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.

 

 

TYPES OF LAW FIRM

Ibukun Awosika of the SOKOA Chair Centre made a comment about how building a business was not just enough for success, contribution and meaning. The type , character, nature and features of the business you build matter very much. Pushing this idea into law land and compacting it to mean; building a law firm is choosing to build a type of law firm just like giving birth to a child inherently means giving birth to a boy or girl. There are no other choices. The law firm you build is either one thing or the other it is not just a law firm. One stock of Berkshire Hathaway is worth 70,000 dollars and you get given the shares really, you don't buy into the company. This is a type of company, one whose value is very, very clear.

 

Type of law firm means, what are you doing? After slaving away to pay the rent and light bills what is left on your table. What do you have to do to make your dreams come true? You hear and read a lot about management so now you need action, to execute. How do you want to be seen by the world leads to, what do we have to do to achieve it? Say you want to be a thought leader (whatever that means) in renewables and alternative energy you must actually enjoy the matter and think upon it for yourself, for your government, for your clients and especially, for your competitors. You will not get by with showing up for client raids or pitches and then slinking off into the night after lining your pockets. Thought leaders do not do this kind of thing and neither will you.

 

Choosing your type of law firm hasn't too much to do with current reality however mediocre and Spartan your practice is. It is about looking at that reality and thinking of what you can be and then getting into the ring to make it happen. The entire legal services space is built up of individual firms like yours and the legal services chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

 

Is that you?

 

OUR WORD.

There is nothing we can say or do on our business platform that will single handedly or automatically transform your law firm into a global behemoth. That will only happen as you put your hand to the plough with us and together we will both accept responsibility for and carry the weight necessary to become a global behemoth of a law firm.
Stick with us and we will get there...

Think these ideas through put them to work and let us know how you do. This is it.

Success as a leader is dependent on calling on behaviour that is appropriate to the situation.
Jumping on each management fad without taking the time to digest the evidence which supports it.
That LSE or INSEAD or HBS puts it out there don't mean you should go for it.
If you take these thoughts as narrow prescriptions to follow then you are restricting their application to your affairs.
Understand that no one can tell you what to do and only you will know what to do with what you have and read and this is why your intent and the levels of desire and motivation that you bring to this platform matter very much.
In the days to come there will be shifts in the legal landscape and the business world and you will have to make shifts.
Welcome to figure it out on your own, the key word being figure it out.
This is not , even slightly, a wild card to rationalize and justify doing what you want or are currently doing because we have shown you the reality that you have to add you to the thoughts we offer. It is the placing of a duty on you.
For example, if some other chap uses these same thoughts who will come out on top? Only you can answer that.

ENTREPRENEURIAL LAW

A few years ago the idea of entrepreneurship exploded into the public space and everyone was itching to have a go at it. This was the solution to the unemployment problem, the low wage problem, the bad boss problem. But what on earth did it really mean? And what can law firms do with it?

A simple definition of this term entrepreneurship: is the absence of a safety net, there is a real risk of failure, of exposure and the relentless pursuit of opportunity. It is throwing oneself upon the seas for a chance at profit alone.
Entrepreneurs deliberately chase risk they use intuition, practice creativity, have to be extremely resilient and quite frankly lawyers live in another world with their focus on conservatism, being cynical, skeptical.

Do any of these law features make for good entrepreneurs and does the law need them? The history of legal entrepreneurship is not a particularly long or varied one. No media reporting in it, no awards for it and no marketplace buzz touting legal entrepreneurship.

So who dares claim up be entrepreneurial?

I DID IT, YOU SHOULD TOO

Senior to Junior: This is the idea, when we started out in practice things were terrible, money was terrible, opportunities were terrible, life was terrible and : IF I WENT THROUGH IT, YOU SHOULD BE GRATEFUL FOR WHAT YOU HAVE NOW. Basically compared to my time, you my friend are having it great.

This is about what the senior partner or whatever is supposed to do for the junior. I truly cringe at the word, supposed. Is anyone supposed to do anything for the junior? Well, it is out there and is causing drama so chipping in a word would help.

First there is the mentorship issue: This part can be confusing because for the junior he really has to find his feet on his own but there is a lot of talk about receiving guidance from a senior chap who knows the rules and is willing to give this to the junior. The junior also has to be reasonable and not expect sponsorship or someone to basically pave the way for him.

Then what are the duties of Senior and Junior: The senior offers what he can and the junior takes it with a smile. If there are deficiencies the junior makes up for it using his own ingenuity.

And finally there is context: Juniors have been led to expect freebies but this is not real so they will have to learn to negotiate in the context of the real world where having an edge or an impregnable position will determine who will decide to partner with you.

And let us not forget human nature. It is so constituted that it cannot respect a helpless man but it can pity him and even that it cannot do for long if the signs of power do not emerge.
On the part of the senior, it requires a big man to determine in his life that he will be a giant upon who others can stand to see further. And this choice can only be impelled no matter how much railing or finger wagging we all have to endure.
Find me a law firm that has invested enough in its associates to put them in front of the GC of a major company. That's the kind of major thinking that pulls thee ahead.

If all this goes to bits, the junior can always break out with a direction or thought which he can out into play on his own. This has been the way of all rising stars

There are merits to this do-it-for-me mentorship point of view and it works for the lazy, the shirkers or those who just cannot cut it.

ACTUALLY RUNNING THY LAW FIRM

The total absence of management training from legal education is a significant contributor to the current holes that exist in legal services. Current reality is that a large number of lawyers hang out shingles from day one or step out after a few years to do so. The only skill and experience in their possession is their drive and what they saw at the firms they were in.

From the perspective of formal legal education, this hole must be filled BEFORE the pupil is released to the society so she goes in ready to contribute and to cut short her spinning-the-wheels time under the guise of pupillage. As long as the pupil is actually undergoing an apprenticeship then the length of time can be justified as she will come out as a master in her field to the glory of lawyers everywhere.

THE LAW FIRM REFINERY

One of the ways that the third world countries are able to have some meaning in the global economic space is through OPEC, the oil people and refineries are a really big deal in the industry. In fact, one of the chief means through which the Standard Oil company achieved leadership was that it positioned itself as a refiner and every oil find had to come through its system or else there was no profit for the driller. Refineries made it all happen.

Client Management is the law firm's refinery. The first task is to search for where oil is which is business development, generating a viable book of business and then the next step is to refine the oil so that it can be put to several uses and generate value through the international economy.
Another way of looking at it is eating. You cannot eat food that is not cooked because it tastes terrible for one and your body cannot digest raw food so over a while you will become sick or starve.

The way the oil industry works is that most of the value is actually gotten from the refining process, this is where magic happens and your law firm needs one for all the data information, ideas, issues affecting the client, her industry and the work that you do.

What on earth is a refinery? Since you are in the services and ideas business, here's a go:

Client management is that function at your law firm that develops a conscious plan of studying your clients and the revenue flow they contribute to your business, paying close and continuous attention to the trends in their industry and business and finally using this information to develop a plan for what levels of revenue and relationship you will have with the clients for the long term future.

All this talk of refining is not fear mongering. It is a statement of business fact that has been confirmed by pollsters, consulting people, market research and customer service people.
It is 7 times more expensive to get a new client than it is to make better with current clients, not every new client should come to your book of business, instead of endless line extensions you need to avoid watering down the value of your services offering.
You cannot keep going after new clients if you do not make the most of what you have. For example, Berkshire Hathaway stopped receiving new investors because it did not know what to do with the new money and could not guarantee any value for new money. Its shares are in a class by itself and are transferred from generation to generation while most companies are perpetually cheating the public and watering stock.

A regular refinery costs and maintenance costs are heavy as well so you have a clear idea for what you are about when you sign up for it.
This is a difficult task and an expensive one as well but it really is no more difficult than the burden of crap that is the alternative.

WHERE WHERE WHERE

Does your practice have a venue management plan? The idea is that as in real estate where we have been told that location is everything, the venue of the matter counts for a lot.
Say you are on the plane and some business comes your way but it is forever away? Do you let it go or try to hold on to it no matter what. Do you have a plan to bring the necessary resources to address this kind of problem even in your local practice space?
On another level the venue of the matter counts because of transportation time and costs for you and your client. Is it worth it and can you handle it and still do great work or will it be one of those situations where hide and seek leads the transaction to drag on and on.
Then looking at home court advantage, is the venue of the transaction a place you know well and know enough to be comfortable in? To some the home court means nothing but at least a little reconnoitreing will put your client in the 'My counsel has this issue locked down' zone.
For non-court matters, where the parties are coming from and where meetings will be held matters a great deal for everyone so that missed Arbitration sessions will not happen, contract negotiations will happen with relevant parties present and so on and so forth.
Here's a funny one. You just cannot forget or leave anything behind in Lekki if you are headed to Ikeja. It means you can't nip across Falomo bridge or take a speed boat to get it back.
Can't happen.

GOOD FOR YOU

Since your law firm is a business you will have to make certain choices on the type of clients you will devote your resources to. Lots of things come in to play to help you make up this decision and you will be pushed to it just to decide.
We will refer to this opportunity as the Good For You opportunity. How do you know when a client is good for you? Well from the get go you may have the notion that there does not exist a piece of business that you cannot work on or that you cannot have enough business but after a while you begin to see the signs and decipher what works for your law practice. Both from practical defeats and a feel of the land.

1. You first hear the client story and decide using your business judgment on whether you are the firm to do the work. If you botch this up you really have your self to blame and that really is that. As is said, if the foundation be destroyed there will be a lot of renovation down the pike.
2. If you made the wrong choice the business will drain away time and resources specifically meant for other productive business. Now you can manage it all by diverting resources from good to bad BUT this is usually a recipe for disaster. You cannot keep up with this, it will eat into personal time and you will be cranky for no apparent reason.
3. The wrong choice continues to drain and this brings you down where anytime you remember the situation the zest for the business and the spring in your step go away. You know you can't do great work with that kind of drama, talk less of enjoying your labour. Just like having a nagging partner, Samson the great warrior was vexed unto death by Delilah so that he told all that was in his heart. You won't be doing any telling but there will be lots of negative energy around you which will only lead to more negative energy. A negative cycle.
4. The squeaky wheel gets the oil change and you ignore the smoothly running wheel. This is pouring resources down a black hole and soon enough the smooth wheel gets upset and leaves and you have only the squeaky wheel and a car that can't move. The wrong choice compels you to pay less attention to the good business you have so that it becomes squeaky as well.

Now take serious note: a client may not fit your law practice for all sorts of reasons and fit another law firm so there isn't anything inherently wrong with the client. It is just that you both don't get along well enough to make a success of the operation.
Just like two people may date and never marry each other but then go on to other relationships and get married in a heartbeat and stay married for forever.
Also, there are the rationalizations that you use such as ' Building a client base and getting contacts, Not so busy right now might as well get to it, e.t.c.

You can make the choice anyways you want just make sure you do make the choice so you own the situation and adjust it accordingly.

WHAT ON EARTH IS MARKETING?

 

Once you hear the word, especially as a legal practitioner you may instinctively yell 'never!. Marketing is against the ethics of the profession, it does not apply in law land and lawyers can never be greasy snake-oil salesmen. All of your objections are right but if you've observed the levels the hustle has reduced the effectiveness, reputation and dignity of legal practice to, you must pay attention and note that something has to be done.

Now that something, is that the business of getting clients and shaping your law practice that is marketing. It must be given the respect and effort it deserves. Respect because no firm ever does well in a discipline it barely tolerates and without the work and sweat them good plans ain't going nowhere.

 

Marketing is about getting clients by appreciating what type of clients and why those clients, appreciating the direction the firm is going in with that client base and finally how the law firm can ever remain useful to the market. Lawyers are a knowledgeable lot said to read tomes so here's a marketing spin on it. What determines the types of books in your library and their quantity and on which topics. You have some notion concerning the items in your library however chaotic it appears to outsiders so it makes sense to you and is useful to your work. Marketing is that thing which you use to pick your books (clients) by and not the physical act of going to the store and paying for the books.

 

There is also the idea of perception is reality so with the right marketing spin you can pass your law firm off as whatever. The way it works is this; if you have a reputation for telling lies you ask yourself 'what has this law firm done to deserve this?' and if you want to have a reputation for telling the truth don't go on T.V.  or wherever else. Tell the truth to your employees, competitors and clients. Reputation problem solved.

And that will be three million naira please. You know the address.