In my short talk, the main point was that, when possible, lawyers should advance the business of desired clients.  Unless it hurts a current client, business tips and wanted introductions are appreciated.  Often enough what goes around comes around, sometimes indirectly.

One lawyer objected to what she saw as the hypocrisy of reaching out to help others from whom you want business.  “People will see through my largesse and know I am only seeking a quid pro quo.”  The answer to that is to truly give sincerely, without any direct expectation of return.  It is simply part of the relationship.  One cannot discern hypocrisy where there is none.

A more serious objection was about violating one’s own values, becoming a sell-out.  “I cannot act friendly towards someone whose politics I deplore.”  “I cannot spend time discussing the virtues of boxing since I hate gratuitous violence.”  Etc.

Pursuing clients with whom one has ethical or political disagreements should not be a problem if the work sought does not further an objectionable agenda.  Just like lawyers sit on charitable boards with fellows having opposite political views, they can have clients who contract or litigate over issues about which there is no reason to feel discomfort.  Working with people who support causes with which you do not agree is not the same as working for a position you do not support.

Your clients do not need to be your soul-mates.  All that is needed is comfort.  In the commercial world, if you perform legal work that helps your clients engage in business activities you respect and treat those clients with loyalty and respect, you will have a good working relationship.  To expect more than that is a confusion of your personal and professional lives.

The last Make It Rain blog suggests that a good way to spend time with especially hard to pin down potential clients is by extending invitations for personal, and not professional, events.  The invitations should be particularly attractive and targeted at the client’s interests.  When accepted, you always get face time.

This technique has one important addendum.  At some point during your social event, business must be discussed.  Hard to capture business people are busy.  They are also often important, at least within their work world.

People who are busy and important generally skew into two categories regarding invitations from acquaintances.  They may have large egos and really do believe you want to be their friend, not their lawyer. If you want their business, that needs to be corrected.  Alternatively, such people often believe everyone wants something from them, and you are at least subconsciously attempting to bribe them.  Even if someone accepts a shiny invitation, he or she may resent the attempted bribery and resist giving you work.

Your potential client needs to be made aware you are not expecting personal friendship or legal work, but do want to get across that you have high quality legal services to offer and do want consideration for their work.  If the client has interest, further meetings, in a business setting, will be arranged.  Actual work may come from those meetings.  Those meetings would probably not have been possible if you had not created an opportunity to spend time together and briefly discuss your services.

Unless, upon reflection, you do not want someone as a client, a circumscribed, brief business discussion at the special event shows you are not afraid of the topic and understand the desire may not be mutual.  Create the opportunity.

It is acceptable to be forthright, to simply call and say you want to know what the client’s legal needs are and how they are currently being satisfied.  However, if your relationship is one of mere acquaintance, that is unlikely to work and may backfire, especially with clients who are happy with their current representation.

It is more likely you will get work from a new client if you engage someone personally, if you offer an experience you suspect or know the client or its representative especially like.  Take your time and be thoughtful.  If everyone accepts that a courtship has begun, the next event need not be subtle.  I was once advising a lawyer seeking a particular client to invite the person, who was a serious football fan, to an important game for which the lawyer had access to tickets.  He told me that he feared this person, for whom he did not feel any personal warmth, would think the lawyer was trying to be his friend.  I pointed out that they barely knew each other and it was unlikely the potential client would think he was trying to be his friend.  The client would, and should, think the lawyer offering the experience of a crucial football game was trying to be his lawyer.

A client who had resisted meeting a lawyer for months was led to a dining table with a lawyer who wanted to spend time with him because the table at which they dined was one at a small gathering with a former CIA Director.

More ordinary things also work – fishing trips, hiking expeditions, dinners and lunches.  If a client does not want you to pitch being his lawyer, try pitching being his supplier.  Theater and sports events as well as lunches and dinners are not illegal drugs.  Such events are usually tax deductible and the worst thing that happens is you have fun and may, in fact, make a friend.

In hearing different perspectives about legal teamwork and legal fiefdoms, I was reminded of an axiom about all relationships.  People who work and play well with others are happier than those who keep their own toys.  It does not matter whether the people are children or adults, tailors, sailors or lawyers.

Gratitude and enthusiasm trump resentment and ennui not only for the person involved, but also for the work product.  Happy cooperative people produce good work.

Following the closing, the client sent the procuring partner a thank you e-mail.  Special mention was made about one lawyer’s particular contribution.  It does not seem like an accident that the lawyer who was singled out was the lawyer who worked with enthusiasm and frequently expressed gratitude during the deal to fellow lawyers.

Also, to my knowledge (this time I have no biplane), the procuring partner sent one internal note of appreciation.  It went to the same lawyer.  This lawyer was not particularly thanked for his skill set or technical work; presumably everyone’s work was top notch.  He was thanked for his attitude of gratitude.

Should the client now directly call the non-procuring lawyer, that lawyer will be happy to help and not consider the client his.  Moreover, if, over time, client credit shifts, gratitude will be the soothing background for that conversation.

Partners who feel unfairly compensated sometimes complain, or leave. However, since most partners do not leave over a year’s compensation disappointment, I want to suggest a few things to think about, and perhaps change, if you find yourself in this situation. (You can leave in a year or two if things don’t improve.)

People who rationally feel disappointed regarding compensation come from fundamentally two perspectives. Some believe they deserve a certain amount of money or percentage of profits, and are put off if they do not get that number. Others may have achieved their expectation, but perceive that someone else who contributed no more to the enterprise made noticeably more. They are disappointed not with their compensation, but with their firm’s hierarchy.

Which category you are in? If you resent someone else’s compensation, perhaps firm life is unfair: you cannot become the child of the founding partner or the cousin of a big client, and if such things are rewarded beyond your tolerance, you may choose to leave. However, perhaps the other partner did contribute to the firm in ways you do not value, but should. Did that person train associates or paralegals, investigate new technology or manage internal CLE programs? Such things may not be something you like as a distinction, but they do improve everyone’s lives.

Perhaps the firm’s assessment of your worth is more correct than your own. Frequently relative compensation can be changed in the future not by complaining but by understanding what goes into these decisions and acting accordingly over time.

Many firms hire “smart”. When looking for a working lawyer (as opposed to a rainmaker) those firms’ hiring decisions are based substantially on the lawyer’s raw intelligence. References are checked to make sure the person is not dazzle without diligence. But then smart gets hired.

Flexible also gets hired. I know a firm with strong preferences for people who wrote for their college newspaper. They assume those people can write well under deadline about a subject with which they may be unfamiliar.

So in this time of legal upheaval, smart lawyers with an unpopular specialty are sometimes learning new skills and specialties. Yes, no one is automatically an expert in a new field. Transitioning lawyers may not even want to work solo for a while. However, if you can read, pay attention, take instruction and be humble, transitioning or adding a new line of legal work to your repertoire is possible. Consider telling fellow lawyers in your chosen additional field that you are willing to work at a junior level for a junior hourly wage.

Your learning curve will be much faster than it was the first time. Mature legal and practical judgment is honed over time. You already have both. Rainmaking can also develop faster than the first time around. Don’t overpromise and start with modest goals.

Lawyers cannot see into their clients’ souls.  When lawyers act on unexamined judgments about the naughty or nice characteristics of those upon whom they bestow their legal talents, such mistakes often have consequences for both that lawyer’s practice and his or her spirit.

It is possible to get closer to Santa’s impeccable track record.  Here are just a few rules for determining who is naughty and who is nice.  These do not create impeccable judgment, and are not always possible to follow, but they will hone your instincts.  Santa’s intuition can be learned.

When a potential client complains about a prior law firm, make inquiries. How many prior firms were there?  What exactly was the problem?  Does the universe seem unfair to this person?  You might be a better fit, but you are not a knight in shining armor.  The client might be the problem.

When a current client expresses gratitude, take it in.  Notice the appreciation and let the client know you appreciate the work and the relationship.  In Santa’s terms, niceness can be grown and cultivated.  If you connect your clients with other people and services they need, referrals often surface.  Minimally, you will encourage the client to be nice to lawyers.

When a current client is ungrateful, listen to the complaint.  You may have made a mistake.  You may not have explained your thoughts or actions with care.  Or you may be being blamed for something you did not cause and cannot help.  You should at least correct what you can and be nice.

You may want to keep or acquire “naughty” clients, but remember adults seldom change, and Santa brings presents to children.

Since clients are receiving substantial discounts on legal commodity work (and outsourcing legal work is no longer a scandal), lawyers who understand enough to save their clients butts quickly should be able to reap the benefit of their years of experience with pre-arranged premium billing.

During the 1980s law practice began an accelerated shift from a profession to a business.  Lawyers started to run their operations as a business.  They also got more involved with their clients’ businesses. I saw much of this shift, beginning the decade as a lawyer with a sizable firm and ending it as a legal executive recruiter with my own firm.

For a thorough article on the shift and its many consequences, see http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1586517.

One summer I watched a firm, for the sake of a time sensitive client transaction, work all its lawyers harder than ever before.  Come equity compensation time, the revenue increase was significant.  Expected and actual billable hours for that firm’s successful lawyers have never gone back to where they were.  This shift was steady, and repeated all over the world.

The best lawyers became bold about giving business advice.  Such advice was no longer given with trepidation.  It was often solicited.  It seems like this was always so, but it wasn’t.

In the last few years, as conventional legal bills are slashed, it seems fair that the other side of the teeter-totter should be that business advice from lawyers who save clients substantial sums in a short time should be billed at a premium.  Those lawyers with whom clients consult before any important move could fairly benefit from excellent advice based on years of experience. Five minutes that save millions of dollars or years of aggravation is worth more than five minutes of legal time, especially when conventional legal bills are under such pressure.  The compensation shift for lawyers who function as both lawyers and business people seems to be that the legal bills have gone down.  Superb but efficient business advice can be billed at a premium.

I have seen lawyers have their best “aha” moments in minutes – minutes that have saved their clients’ very existence.  When that happens, both clients and lawyers should benefit.

A client who uses my consulting services called last week to share a success story. This lawyer is developing a new solo practice in two fields he has specialized in for a while. His challenge was to find buyers for both of his new practices.

Rainmaking has to begin somewhere. This lawyer called someone he knows at a large financial institution who uses outside counsel for one of his specialties. He offered a free lecture to a group at the institution that hires such outside counsel.

The person with whom my client spoke realized that a number of professionals in a different division of the institution need both of my client’s legal specialization services for their customers.
My client was set up to speak to a group for which he is almost uniquely qualified. He gave a talk regarding the legal work involved with the intersection of his two specialties.

Because both fields and their intersection are subjects my client knows well, the work he needed to do to prepare his talk was not arduous. The lecture was extremely well attended. The room was energized, and so was the presenting lawyer.

A number of the professionals at the lecture now use this lawyer, not only for his interstices work but also for some of their more typical needs. As a result of being able to say he has this well-known institution as a client, this lawyer picked up two more corporate clients.

The worst thing that would have happened is that the lawyer who generously offered his time and insights would have been known to many additional individuals who may need his legal services. The best thing is that they would start to call soon, and they have!

Our new friend is twenty-five years old with two advanced degrees in the biological sciences.  She was happy to be able to take orders in a restaurant with a busy delivery business.  She has little hope for a job in her field in Greece, and was talking about emigrating.  There are fields, like most of the sciences, where rescuing one’s own professional life is problematic.

Law is a field where self-help is not only possible; it can be planned for – like having a fire escape.  Unless you are not allowed to bring in work where you are, start small.  Find out what legal services people you know need.  Try to help them get it done.  If you cannot do the needed work yourself, you need not learn an entirely new field of law.  Introduce the people you know to other lawyers who can do the work.  The lawyer you gave work to may return the favor and the client you helped will remember you are the one who made the connection.  It starts slow, but it gets you where you want to go.