Lawyers know an incredible amount about their chosen speciality. And they are usually hungry to know more. This knowledge is both their biggest strength and their biggest weakness.
The strength of knowledge is evident when the lawyer is engaged on a client matter - the knowledge combined with experience enables the lawyer to get the client from A to B in the best way possible.
The weakness of the knowledge base is that it is impossible for anyone to forget what they already know, so far too often the lawyer assumes a base level of knowledge in the client which he or she doesn’t have.
Meanwhile, at the same time, the client doesn’t know what he or she doesn’t know, and can hence not offer up relevant information, or understand the background to the lawyers’ enquiries. This imbalance has become more prevalent in the internet age, with the rise of the “instant expert” - clients who have read 2 internet articles and think that they have mastered the topic. These people genuinely believe that all they need is a light steer to accomplish the legal task themsleves. A dangerous precedent.
The challenge, therefore, is to treat your client as a well-educated yet ill-informed individual. This means that you explain why what you do matters to him/her, the costs of getting it wrong, and what to do to ensure she/he gets it right. The trick is to do this without appearing patronising or overly technical.
You can often see a very stark illustration of getting it wrong when you read an article penned by a lawyer for a trade magazine. The article often builds from a non-existent client knowledge base, adds information which no reader is asking for, and finishes without explaining what the potential client should do next.
Remember that a lawyer’s knowledge is rare, and what you consider common knowledge isn’t.
The aim of a website is to get business. Discuss.
Your firm’s website is part of the marketing machine, and as such should help you get business. However beautiful it is, however much time was invested in it, however much the managing partner likes it, if it doesn’t help you get more work, it’s just a work of art.
Something that serves no purpose but to look good.
So does your website get you business? Originally you couldn’t know. Now you can. You can track leads, track page ranking, track dwell time, track conversations and track a whole lot more. You can then write stuff that people want to read & comment on.
Ask marketing. And if you are marketing, be prepared to be asked.
In his recent book Outliers: The Story of Success
Malcolm Gladwell suggests there was a time to be born in New York if you wanted to succeed in law. He builds the case based on the study of several individuals who made it big in the expansion in corporate take-overs in the 70s and 80s in New York. His point was not just that these successful people were born at the right time but they also did 10,000 hours of practice in a field not popular with the big firms of the 50s and 60s and this is what meant they were ready for the brave new world when it came.
The question is therefore - were we born at the right time for the current changes in the business environment and have we spent the last 10 years practicing enough to be ready now?
Mark Jarvis
mark@penningtonhennessy.com
It may be an inevitable condition of life that it takes so long to learn so little. When I was catapulted from senior litigator at a major City firm to partnership with Pinsents in 1994, building a practice would have been easier if I had known:-
- That all high performers receive coaching, not because they are poor performers, but to become the best, because they are restless to improve
- That selling was an art, needing tuition, then constant practice – just like the piano, learning a language
- That there were people outside the law who had the skills and experience to give me a head start – that sales skills were not something that would just happen by magic
- The elements of Key Account Management – that the intensity of approach needed to achieve success was the same as the most complex areas of litigation
- What was really needed to win a pitch – what was going on in the mind of the buyer
- That networking was much more than being affable with as many people as possible
- That I would differentiate myself from most other lawyers by actually doing it - putting sales and other learned skills into practice
Patrick Raggett
Patrick@penningtonhennessy.com
It is a common mantra within law firms that lawyers need to be "more commercial". Many programs have been established to address this issue, including:
*MBA-style programmes,
*client focus groups,
*industry lectures,
*case studies and
*specific training modules
Training departments also offer training to in-house legal teams on both legal and managerial issues to enable a stronger bond to be fostered.
But I've yet to find a firm who sends chosen associates on a specific client's own middle-management leadership development programme.
So, for example, you would send an Associate on IBM's 5-day "The Leadership Challenge" programme (assuming IBM was a client), where s/he would mix with the future senior line managers within IBM.
In this way:
The lawyer would meet people who will REALLY matter within the client in 10 years time, and get a true understanding of the client's business outside the legal function.
- Associates would understand that the legal function within most client companies is not the well-regarded powerhouse that the in-house team would have you believe.
- Associates would see that, conversely, the legal function is often seen as the "business prevention unit" within a company, and is avoided in the usual run of events.
Contacts within the client's line management would be established, so that they can help the client's own in-house lawyers be more effective.
You could also impress the client with the quality of your associates, since you would choose your delegate carefully. In this way you would build a long term client relationship based on what we preach; really understanding the client.
If you want some solid research to challenge partners who think that people buy for rational reasons (let's send them the brochure with our Legal 500 profile...), Predictaby Irrational by Dan Ariely is the book to read.
In the book he narrates a whole series of scenarios which he set up to test various theories. Two examples:
- Why removing an alternative purchase that nobody chose could change the one they DID choose, and
- How to price a $5.00 product to sell - he tried 3 ways: $5.00 with free p&p; $2.50 + $2.50 p&p; or Free + $5.00 p&p. You can see the answer to this particular test in a short video clip he created here.
We know that clients buy the individual lawyer, supported by the firm's brand. This book unpacks some of the science behind how they choose.
They've attended the partners meeting, agreed the strategy, budgeted for the training and even attended a few of the training sessions. So why won't they go out and sell?
3 possible reasons:
- Lawyers are the wrong sort of people to enjoy selling. A typical psychometric profile for a lawyer is everything you don't want in a salesman.
- There is little perceived reward. Once a partner has filled up his or her own pipeline, the revenue-recognition for sales-performance is seen as small when set against how hard it is. Most partners would prefer to get back to doing high-quality work for grateful clients.
- Lawyers won't work the process. Good salespeople (whether lawyers or not) know that sales is a process. Exceptional salespeople have an intuitive grasp of the process. The rest of us have to learn it, and do it methodically, day in and day out, not just when we feel like it or have run out of fee-earning work.
So a typical lawyer doesn't want to sell, isn't rewarded for selling, and when he or she does try and sell they do it unsystematically.
So what should we do?
Possibly focus on the untypical ones. The ones who want to sell. The ones who are selling, but know that they could do better. Perhaps even the senior associates who show the spark, and who could be promoted as a sales partner rather than a traditional client-facing one. You wouldn't expect the entire senior team of BP or Proctor and Gamble to go out and sell, so why expect a stellar sales performance from all your partners?
The answer seems to be to invest in the best.