How Sun Tzu Would Win The Law Firm Client Development War

Do you feel like you’re constantly engaged in a war for legal work against numerous lawyers and law firms - and each time the client knows you can all do the job wonderfully?

An Office Managing Partner of a international law firm contacted me the other day. Our discussion eventually veered into the problematic way in which many lawyers approach the competitive landscape. I asked him a simple question:

"Brian - May I ask? Is the client development problem one that has arisen recently...or is it a problem consistently gnawing at you that's been in your 'Should Tackle Someday' file for a decade or longer?"

To which he responded:

"Craig - You certainly know lawyers well; I can tell from your last question! We do seem to operate (or procrastinate) on longer time frames than other businesses."

I replied:

"Thanks, Brian. I get it; I was a practicing lawyer myself. While I agree that we, as lawyers, are the worst procrastinators, your prospects and clients all have ‘Should Tackle Someday’ files too. I've surveyed hundreds of C-Level executives and GCs. Most agree that 90% of the problems that come over the transom each day get placed in that file."

I revealed that one of the biggest breakthroughs I had - and that any rainmaker can have - was the realization that there are two separate and distinct decision tracks one can traverse with prospective clients: Action and Preference. Most lawyers ignore the Action track completely. They only pursue existing, acknowledged legal work. That forces them to sell based on Preference, which is difficult to do when the perception (and often the reality) is that all the competitors can also do the job superbly. That often devolves into a battle of price concessions, which is not where anyone wants to be.

The only competitor a lawyer should hope to face is Inertia. There’s ten times more legal work in clients' "Should Tackle Someday" files than all of the legal work those clients have awarded in the past five years. Those matters merely remain dormant until someone helps the client explore the magnitude of them in a way that triggers Action.

By engaging prospects on one problem from that file that's likely been gnawing at a percentage of them, a lawyer can create legal work that didn't exist yesterday - and of which even the company's incumbent lawyers are unaware. The lawyer is now well-positioned to get that work, if he/she continues to be strategic in aligning the other decision makers.

In The Art of War, legendary military strategist Sun Tzu focused on winning without fighting or, at the very least, winning the easiest battles first. He advised his troops to:

"make your way by unexpected routes and attack unguarded spots."

He further stated that:

"In war, the (best) way is to avoid what is strong and strike at what is weak."

The next time you get frustrated over the many talented lawyers and renowned law firms competing for the same work as you, think of Sun Tzu and ask yourself:

"Am I fighting the hard fight or am I fighting the easy one?"

Should you become cognizant that you’re almost always doing the former and rarely doing the latter, change your tactics and start competing one-on-one with inertia, a competitor that can regularly be defeated. 

Craig Levinson, Esq. leads law firm consultancy Levity Partners. He’s held CMO, Director of Client Development & Sales, VP, and other business roles at Katten Muchin, Brown Raysman, JAMS, Berger Singerman, and Sills Cummis, where he won the industry's “Marketing Initiative of the Year” award. Craig co-created the first web-based virtual reality tool teaching lawyers how to network and develop clients – without leaving their desks.