Do You Know Where To Find Paying Clients?

Posted on December 5, 2010 by Lori Iwan

Lesson 2

Knowing how to originate business is a matter of survival in the legal world.  To keep a legal job, the lawyer must demonstrate an ability to bring in business.  If the lawyer can bring in business to the firm, then that lawyer has achieved a degree of independence to work when and how she wants to work and can control her own destiny.

Rainmaking is not an innate skill.  Nor is it instinctual.  Rainmaking is a process where the lawyer puts his ego and credentials on the table for all to see and examine and possibly reject for reasons that may never have occurred to the lawyer.

Rainmaking is like entering a strange land where the lawyer does not know the language, what the customer is really concerned about, what motivates the customer or what the customer needs.

For the foregoing reasons, that is why a lawyer must practice, practice and practice some more the skills of Rainmaking before trying them out on a client.  Practice can be with a colleague in role playing, it can be running through a list of difficult questions, it can be a lot of things.  But without practice, the lawyer will come off as credible as a used car salesman.

In Lesson 1, the focus was a self-examination of who you are and what you like to do.  It also should have opened your eyes as you learned how certain clients were originated within your law firm.

In this Lesson 2, there are two goals:  1) to identify your uniqueness and 2) to identify the means to find the clients you want to do business with based on your self-analysis in Lesson 1.

Goal 1: identify your uniqueness.

Can you state what you do for a living so a person with an eighth-grade level of education will understand?  Can you explain what you do in under 25 words to that person?  Can you work in why you of all attorneys have the unique ability to do the client’s work that is not possessed by all other attorneys?  If you cannot do these three tasks, then you are not ready to call or meet on current or prospective clients.

Just like the title of an article is intended to tap your curiosity to read the first sentence, the 25 word summary of what you do as a lawyer must accomplish the same goal.  One student in a rainmaking class candidly stated that he felt like a used car salesman, that the type of work he did was generic commodity type litigation, and virtually any other insurance defense lawyer could do the business as well, and probably at a lower cost.  This lawyer’s perception of his job and the legal community is what held him back from originating business.  He could not muster the necessary credibility to build trust with the client on the proposition that the lawyer could deliver a better quality of legal service at an overall lower cost.

So how do you describe your uniqueness in 25 words or less? First, you must identify what it is that makes you and your law firm different from any competitor.  It is extremely important that you never, ever, ever speak ill of another law firm when trying to originate business.  You do not need to give the other firm a glowing review, but by asking the client who he works with generally, you can quickly identify what features the other law firm has that probably appeals to the client.  Most clients complain they do not have an open  or timely line of communication with their lawyers. Your uniqueness may be that you are on-call 24/7.

How do you state your uniqueness in 25 words or less to intrigue the client to want to learn more about you? While the answer sounds simple, it is not.  It will take a rainmaker some time to craft the tag line that will pull in the greatest number of clients.  But the method of coming to that 25 word answer is relatively simple.  The lawyer needs to identify the client’s problem(s) with single or multiple firms.  Then the lawyer needs to put the answer into a form that will inevitably cause the client to ask for more information.  Here’s an example:

The lawyer is at a conference and gets into an elevator with someone who also appears to be attending the conference.  The lawyer asks the person what they do for a living?  The non-lawyer’s answer is usually non-descriptive like handling claims, monitoring lawsuits, complying with SEC regulations….whatever.  This is where the lawyer drops his 25 words to grab the person’s attention.  Example response by the lawyer: Have you noticed that your workload has increased as new regulations are implemented and you cannot seem to get out from under the deluge of forms to be filled out?  “Yes” says the client quite enthusiastically.  “Well” says the lawyer, “I solve the problems on your desk and lessen your workload.”  In this short exchange you are now at the main floor and have to get out of the elevator but before you do, you have set the hook, caught the fish and are halfway there to getting the business, when the potential client says, “How do you do that?”

Those are the magic words.  “How do you do that?”  The answer to the client is that you would love to discuss the simple way your firm could help reduce the workload without an appreciable increase in costs to the company.  Most of the time, the client will want to meet with you as soon as possible.  Now, you shouldn’t give this particular answer if you cannot identify a uniqueness in your law firm that can solve the client’s problem.  Obviously.

This is why you need to determine your uniqueness relative to the client’s wants, needs and budget, and phrase them in 25 words or less to get the client within a one minute encounter to ask “how do you do that?”

Goal 2: Identify the means to find the clients and decision makers to obtain their business.

Lesson 2 focuses on goal one and two.  First, you need to identify your own uniqueness –what you and your firm bring to the table for that client that no one else is doing for them.  It may be a billing method, it may be the senior experience of the person assigned to the client, it may be a system for accelerating the time to meet regulatory requirements.  Whatever it is, you need to know before you can identify the clients.

Knowing what you as the lawyer want to do and can do uniquely, then requires the lawyer to identify all means of reaching potential clients that will benefit from the lawyers/firms unique talent.  Identify all methods of finding clients in your niche.  That doesn’t mean you will use all the methods for marketing but you need to consider cost, effectiveness, timeliness and the degree the method detracts from your practice of law before outlining a business plan.  Lesson 2 is designed to help you identify where the clients can be found.  In completing Lesson 2, do not leave any method out.  It may not be the best but it should be on the list to consider and may very well prompt you to think of a variation of a mediocre idea that turns it into a game winner.

Good luck with Lesson 2.  Please email or comment if you are stuck or have a question.

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Rainmaker: Do You Know What You Want To Do For A Living?

Posted on October 21, 2010 by Lori Iwan

Lesson One

Why am I writing a blog about how to develop legal business? 

There are several reasons which coincidentally arise from my own experiences.  First, law is a very hard business.  Every minute must be accounted for, the hours are long, the days are unpredictable and clients expect favorable results.  If you are not working on business you enjoy, then the days will drag, getting out of bed will be a chore, and the one-third of your life spent at work will be miserable.  There is no reason to be miserable with the enormous number of areas of practice available to lawyers.  So learning Rainmaking will enable you to free yourself from the work you do not like and have the freedom to develop and work on the types of matters that you enjoy.

I consider myself one of the luckiest people on the planet.  Why?  Because when I graduated from law school I knew exactly what type of work I wanted to do:  try cases.  It did not matter to me what type of cases as long as I could get in the courtroom and use my skills at speaking, persuasion and strategy to take a case through to a jury verdict.  I thought I was so lucky to be able to try cases that I often commented how I could not believe I was being paid to do the job.  I feel the same way 27 years later.  If I could be in the courtroom trying cases every day, I would be having the time of my life.  By Rainmaking and developing clients, I have been able to control my own destiny for the past 24 years of my 27 year career.

The second reason why I am trying to help lawyers develop Rainmaking skills is because there are few, if any, practical hands-on courses that allow you to practice a skill before you implement it with a potential prospect.  When I determined in my third year of practice that I needed to learn how to be a Rainmaker, I naively went to a partner who regularly visited clients and asked if I could go to his next client visit with him to learn Rainmaking skills.  The partner plainly asked, “Why would I take you to see one of my clients?  I already originated the business.  Why would I want you to channel that business away from me?”

While the partner’s message seemed harsh at the time, he did me an enormous favor by exposing me to the reality of Rainmaking in law firms.  No one in the firm is going to teach you rainmaking skills if it means you might take their clients and business away from them.  Partners get paid for the amount of business they bring to the firm.  Consequently, partners store their client information with the utmost security to minimize the risk that someone else in the firm will claim they originated or somehow contributed to the development of the business from their clients. 

This Rainmaking course solves the problem of the lack of a mentor because the course includes hands-on training and skill practice with every blog post.  To learn the skill, you need to complete the worksheets accompanying the lessons.  If you try to skip a step thinking you can just read the posts, you will miss the essential ingredient to learning Rainmaking, which is the no-risk practice before you meet a real prospect.  If you skip the practice sessions, you will only get part of the message, like attending a legal seminar while half-listening and texting and emailing at the same time.

The third reason why I am trying to help lawyers develop business is based on my observations over the years that a very large group of attorneys have no idea how to develop business.  Reading the news over the past two years brought home the sad fact that law firms jettison attorneys who are not Rainmakers.  The laid off lawyers may have great potential one day as lawyers, or may be highly accomplished and credentialed attorneys but if they cannot bring in enough business to cover their salaries and overhead and put profits in the partners’ pockets, they are fungible.  Rather than watch attorneys suffer the humiliation and hardship of layoffs, I decided to try to help all attorneys fortify their careers by learning how to develop business in an area of law that excites them and fuels the passion to go to work.

So What Is The First Step To Develop Business?

When it came time for me to generate new clients to fuel my desire to try cases, it was self-evident that I needed to focus my efforts on clients who were in disputes and needed trial counsel.  But my focus did not end with such a general category of clients.  I had to narrow down several factors: (1) what type of clients I wanted to represent, (2) what the subject matter of their disputes covered, (3) whether they could pay my fees, and (4) whether they wanted or needed to take their disputes to trial.  The next big decision was to determine how or where I could find the decision-makers for assigning this type of work, a topic we will cover in later lessons/posts.

The most important step to accomplish as you begin to develop business is to decide who is your perfect customer.  A “customer” might be vehicle manufacturers, or inventors in need of patent applications, or insurance companies in need of trial lawyers, or Fortune 500 companies planning a merger or acquisition, or individuals personally injured by another person or product.  While you might think that your Rainmaking efforts should be broad based to take in any business you can find.  In fact, sales and marketing research demonstrates that casting a wide net or a scatter-shot approach to business development does not work.  Such an approach is not credible to the clients because you cannot pretend to be knowledgeable in every substantive area of practice sufficiently enough to instill faith in the client that you are highly skilled to handle that client’s particular matter.  The practice exercise in Lesson 1 should help you identify the characteristics of your ideal customer.

This blog post contains a worksheet (Lesson1 worksheet) that you can download to conduct your own analysis of your career, your interests and your likes and dislikes of the legal business.  This first step of self-analysis is essential to being an effective Rainmaker.  If you do not love the work you are doing or the type of work you are seeking from clients, your lack of interest will be apparent to potential clients and you will fail at your efforts.

If you want or need help in completing the worksheet, please post a comment or contact me right away.  You can ask for clarification of a question, or ask for input on your answers.  No comment or question is off-limits.  Rainmaking is a lot like asking someone out on a first date.  There is a lot of basic information that is not yet known so it makes you nervous but it is not hard to learn the details and apply the information.  You just have to ask for help.

In summary, lesson one is to conduct an introspective analysis of what you like to do and what you want to do as a lawyer, and use those insights to identify the perfect customer.

I hope to see you back here for the next step in the Rainmaking process in the next post.

Lesson1

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Lawyer, Do You Want To Be A Rainmaker?

Posted on October 15, 2010 by Lori Iwan

Hello Legal World, Other World, the World Court of Justice and Intergalactic Readers! 

Somewhere out there is a lawyer that realizes that law is a business.  And that lawyer knows that to be successful in the law business a lawyer must be a rainmaker.  Rainmakers control their future.  Rainmakers can dictate what they are paid, when they work, what they will work on and the type of work they want to do.  When the economy is slow and news of attorney layoffs are appearing daily, the rainmaker knows he/she is secure in the job.  The rainmaker can move to any firm or start a new firm.  Rainmakers have achieved the ultimate freedom in their career.  What does ”ultimate freedom” mean?  The Iliad teaches “[t]o be truly free is to allow your natural identity to go forward.”

Law schools do not teach rainmaking.  Law firms do not teach rainmaking.  In big law firms, large institutional clients are handed down to the next generation of partners to service the clients needs and subsequently pass down the clients to the next generation.  There are books on the topic of rainmaking, but those books do not teach the actual process of what to do, when and how.

This blog is for the lawyer that wants to know how to be a rainmaker; the lawyer who wants to control his/her own destiny.  The blog is intended to teach the process of rainmaking, to identify the skill set that must be honed to be a rainmaker, to take the lawyer’s fear of rejection out of the rainmaking process, to demonstrate the rainmaking process and address the objections to rainmaking. 

The key to mastering the rainmaking skill is to follow the entire program, attempt each step of the process each week, be prepared for the next step with a specific client in mind, work the workbooks and then practice.  Practice, practice, practice.  Practice until the words flow naturally from your lips.   Practice until the initial greeting of the client is second-nature, until the request for work comes without hesitation and closing the sale is as easy as paying a check after dinner.  If you get stuck on a step in the program, then write a comment and include how you think you would resolve it.  This blog will be interactive so that any concerns or questions are addressed as they arise as lawyers are earnestly trying to learn the skills.

Rainmaking skills can be taught and learned.  However, any method other than following the process, with hands-on exercises, will not enable the lawyer to overcome any fears or concerns, or to calm the nerves, before the real client contact occurs. 

I have taught a rainmaking course to lawyers in private law firms for close to 20 years.  I employed these same techniques that I taught to build a book of legal business far beyond anything my colleagues could accomplish.  I started two law firms secure in the knowledge that I had a loyal following of clients.  In the 27 years as a lawyer preparing and trying civil commercial and complex personal injury cases in 27 federal or state courts in the U.S., I have not had to look back and rely on a law firm to supply a caseload for me once I acquired the skills to perform my own rainmaking.  See www.iwanlaw.com.

You too can have the financial and work freedom that I have experienced by building your own book of business.  The rainmaking course starts with the next blog entry.  Buckle your seatbelt and hang on, it’s going to be a wild ride.

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