AS YOU MAKE IT RAIN

Here are some background facts that you must grab to be any good at generating business for your law firm.

1. You are an expensively and well trained legal professional. Extremely knowledgeable and keen to practice the law in all its beauty so you did not train to sell or market.

2. The skills and way of thinking that make you a good lawyer do not obviously translate to skills that make you a rainmaker with the ability to bring in the business through the door.

3. You probably disdain the bit of marketing and assume that the substantive fee generating portions of your work must take precedence over all else.

4. As a lawyer, marketing is unethical and for shysters. Those who do it, God will soon catch them plus If you do great work the clients will come. No need to market.

5. If you actively or basically accept all the above its okay so do many others, in fact yours truly held these beliefs at some time in the past but you cannot hold onto them any longer.

The five things just listed will demoralize and make your sales efforts ineffective to the point of impotence.

Now let's move on to more productive alternatives:

1. Learning and making time to sell your legal services as you practice is as important as building your technical legal skills and knowledge.
You must come to believe this.

2. Marketing is a numbers game so the more times you do it the better you get at it BUT sometimes you will fail to close the deal. Be ready for this.

3. Marketing is important because if you do not bring in the business through the door using all the selling tools at your disposal you cannot learn the law and if you do it badly it will be a disaster for your legal reputation as a law firm. (The Reputation!)

4. It is up to you to develop the time, contacts, issues and resources needed to market your firm's legal services. Do not expect much slack from your superiors. (The Cold Cold World!)

5. It is very ethical to market, advertise and promote your law firm, your legal services and everything else, even aggressively.
You just have to do so creatively, within the bounds of what legal professionals are allowed to do.

Go get 'em Tiger.