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.