priesthood and most importantly teach the lawyer how to sell legal services and we all will have received a double promotion in half the time. Instead of spending 6 years before learning the facts of life, you could do it all in 4 which includes a heavy dose of how to get clients so when the lawyer gets to the jungle he is ready and able.
Let us remember, a purpose of education is to prepare you for the real world.

All the above is about addressing the systematic and structural problems in the practice of the law, in a fundamental way. It is easier and more productive to address the problem from a systemic perspective then pass the individual through the system than to try to make the system fit each individual.

Individual lawyers and firms are already hustling and will continue to do so. Making systemic adjustments and basic restructuring will really enhance their work and for those who refuse to adjust? They will be thrown out onto the streets.

BEFORE IT BECOMES A REAL PROBLEM

Ever get tired of hearing about it? I mean hearing from lawyers that their clients get into the mess and then bring it to the lawyer to wave his magic wand to make the problem go away. Now while it is true that at this point there is little the lawyer can do except make the best of a bad situation, we are here talking about the great lawyer.

As impossible as it may sound, part of your work is to see around corners and keep tabs on your client so you do not have unpleasant surprises. Where it happens with a new client that is strike one for you as a professional and you have two more strikes and you are out of the realm of being considered a competent professional.
In case you are the kind of lawyer that thrives in pulling rabbits out of hats then you do not need to see anything before-hand. Just keep putting out fire after fire.

The answer we offer is a little something called CLIENT MANAGEMENT. In theory the idea is kind of simple: you have a client, you set goals for business you hope to execute for the client, the type of relationship you will have, the resources you will invest and the corners you hope to see around going forward. In short, there is a deliberate effort by the lawyer to manage the client.
In cases where things fall into the cracks or deadlines are missed and where new business goes somewhere else you can be sure there was no planning. Lots of hand wringing and regret but no plan on ground to make certain that in the next 9 months whatever newish business or new direction the client is going in, the law firm known because it has made the plan a cause celebre, a part of its service level agreement. A very good example of the Client Management Product is the proprietary Large Client Revenue Service developed by IBARU-McKENZIE (some obvious self promotion).
We cannot count the number of times when the client has told us 'We just don't know what is going on'
We knew. There was muddling through and winging it, which had always worked in the past so the need to pay attention to the care,feeding and cultivation if the client business relationship was not acute. Besides, who has the time for such &%$##.

Before the problem comes up means deliberately looking forward at the hard facts of successes and failures and predicting what the future will hold based on current facts. If a young lady and a young man are romantically involved then we should all be preparing for a wedding and kids in the not too distant future. Same way if a law firm's clients are entering new areas of business and are looking at new business partners and the law firm is blissfully unaware, you can be sure some territory will be raided very soon. Or let's look at the case of the associate who spends a lot of the time grinding and doing work. Who is going to tell him that he needs to generate business to make partner or that the faster he can do so, the faster his partner track. Plus the fact that he has no time, while unfair will not be accepted as a valid reason?

No lawyer is ever blindsided by anything that comes up in her practice, she just wasn't looking when she was crossing the street.

THE PIPELINE: ACT ONE SCENE ONE

The children of a nation are its future so everyone says and this fact is invoked when it needs to be and it is a fact. Look at the current crop of national leaders across all industries and you'll notice that they are wards of the state or children of wards of the state in the sense that the state gave them an international childhood, education, development and nutrition programme. Adolf Hitler for all his choices made sound choices as far as the children of Germany were concerned, with preserving their culture and securing their contribution to the state e.t.c.

What does have to do with legal? In the fourth year of yours truly in the school system (400 level) it happened that lawyees were doing all sorts of professional programmes (ICSAN, CIARB) and after this they hopped on a plane across the Atlantic or to Jo'burg for a foreign degree to JumpStart the illustrious legal career. After a while the lawyers returned or finished the ICSAN or whatever else and began work at a law firm.
Then a short while or a few years later (pick one), THEY LEFT THE LAW. For a simple reason really. The finances were off and they usually moved to financial institutions like banks, financing outfits.
I find this decision to be admirable and a true reflection of the beauty of capitalism which allows you to do as you please where you own the means of your own production. But from a legal ecosystem perspective we must stop the bleeding or else in few years we will be an ecosystem in drought.

These said lawyees are sharp, ambitious and fortunate enough to be able to purchase an expensive, global education and they should be a high return on investment to legal directly, the idea being that this education gives you an edge, a cachet to the firm you are with as well as enhances your contribution to local legal culture. But if these lawyees are leaving then what is the point?

This is about the legal pipeline of talent, of bodies on the ground and of ambitious young minds engaged in legal. The football team F.C. Barcelona has its marbles straight, is sticking to the plot and is a model to follow. It has its functioning football academy (a pipeline of football talent) that produces a team that has become a living, breathing fighting unit of steel. Its results speak for it: The Champions League, The World's Best Player, Massive Membership of the World XI, Reception of a large part of advertising revenues e.t.c.

Creating and tending to a pipeline means addressing the issues that encourage prospective legal heavyweights to leave before they find their feet at the beginning stages of the legal career: poor pay, stifling of initiative, actively killing of ideas e.t.c It will also weed out the weak, the unlucky and the unproductive so whatever is left will be leaner, meaner and will guarantee a meaningful future for legal.

SCHOOL ET AL: ACT ONE SCENE ONE

Looking back at your own legal education with your years of practice and your exposure to how lawyers are educated in other countries of the world, do you not find 5, whole years a bit too much? This question about the education system professionals like lawyers and doctors go through is not new. The idea behind this length of time is to give you a thorough exposure to the rudiments and nuances of legal theory so that your entire being gets the idea that you are studying the law. Now, while one understands the howlers who say the time is too much ( yours truly met with a lady who studied in London and she asked 'what are you people doing with 5 whole years? Reply: 'My Sister...' ) and I strongly agree with them but I am more concerned with the content and direction of the education itself.

This is what we do at IBARU-McKENZIE, we generate business for law firms. This is our contribution to legal, others have social reform, justice e.t.c. we want to build billion dollar law firms, outside the major cities. So if you decide to spend your precious eyeball time on this blawg the preceding sentence was written so you'll have a clear idea of the kind of stuff you'll be getting. And blawg was not an error, it is pretty normal in the legal blogosphere as in B.LAW.G

So this matter of generating business in law firms rests primarily on the not-so- obvious assumption that the law is a business and a business needs customers to exist. You've probably read this business of the law being a noble profession? All lawyees get this from day one. Please for your own sanity take it down a little on the noble and dig in to the business. You cannot exercise a drop of nobility if the economic existence of your firm is in doubt. Not survival now, existence.
Following from this what did you ever learn in school about generating business apart from 'No Soliciting'. Probably nothing, so you had to learn by aping your seniors and the school of hard knocks. But (one really should not start a sentence with but, but it sounds right) there is this strange idea that has been around for a while. Really since the foundation of school and it is this: the plan behind setting up a system and working through it is that the individual can achieve more through the system than on his own? Well, reform in education requires a concerted, planned and political will rich process, McKinsey has a report out on it.

While the wheels of change are turning, you have to be committed to the hunt as a law firm and do remember, you are a professional services firm with limits on how you can go about it both by law (LPDC anyone?) and by the nature of the services you sell. If it is any consolation to you, developed legal economies, the U.K., the U.S. have the same challenges in driving business their way.
Soliciting will not do it for the long term though an anything-that-comes-in-the- door policy has always bee used to tide over till more stable times, no trouble with that. As long as it is a SHORT TERM measure and you fight like hell to keep it so.

A closing thought: have you noticed that most regular folk associate the lawyer with the courts i.e. litigation while the legal community itself seems to reward business law which follows business around and does its paperwork? It gets one thinking about what is what.