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).