Five ways lawyers can leverage a win or other successful outcome to get more clients

September 27, 2011 by
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Most lawyers go from case to case, client to client, never stopping to use the successful outcomes they create as marketing leverage for bringing in more clients. That’s because they’re thinking like a lawyer, not a rainmaker.

Instead of rushing from one case to the next, take a few minutes to think about how you can use the successful outcome (verdict, settlement, closing the deal, estate plan, etc.) to get the story told to the people who can bring you more business.

Here are five ways you could do that.

  1. Your client. The best time to talk to clients about referrals is right after a successful outcome. When you hand them a check, sign papers, or otherwise bring things to a climax, it’s prime time to ask for referrals, for a testimonial, or for other help.

    Ask consumer clients to refer you to their friends and family or to other professionals they know. Ask your business clients to introduce you to their vendors or distributors, to write about the case in their newsletter or blog, or submit an article to their local paper. (You can write the article for them).

    The favor you ask your client doesn’t have to be related to their case. They’re happy and willing to help, so ask them to distribute your new report, “like” your new blog post, or invite their friends to your upcoming seminar. And ask them to ask their friends to do the same.

  2. Your other clients and prospects. Write about your successful outcome in your blog and newsletter. Post it on your web site. Do a little bragging on social media channels. Take advantage of the win to let others see you doing what you do, helping others “just like them” achieve the same benefits they seek.
  3. Other parties/witnesses. Send a quick note to the other parties and/or their counsel, thanking them for their professionalism. Send a thank you note to experts and other witnesses, for a job well done. It’s not uncommon to see the losing side hiring the winning attorney or sending referrals or opposing counsel referring clients when they have a conflict. By the way, do the same thing when you lose a case or settle for less than hoped.
  4. Your colleagues. Tell other lawyers you know about your case. Send a letter, speak about it at Bar functions, write an article, point them to your blog post. Tell the story and share the legal nuances, give them tips about the judge or arbitrator or experts. Help them do better on their next case and they will appreciate you, reciprocate with good information on their next case, and send business your way when they have a conflict.
  5. The media. Find something newsworthy or otherwise interesting about the case, your clients or their company and issue a press release or write an article for publication in their trade journal or home town paper. The media are starved for good stories; don’t assume there’s no news value to preparing a living trust for your blue collar client. In the hands of a good writer, there’s always a story to be told.

Leverage means getting more results from the same effort. From now on, leverage your successful outcomes to get more publicity, more speaking engagements, more traffic to your web site, and more new clients.

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Filed Under: Increase your income, Leverage, Marketing legal services, Newsletters, Press release, Public Speaking, Publicity, Referrals, Relationship marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

How to read more and get more out of what you read

September 1, 2011 by
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Attorneys read a lot. Still, there’s always more we want to read, if only we had the time.

I was reading an article, yesterday, “7  Tips for becoming well-read,” and it has some good tips for reading more, things like starting small (e.g., 15 minutes during lunch) and minimizing distractions. But I didn’t think the tips went far enough so I came up with my own:

  • Be ruthless in what you select to read. Spend a few minutes with a book candidate and decide whether or not it is worth your time. Read reviews, the book’s cover, excerpts, and ask the person who recommended it. A few minutes spent in this process could save you hours of wasted time.
  • Skim. You don’t have to read the entire book, cover to cover. The 80/20 principle tells us that 80% of the value of a book is contained in 20% of its content so look for that.
  • You don’t have to finish it. If you don’t like it, stop reading it. Don’t waste time on books that don’t resonate with you.
  • Learn to speed read. Why spend five hours reading something you could read in 30 minutes?
  • Subscribe to book summaries services. Their editors summarize the books for you. For most books, that’s all you’ll need but if you like what you see in the summary, you can put that book on your list to read in its entirety.
  • Delegate. An employee can read for you, present a summary, and/or bring to your attention those books or articles he thinks you would want to read.

This will allow you to read more by eliminating a lot of marginal choices. You’ll have more time to read the “best of the best”. When you do, here’s how to get more out of what read:

  • If a book is truly high value, you may want to read it more than once. When I was in high school, I read, “How to Read a Book,” by Mortimer Adler. He presents a process for reading a book several times, each time with a different purpose. I don’t think every book qualifies for several readings but when you find one that does, a second or third reading could have immeasurable value.
  • Highlight. If you think you might read the book again, highlighting passages will make the second reading faster because you can, if you choose, read only the highlighted passages. (If you don’t think you will read the book again, or use it as a reference, there’s not much point in highlighting). For the record, I use a yellow highlighter on my first read and, usually, a red or blue pen on the second read.
  • Take notes. You’ll learn more about what you’re reading if you think about the words while you are reading them. Put the ideas in context, ask yourself questions, speculate on the options, and write it all down. It takes longer but you’ll get more value out of what you read. You’ll remember it better, too.
  • Read (and take notes) as though you had to teach the subject tomorrow. This will force you to zero in on the essence of the material, and master it.

So those are my tips for reading more and getting more out of what you read. By the way, none of this applies to fiction. We read fiction to escape, to learn about exotic places, to solve a mystery, to feel emotions, to have fun, or to learn about the human condition. Not something you want to speed up or delegate.

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Filed Under: Leverage, Personal development, Productivity, Time Management Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Seven steps to better delegating for overworked attorneys

August 23, 2011 by
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Attorneys, especially sole practitioners, are often poor at delegating. “Nobody can do it as well as I can,” they say, and that’s not ego talking, it’s usually true.

There is risk in giving a task to someone who might not do it as well as you or might not get it done on time, but delegating is essential to the growth of a law practice. Delegating gives you leverage and leverage helps you to earn more and work less.

To get better results when you delegate, follow these seven steps:

  1. Give specific instructions. Describe what you want done in sufficient detail, in writing if possible. If instructions are given orally, ask them to be repeated back to you. Tell them to ask questions if they don’t understand.
  2. Give objectives, not procedures. Tell them what you want done, not how. If you’ve chosen the right person for the job, trust them to get the job done. Guide them, don’t micro-manage them.
  3. Tell them why. They’ll do a better job when they are invested in the outcome instead of just carrying out orders so explain why the task is important. And, if you give them more than one task at a time, tell them the relative importance of each.
  4. Give a due date (and time). Due dates help them to know what is expected and allow them to prioritize their work flow.
  5. Equip and empower them. Make sure they have what they need to get the job done–tools, a budget, assistance–and the authority to decide what to do. Don’t make them come back to you with every little decision.
  6. Offer incentives. If you have an especially valuable project, you might want to offer something for getting it done early or with a better outcome. A day off, dinner for two for them and their spouse, a cash bonus, all work well.
  7. Give praise. When they do a good job, thank them (even though they were doing their job) and praise them. Let them know you are pleased and they’ll want to do a good job for you next time.
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Filed Under: Leverage, Productivity, Time Management Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

How to leverage CLE time

September 12, 2007 by
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Kiyosaki (see previous post) says leverage is “doing more and more with less and less”. One way to accomplish this is by making the time you spend in Continuing Legal Education do “double duty” for you, as the following letter from one of our subscribers attests:

“One idea that I have found very useful in building clients’ perceptions of credibility and reliability is the faxing or emailing of regular snippets of industry-specific information.

“For example, I have been wooing a client in the commercial construction business. Although I am not an expert in construction law. . . I came across an interesting summary of late breaking developments in subcontractor liability in the latest issue of the [his state Bar] Journal. I immediately copied it and faxed it to my contact (the executive v.p.) with the note, “I thought you might find this interesting.”

“I then added a quick blurb about how this is precisely what we do proactively for our business clients to keep them on the cutting edge of their field.

“This practice keeps me alert to my client’s needs, motivates me to stay on top of “hands-on” CLE information, and lets the client know about my concern, competency and desire to excel.”

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Filed Under: Client relations, Continuing Legal Education, Leverage Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Leverage: the key to wealth

September 12, 2007 by
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I was at a convention for another business I am involved in and one of our speakers was Robert Kiyosaki, author of the "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" series. Kiyosaki was able to retire at age 47, then came out of retirement to add to his wealth by investing in real estate and building businesses.

One of Mr. Kiyosaki’s themes is leverage. In fact, he says it is the key to wealth. If you are an employee, he says, you will almost never become wealthy. Aside from not having leverage, our tax system is rigged against you.

Being self-employed isn’t any better. In some respects, it’s worse. When you are self-employed, the more successful you are, the harder you have to work. Most self-employed professionals I know work longer hours than their employed counterparts.

In the income arena, leverage comes from owning a business or through investing, Kiyosaki says. If you think your law practice is a business, you may want to reconsider in light of Kiyosaki’s litmus test: You own a business if you can walk away for a year, come back and be earning as much or more as when you left. If you cannot, then you don’t own a business, you are merely self-employed, which means you "own" a job.

Ugh! Hits you in the gut, doesn’t it?

Michael Gerber, author of The E-Myth Revisited, says the same thing when he tells us that entrepreneurs (and that includes self-employed lawyers) need to build something that they can walk away from. Both he and Kiyosaki talk about creating "systems" to build a business and wealth.

Creating a system means taking yourself out of the equation. If you want leverage, You must be ruthless in your quest to make yourself obsolete. So long as your practice is about you and what you can do, you do not own a business, you do not have leverage, and you will never be able to walk away. Only in rare instances will you become rich.

The dichotomy is that as lawyers, the strength of our practice is directly proportional to the strength of our relationships with our clients and referral sources. When we take ourselves out of the picture, those relationships wane.

How do you reconcile the need for systems with the need for strong relationships in a personal service business? You probably can’t, completely. But here are three things you can do:

1. Create systems for every aspect of your practice except relationships. Make yourself obsolete with respect to the delivery of legal services and administration. Work toward delegating everything OTHER THAN the perpetuation of existing relationships and the generation of new ones.

2. Teach your employees how to build their relationships and incentivize them to do so. You will thus be able to compound your leverage by leveraging their relationships.

3. Use the time you no longer spend delivering services for building other businesses and investing.

This is what I have done. I leveraged my (former) law practice to build the attorney marketing business, and I leveraged that business to develop another business, and the latter, thankfully, does meet Kiyosaki’s litmus test.

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Filed Under: Leverage, Wealth Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Three simple ways to increase your income

August 29, 2007 by
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Getting more clients through networking, advertising, writing articles, speaking, and so forth, is the obvious way to grow your law practice, and your income. But there are other ways.

There are three things you can do to increase your income that require no time or money, only a little creativity.

The best part is that if you do ALL THREE THINGS, your practice will grow not arithmetically but. . .

. . .geometrically.

Interested?

Okay, here are the three things:

1. Enlarge the size of your average engagement
2. Encourage your clients to hire you more often
3. Get your existing clients to refer other clients

You can enlarge the size of your average engagement by offering a "deluxe" version of your services or by packaging your services in ways that offer clients incentives to hire you to do more now.

You can encourage clients to hire you more often by offering "maintenence contracts" or other incentives to use you more often, or by simply staying in touch with clients and reminding them of the need for your services and the benefits thereof.

You can get your clients to refer other clients by asking for referrals or asking them for the names of their friends and colleagues to whom you can send valuable free information, i.e., reports, newsletters, etc., or special offers, or to simply inform them about your services.

You invested time and money in acquiring your clients. Work smart and maximize your profits with bigger engagements and more repeat business and referrals.

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Filed Under: Increase your income, Leverage Tagged With: ,
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