Learn from my Quarter Century of Legal Marketing Experience

With 18 years of dedicated service as an in-house legal marketing professional with three Philadelphia regional law firms, I have had the privilege of having a front row seat into the inner workings of law firm life, governance and culture.

After stepping away from providing strategic business development and marketing services inside law firms and forming the legal advisory firm KLA Marketing Associates in 2008, I’ve worked with hundreds of lawyers in scores of legal practices across the U.S.

What I’ve witnessed and learned bears sharing with the legal community, at large, for the benefit of ‘lessons learned’.

1.   Law school does not prepare you for private practice, or much else. Over 25 years of coaching, advising and working with lawyers, I have made a habit of asking lawyer clients “on Day One of your private practice, what did you feel prepared to do?” Without exception, the response has always been ‘nothing’ or ‘not much.’

Lesson: Recognize, as in most areas of higher education, that much of your academic training provides plenty of theoretical analysis and little practical information and experience. Understanding that will propel you to seek out practical guidance on how to successfully launch and grow your new legal practice, how to engage in appropriate business development and marketing tactics on Day One, such as getting and staying connected with your law school classmates. Doing so provides critical relationship-building opportunities throughout the course of your legal career.

2.   Your career transcends your present professional position. Dependent upon economic cycles, lawyers can be paralyzed from making an upwardly mobile transition due to fear of failing (a common trait among lawyers). I’ve coached too many lawyers over the years who were willing to stay put in a position that they did not enjoy, had little interest in, and fell victim to unfortunate and unjust employment practices, all out of fear of the unknown.

Lesson: Summon the courage to chart out at least the next three to five years of your legal career. What I know for sure is that you can create the career of your dreams by charting your own course. There may be multiple paths, depending upon life choices and family planning concerns. What works for you today may not work in five-seven years. At least sketch out a plan of action, so you are working towards these goals. Doing so can prove empowering while you are clocking the endless billable hours, in the interim.

3.   Submit to the relationship-building process. Examining your motivations for becoming a lawyer initially may prompt you to reflect upon the approach you take for strengthening and cultivating new working relationships, or not. One of my career surprises has been that the majority of lawyers are actually introverts. To me, this defies logic, particularly with respect to litigators.

What I’ve seen time and time again over the last 25 years is how some lawyers resist engaging in consistent relationship-building initiatives. As I repeatedly explain, if you are a private practicing lawyer, you are a business owner. Whether or not you actually have clients is another question, altogether.

 Given that professional services, including legal services, is predicated upon consistent relationship building, it is impossible to build and grow a prosperous practice without engaging in meaningful relationship-building activities such as targeted networking and, to a lesser degree, some sort of professional association involvement.

Lesson: Regardless of whether you are an introvert or extravert, there is a path uniquely suited to your personality and skill set to develop meaningful relationships which will lead to attracting new clients and strengthening existing relationships for business generation purposes. What I’ve come to know for sure, is if you are focused on building a prosperous practice/business, you will take the necessary steps to do so. Similar to experts in other disciplines, savvy lawyers know they must reach out to access requisite resources on the appropriate steps that stand between their present situation and the one they intend to create.

Often, law firm clients are uneducated and either uninformed or misinformed on exactly what concrete steps they must take to advance their professional networks, how to promote their legal practice and grow their firms’ business.

4.   Failing to plan is planning to fail. Almost without exception, when we initially work with law firm clients, they do not have a written business marketing plan. Depending upon the stage of their business cycle they are in, lawyer clients may have built a practice and are cruising to retirement, have assumed a ‘grinder’ role in their firm and are hanging on by a thread, or are really struggling to string together success from their scattershot marketing approach. We see these as the most common scenarios, across all areas of legal practice.

Lesson: In light of overarching economic forces, the overall shrinking legal pie (in some areas more than others), and the uber competitive legal environment, lawyers and law firm management cannot afford to ‘fly blindly’ and still expect profits to increase year after year.

 It’s astonishing that regardless of firm size and breadth and depth of practice groups, firm management does not seek outside expert marketing resources to guide them to growth and prosperity, institutionally, at the practice group level or with individual lawyers. Further, there are plenty of in-house Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) and legal marketing professionals who are woefully underutilized for the express reason that law firm management does not either know how to utilize the expertise they have in these capable professionals and/or they do not know what they do not know, as business owners and firm leadership.

Irrespective of the underlying reasons, we see firms survive despite their egregiously misguided leadership practices though many do so by the slightest of margins.

5.   Accept building a prosperous book of business is a journey not a destination and a business a total team effort. I realize that this truism is not limited to lawyers, but this is the world I know intimately. In my 25 years of extensive legal marketing experience, I have rarely encountered a lawyer who understands fundamentally that consistent business development and marketing must be an ongoing, consistent and integral piece of their business model.

Conversely, many lawyers prefer for clients to be handed to them, in a box with a beautiful bow on top. This unfortunate situation escapes reason that lawyers view marketing as a ‘catch as catch can’ proposition. Or, what we typically refer to as ‘random acts of marketing’ which frequently results in zero clients/new business and 100% frustration.

Lesson: Lawyers would be very well served if they would allow themselves to be educated in the fundamentals of building a prosperous practice and, by extension, a successful law firm.

In my in-house firm days, I was required to perform as a generalist: the marketing coach, the publicist, the event planner, the webmaster, the graphic design department, the data specialist, and so on. The fact is that in those days, firms of any size did not value or budget for professional marketing staff which brought in-depth discipline expertise. That would account for why there was/is so much dissatisfaction towards law firm marketing departments. Quite simply, there are too few resources available to even begin to service the attorneys effectively and to demonstrate proven results.

Similar to why firms either employ or contract with industry experts such as CPAs, risk managers and business valuators, if lawyers would avail themselves of expert marketing resources, either from in-house marketing departments and/or outside marketing experts who have a broad base of experience, lawyers could take comfort and be empowered to develop a concrete and integrated marketing plan which is S.M.A.R.T. – specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. With this tangible document in hand, consistent and persistent implementation would be clarified and much easier to attain.

6.   Effective time management imperative. While many legal practices grow and die by the billable hour, I have often been dismayed at the lack of effective time management discipline lawyers have. Granted, time is money and one must prioritize the most pressing tasks at the top of the list, but engaging in any activity that resembles relationship building, reputation enhancing and meaningful contact management only when everything else is done, is a grave and often fatal misjudgment and waste of resources.

How often have I heard, “I just don’t have time to market; I have too much work to do.” Do these lawyers ever pause to question what would happen if their top clients suddenly disappeared? If you have been practicing more than a decade, you have likely experienced this first hand. Bankruptcy, consolidations, mergers and acquisitions, and total dissolution and liquidation. No company, private or public is immune to extinction. All the more reason to craft a plan to grow, not contract, your business- building endeavors.

Lesson: It bears an in-depth assessment of how you allocate your time, on a daily basis. Do you really have all the business you can handle - - today and a year or two from now or, more likely, should you re-allocate some time to cultivating new, targeted relationships with individuals who can directly purchase your legal services or connect you to those individuals who can.

Over two plus decades, I have witnessed too many lawyers put their proverbial eggs in too few baskets, and the entire apple cart was turned upside down, when that “one big client” went away. Do not be lulled into complacency, begin 2017 in a stronger, more empowered position for growth and prosperity.

7.   Trust thy partners: cross-selling still has not been institutionalized, in most firms. In my view, it is a sad testament that law firm partners still do not trust one another not to poach each other’s clients and act for the greater good of expanding the services provided to existing clients. Do lawyers fundamentally understand that by refusing to introduce their clients to lawyer colleagues, they are cutting their nose to spite their collective face?

Can one only even imagine how much untapped firm growth there may be if only in-house lawyers would proactively service their clients by anticipating their legal needs and connect the clients with colleagues who might help them solve or prevent a problem, or capitalize on an opportunity.

Lesson: While cross-selling still has not made its way into the accepted marketing mindsets of many lawyers, motivated and service-minded lawyers would find greater prosperity if they took the time to analyze additional service areas their top clients would benefit from, then make introductions. There are certain stopgap measures which can be put into place for the referring lawyer to be kept abreast of matters proceeding without their direct involvement. My mantra has always been “do what’s right for the clients and it will be good for the firm and individual lawyers”.

8.   Client teams can be an extraordinary selling tool and service solution. If firms and lawyers can move beyond the ‘go it alone’ mentality, offering clients a team approach whereby lawyers of different disciplines focus can effectively work together to deliver extraordinary service. To borrow the cliché ‘it takes a village’, in some cases it truly does. What is required, however, is to check the egos at the door and a designated partner to demonstrate strong leadership, for the good of the team.

Lesson: Fortunately, we have seen firms have great success when they have organized as client teams, with one caveat. These arrangements absolutely require a constant and thorough communication process, to ensure all the ‘pieces’ are kept apprised of developments, successes and losses, regardless of whether a particular team member is directly involved. It is here that we have sadly witnessed considerable and needless client drama and loss of credibility (not to mention steep write offs) when the team is not unified in its communication strategy and keeping each other abreast. Too simply, what began as a top selling client benefit unraveled into a painful mess.

9.   Commit to becoming and perfecting a strategist, not technician, role. Many lawyers know the finder, minder, grinder analogy to describe various types of lawyers. There are those who some regard as natural rainmakers, some who do their best work as a client relationship manager while others prefer to stay behind the scenes and actually perform the legal work.

In these competitive times, it should be no surprise that if there is any security and upward mobility in a legal career, it is at the finder and trusted advisor level. No disrespect, but lawyers are a dime a dozen, in some practice areas, as we clearly saw during the Great Recession. Regardless of legal acumen, extraordinary trial, negotiation and ADR experience, as long as lawyers are being handed client matters and not generating their own cases, it is merely a matter of time until your professional life as you know it will cease to exist. If you don’t believe me, simply google and research the latest stats on the ABA website, and other reliable websites and legal management firms such as Altman Weil.

Lesson: Learning from Day One how to develop and grow a book of business to ultimately be regarded as a legal strategist, a trusted advisor to your growing client base is the only path to prosperity, when lawyers are engaged in private practice. Resist the temptation to believe anyone who says “don’t worry about developing business, we have plenty of institutional clients who are not going anywhere.” Do not allow yourself to be lulled into complacency by this assurance. You do so at your own peril.

10. BONUS: Evoke the Secret Sauce. Since I began my legal marketing career in 1991, many many things have changed, some for the better, others, not so much. If I have learned anything in 25 years, this is it: to build and grow a prosperous business and law firm, lawyers and law firm management must evoke what we refer to as the Secret Sauce which is quite simple. The secret to prosperity is not some far-fetched random, scattershot approach to marketing as we know there are no magic bullets, no ‘one and done’ marketing exercises.

The only path to true growth and prosperity is through strategic and defined consistent, persistent massive amounts of action over a prolonged period of time.

We are humbled and proud at the same time that so many law firms in the metro Philadelphia and New York regions as well as across the country have trusted KLA Marketing Associates to lead them to great success. It is by evoking and applying the Secret Sauce in our business development and marketing programs that has strengthened our resolve.