Wisconsin Lawyer
Vol. 79, No. 8, August
2006
How to Lose a Client in 10 Days
If you've decided you're not cut out to be a rainmaker, if you're not
interested in confronting self-limiting beliefs or in challenging
yourself to take positive action to develop business relationships, then
be sure to follow these 10 tips to preserve your status quo.
by Ellen Ostrow
The pathway to power in a law firm is making rain. Technical
expertise is essential _ but it's not sufficient if your goal is to
advance in your firm. Business development success is vital for
attaining senior partner status and positions on important
decision-making committees, closing gender-related inequities in your
compensation, and becoming a role model for young lawyers entering your
firm.
Most importantly, having your own book of business is your ticket to
professional independence. If your firm is not a good platform for your
practice, you can easily move elsewhere.
Ellen Ostrow, Ph.D., is the founder of
Lawyers-LifeCoach LLC, providing personal and career coaching for
lawyers. She is editor of the free online newsletter Beyond the Billable
Hour. This article is excerpted from Issue #43 of the newsletter,
located at www.LawyersLifeCoach.com.
But maybe you're not interested in autonomy and mobility. Perhaps
you're content to be a "service partner," focusing your energy on work
that other lawyers bring into the firm.
You may even have taken a stab at business development and been
disappointed with the results. If you're a woman, perhaps you tried to
imitate male colleagues but felt uncomfortable. You might have attended
a few networking events and found it difficult to make "small talk" _
and you're discouraged by the fact that none of the people to whom you
handed your business card has called.
If you've concluded that you're not cut out to be a rainmaker, you've
probably stopped trying to learn new, more fruitful approaches. If
you're not interested in confronting self-limiting beliefs or
getting the coaching or other assistance that would challenge you
to take actions more likely to lead to success, be sure to do the
following.
Preserve the Status Quo
1) Do work that means little to you. Doing work for which you
have no passion is an almost certain way to fail at business
development. Your lack of genuine interest will deter you from learning
about your clients' industry. The idea of attending industry events or
reading trade press will make mundane work look attractive. When you
meet with prospective clients, your lack of enthusiasm will be evident.
You will approach your work with your clients as transactions to be
completed as quickly as possible. Perhaps you'll even be hoping they
never call again.
2) Don't build your network until you are pressured to bring in
business. Allow the demands of your inbox to keep you from
developing and maintaining mutually beneficial and rewarding
relationships. Then, when your business generation becomes a significant
factor in decisions about your partnership or compensation, you can
madly dash around at networking events, collecting business cards and
trying to come up with the right words that will make strangers want to
hire you as their trusted advisor. People with whom you desperately try
to network will see you as self-interested and exploitive and will make
themselves scarce when they see you coming. If you're a woman, you can
contact potential female clients with whom you've had an exclusively
personal relationship and suddenly and unilaterally change the terms of
the relationship by asking them for business. They will feel used and
betrayed, but at least you will have "tried." (The points about
rainmaking apply equally to male and female attorneys. Some points, such
as the one above, however, especially recognize the differences men and
women experience in their communication and relationship styles. For
more information, see "Leading Through Communication" in the August
2005 Wisconsin Lawyer.)
3) When you meet with a prospective client, maintain single-minded
focus on getting the business. Putting pressure on yourself to leave
the meeting with the business in hand will make you anxious. Your focus
will narrow and you'll primarily attend to the voice in your head that's
telling you that you'd better make this sale or else catastrophe will
follow. Focusing on the conversation in your head will distract you from
listening to the other person.
When there are pauses in the conversation you will talk more about
yourself and your expertise without knowing whether the information is
relevant to the other person's concerns. If you've prepared well in
advance, you will have a canned pitch that's aimed at convincing people
that you and your firm have singular capabilities. This will ensure that
you sound like every other lawyer from every other firm. Always
remember: you became a lawyer to sell, not to help.
4) Dominate the conversation. As long as you're talking, the
other person won't have the opportunity to tell you about her needs,
goals, concerns, threats, and opportunities. After all, you only want
the engagement, not the messiness of a relationship. Why listen to the
pressures the prospective client faces in his organization? You have
enough worries about your own position in your workplace. In fact, you
might even use the opportunity to complain about how hard you're working
and indirectly convey how desperately you need to get this business.
5) Never visit clients unless you absolutely have to. Although
you may need to go to your clients' offices during the course of an
engagement, there's no reason to visit when you're not working on a
project with them. Doing this would communicate a genuine interest in
their success and the well-being of their organizations. Don't try to
become a trusted advisor beyond any specific engagement. This might put
you in the position of having to advise the client against taking some
action that would result in costly litigation and millions of dollars of
revenue for your firm.
6) Always remember that you are the expert. Keep in mind that
since your client hired you as counsel, she should do as she's told.
Take charge of the project _ collaboration will only reduce your control
and prevent you from billing for more time. Never forget that if the
client had the expertise to do the work, she'd have done it herself. You
were hired to get the work done and to meet the client's deadlines even
if this requires your associates to work 24/7. Although the client may
experience you as arrogant and controlling, you can reassure yourself
that you are right.
7) Think short term. The route to trust is through
relationships. There's no time for that if you only want to bill
hours. Relationships take time to develop. They require genuine
interest, commitment, consistency, and continuity. The goals of a
relationship are to develop a full understanding of the other person's
needs so that you are in the best position to help. This requires
listening not only to what is said, but to how it is said; that is,
attending to feelings as well as words. This is all too "touchy-feely"
and rarely produces immediate results. Find those clients who are as
uninterested in relationships as you are, make a great pitch, get in and
out as quickly as you can, and above all else, make sure you get paid in
full.
8) Make meeting your firm's billable requirements a higher
priority than developing and serving clients. The easiest way
to meet billable requirements is to ask the firm's current rainmakers
for work. Becoming a service partner allows you to stay inside your
comfort zone: you don't have to leave your office to develop business
and you don't have to worry about being scolded by management because
your hours are sub-par.
Bill for every second you spend with a client. Never devote
nonbillable time to learning about your client's business and career
goals. If you happen to think of your client while you're taking a
shower, bill for that time. While this may engender distrust and cause
your clients to carefully audit your bills, it's the only way to prove
to your firm that you're a "good soldier." The alternative would require
you to challenge the inconsistency between your firm's rhetoric about
encouraging business development and its rigid billing requirements.
9) Stay at a firm that requires 2,400 billable hours and
new business generation. When a firm's billable requirements make it
impossible to find time for marketing activities, the only people who
are likely to succeed are those who a senior partner is interested in
grooming to inherit the senior attorney's book of business. Unless
you're a likely beneficiary of such largesse, the only reason you'd stay
is in the hope that clients will somehow discover that you were the one
who did all that great work they received. If you stay long enough,
you're likely to lose not only your independence, but also your
confidence.
10) Continue with a firm that raises your billing rate so that
it's no longer affordable for your clients. Once your clients
can no longer afford your services, they'll have no choice but to go
elsewhere. Unless you want to work in a more client-friendly firm,
you'll need to transition within your firm to a practice area serving
clients whose budgets can easily absorb such high fees. Although this
may mean a steep learning curve as you master new technical skills and
knowledge, and although you'll have to start from scratch in finding new
clients, at least you won't have to make any really big changes in your
life.
Conclusion
For those of you who are brave of heart and determined to succeed
despite the challenges, use this list to remind yourself that you have
what it takes to make rain. Make a planned, intentional effort to invest
some of your precious time to create and sustain relationships. Remember
that your job is not your career. If your current firm can't support
your efforts to develop a satisfying practice, find another firm that
can. Then you will be able to leverage your strengths and experience to
gain the success you've worked so hard to achieve in your career.
Wisconsin Lawyer