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 Last April I had the pleasure of facilitating the Spring ABA Women Rainmakers (http://www.americanbar.org/groups/law_practice_management/committees/wr-committee.html) program on Niche Marketing. We discussed how being recognized for having a niche in the practice of law creates more business, as well as methods for building or deepening a niche to become better known in the legal marketplace.
A commonly experienced frustration was a lack of time for networking and marketing. For fun, and profit, a group of us came up with approximately hour-long tasks that get lawyers better known to clients and potential clients. Here are five of my favorites:
1. Write a Letter to the Editor of a publication that is read by professionals in an industry in which you have clients. Such magazines and newspapers are geared towards professionals in your niche. Smart lawyers sharing their intelligence are appreciated as experts. The chance of getting your letter published is high, and certainly higher than in a legal publication. More importantly, the readership is composed of your potential clients, not your competition. Continue reading →
 Earlier this month I spoke about rainmaking with a group of lawyers. I had not previously met most of these lawyers. Before my talk, the attendees and I were saying hello over coffee. One of the lawyers identified her current and previous firms. I know both firms, and told her I knew and liked a woman at her current firm, someone whose first name I remembered but whose last name I forgot. My new friend pointed to herself. Voila. I was speaking with that very same person. I am good with faces, but had not recognized her.
I first met the lawyer in question five years ago, when she was feeling unmoored and looking for a new professional home. Five years later, she looked ten years younger, without medical intervention. (Women who like each other can speak about such things.) I had an immediate revelation about how a certain professional change can make lawyers vibrant. Controlling your own career by having your own clients can make lawyers almost literally buoyant. Being tethered to someone else’s clients is always somewhat risky, and not as good for the non-rainmaker’s spirits as it is for the rainmaker’s. Autonomy creates its own energy. Continue reading →
 Much of legal rainmaking appears to be based entirely on intuition, especially when we see lawyers create virtual downpours of business. It is not. Even when rainmaking seems to be second nature, the rainmaker has undoubtedly, and consciously, honed skills and techniques over many years. There are, of course, prerequisite personal attitudes essential to client success. Many of those caring attitudes could have been learned by rainmakers as young children.
The graceful landing of a client is no more intuitive than the Pythagorean Theorem. What seems like intuitive ease in the last proof of Book One of Euclid’s Elements needed 46 preliminary propositions to be proven before there was sufficient basis for the culmination of Book One.
Likewise, lawyers whose clients think of them as “my” lawyer use crucial social skills for the foundation of their rainmaking. The effective application of such personal skills may be so ingrained that the skills seem intuitive, but they are not. Continue reading →
 A lawyer asked me where she could go to learn more about the business side of her legal specialty, and possibly meet some potential clients. There are places where clients teach and lawyers can learn, a lot. Industry organizations, clubs and trade associations offer valuable opportunities to lawyers. These organizations are rarely saturated with lawyers and occasionally you can find yourself the only lawyer in the room.
These business forums often welcome lawyers. Legal questions are frequently in the air. What may seem obvious to you as a lawyer can be revelatory to someone in the thick of the business world. As you teach each other without yet having a client-lawyer relationship, trust develops, and where there is trust, a client-lawyer relationship frequently follows. If nothing else useful happens, you will at least learn more about the business side of your practice area. Continue reading →
 Mentoring for lawyers has existed since the start of the profession. It was once the only way lawyers became lawyers. By working with a master, lawyers’ brains developed particular grooves. Over time, as apprentices, lawyers learned to read, think and write like lawyers by training with and imitating their more experienced masters.
In the 20th century, law schools became common. By the end of the 20th century most states had abolished formal legal apprenticeship and required law school graduation before a candidate could take the bar exam. (In a paralegal stint before law school, I had the pleasure of working with one of New York State’s last apprenticed lawyers. His skills were none the worse for having missed law school.) So junior lawyers now start their professional life with academic as well as practical and technical training.
Continue reading →
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