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Not in the traditional sense. Instead you should embark on a skills development effort. The average lawyer might spend 200 hours per year on business development activities. That means an office of 30 lawyers will invest 6,000 hours per year (30 x 200) on business development. If the average billing rate in that office is $360 per hour, your firm is investing $2,160,000 per year on marketing. Unfortunately, most of those hours are "random acts of lunch" which lack clear direction and focus. Our programs are specifically designed to focus those hours more efficiently for the maximum return on investment.
Very slowly. No matter how great the classroom learning, it still pales in comparison to the learning derived from real experiences. In working with some of the largest law firms in the world, we've reluctantly concluded that you build a practice, no matter how large, one lawyer at a time. And each lawyer is best helped by having him focus on one client at a time. And each client relationship is developed one meeting at a time. (A meeting is the smallest unit of measurement in a complex sale.) If your lawyers can "ace" each meeting they will achieve tangible economic results. The single greatest weapon for improving lawyer performance in those marketing meetings is coaching, not just training. The trick is to have more of your lawyers self propelled in the marketing arena. With the help of your firm's marketing director, our goal during the 90 day period is to coach people until they become self propelled.
We will provide your lawyers with a menu of interactive, skills-based workshops from which to choose. Click here for a listing of the workshops your lawyers may choose. For getting started, we would suggest one workshop covering these two topics:
The former is a basic selling and marketing skills course and the latter shows lawyers how to use networking to make traditional selling unnecessary.
No, more classroom time does not equate to more learning. Trying to teach lawyers as much as possible in a three-day program is wasteful. Why? Two reasons -- one is economic and the other pragmatic. The billable hours your firm will forego while its lawyers sit through a two or three-day program is staggering. Click here to view a spreadsheet comparing the lost revenues from one, two and three-day programs. In effect, it's like trying to teach addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, integral calculus and differential equations in a three day period. It can't be done and anyone who tells you that it can is disingenuous or naive. On a more pragmatic level, the pressures of everyday practice will crowd out most of this new learning. When left to their own devices, lawyers practice law not marketing. If we can get your lawyers to learn and apply two critical skills per workshop which enable them to originate more work and get more work that is professionally rewarding, then everyone wins. We initiate phone calls to each participant for at least 60 days after the workshop. Within 90 days of the workshop, the participants also may initiate calls to us to discuss any marketing questions or opportunities that arise. Our proactive coaching is timed to occur immediately before and after client meetings and other marketing events that your lawyers arrange during the 60 day period. In our experience, most lawyers go into business development meetings unprepared. Lack of preparation usually results in something that lawyers fear most: rejection. With a coach, your lawyers will go into fewer meetings unprepared. That will translate into fewer rejections and better results. Even if they are fully prepared, they often miss the learning that is waiting on the other end of the experience. Hence, we conduct thorough debriefings with each lawyer after he meets with his prospective client. In those instances where a "failure" occurs, most lawyers want to "get the body to the morgue" as quickly as possible. We have found that enormous learning is contained in these experiences if your lawyers are willing to focus on them. Click here to read examples of my coaching success stories.
Just because your lawyers can regurgitate a definition learned in a workshop does not mean they will ever apply the concept in the real world. For example, one of our litigator clients met with a prospective client and came back from the meeting excited. During the debriefing telephone call he said, "I got an advance, the client wants me to meet with his President!" "Advance" is a term which every participant learns and practices during the Courting New Clients workshop. Our reply was "Great! When is it?" At that moment, he realized there was no specific date on which the client agreed to meet which means he hadn't obtained an advance yet. This conversation happened six days after the workshop. This lawyer learned the concept of an advance on the day of the workshop, but he didn't learn the skill until six days later. Without the coaching, he may never have learned the skill. He also learned what he can do the next time this situation arises to be sure he doesn't leave the meeting without an advance. For this reason, we think of coaching as time-released learning. Maraia
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