Business Development Skills and the Billable Hour
I recently reviewed a small firm’s Associate Guidebook. In describing the firm’s expectations of associates, two-thirds of the text was taken up with how to attain annual billable hours (2000). The remaining one-third addressed billing and timekeeping. Not a word was said about business development or career. This got me pondering this question: What if […]
You Will Have It in the Morning
I am often asked to submit a proposal which will describe how my team and I might approach a problem and what our services might cost. The person requesting the proposal often intends to share it with others inside their firm. The question is, when should the proposal arrive on their desk (metaphorically speaking)? In […]
Business Development: Strategic Client Relationship Management
Remember the old adage “The Client is King”? Put more baldly, the reason your business remains in existence is because you have clients. To lose sight of this carries the risk of losing clients. You know that the world you operate in is highly competitive and aggressive. You also know clients are (mostly) sophisticated buyers […]
Trade Associations, Conferences, and Events: Creating Warmth and “Reach” Out of Thin Air
“Oh, how I hate cocktail receptions . . .” “If my practice group leader berates me about attending more trade association events I think I’m going to scream . . .” “Ever since my first day of kindergarten, there are few things in life I hate more than walking into a large room of people […]
Building Trust: The Inviolable Rule
With all the attention given to the external forces bringing about change and impacting the legal profession, we sometimes forget how much of successful legal services business is still about human relationships and building trust. Trust is the key building block for so many different areas and interactions in law firms: one that impacts just […]
Know Your Buyer, Know Client’s Internal Clients
At the risk of expressing pablum, KNOW YOUR BUYERS! More importantly, KNOW THE INTERNAL CLIENTS OF YOUR BUYERS! I was reminded of these insipid (yet important!) refrains during work with a client. My law firm client had three seemingly unrelated practices that all served the needs of the same particular buyer of legal services inside […]
Creating a Growth Structure from a Lockstep Mindset
It’s not often I stumble into mid-sized and larger firms that have successfully retained a compensation system that can honestly be described as pure lockstep. Other than a number of the most profitable Wall Street firms, the rest of BigLaw and “not-so-BigLaw” long ago began incorporating some features that track originations and link individual compensation […]
Tall Poppy Syndrome and Origination Credit
Law firms talk a good game about sophisticated management but often, just when a firm reaches the verge of running like a business, its culture gets in the way. Case in point is business origination: should it be measured, how should it be measured and what do we do with the data? Almost 25% of […]
Hunting in Packs: Group Meetings with Prospective Clients
If you have decided it will be advantageous for you to visit prospective clients as a pair or threesome, you need to follow certain steps carefully in order to optimize your effectiveness and minimize mistakes that can cost you a relationship before you even have one. The selection of the team who will visit the prospective client should […]
Closing Strategies: When Prospects Are Ready to Buy
“I’ve spent 18 months cultivating a relationship with an in-house litigation manager who says all of the right things but we have yet to get a lick of work. I don’t know whether to pull the plug on my efforts or keep buying him lunch . . . .” After spending many years working with […]