When asked what business development means to them, almost every lawyer in practice responds by saying that business development is about getting more clients and more files, or in other words, it’s about generating an increased volume of billable work.
Regardless of whether any given lawyer has too little work, just enough work, or too much work, the tendency is the same: to think about marketing in terms of the amount of work it will generate. This article takes a look at how and why lawyers in each of these three categories tend to think about marketing in these terms, and how using marketing to improve quality of work rather than quantity of work is the real key to success.
Scenario 1: The UnderOccupied Lawyer
What if you don’t have enough work to keep busy? In this situation, isn’t the objective of business development simply to bring in more work?
Yes and no. Although it may well be true that any lawyer who is operating under capacity ultimately needs to get “more” work, the focus should actually be on getting the best work possible — not just any work.
If you take on low-quality work in order to occupy yourself and bill hours, there will be less time available to accommodate high-quality work, less time available to engage in the kind of marketing that will bring in that high-quality work, and you will be actively positioning yourself as a lower-end lawyer who takes on lower-end clients and charges lower-end fees. All of which is fine if that is how you want to be seen, but if that is how you get people thinking about you now, it will be very difficult to reposition yourself later. It’s better to deal with lower volume over the short term in order to help you build a better practice over the long term.
Scenario 2: The Lawyer Who Has Just Enough Work
Rare is the lawyer who strikes the right balance and regularly has just the right amount of work. However, this enviable state of affairs can lead to a very dangerous kind of complacency that can eventually undermine future success.
Even if you have all the work that you need, it is always possible to change the composition of the work. If the volume stays the same, but the quality of the work improves in ways that make for more profitable and interesting work with higher potential for future growth, you would ultimately have a much improved practice without increasing the number of hours that you are billing.
For these reasons, even if you are content with your current volume of billable work, you should nevertheless always be actively engaged in business development, with a view to continually upgrading the quality of your practice.
Scenario 3: The Lawyer Who is Overextended, Overcommitted and Overworked
Lawyers who are too busy present the most interesting challenge when it comes to shaking the “volume” mindset. Too much work is not a bad problem to have, and most would agree that it’s better to have too much than not enough. However, being overextended poses some real challenges in terms of business development, and often it’s the busiest lawyers who are among the worst when it comes to marketing.
The problem here is quite obvious: if you already have too much to do, you will be tempted not to bother with business development because you think that: (a) since you don’t have enough time to adequately attend to your files and billable work, you certainly don’t have any “extra” or “spare” time to allocate to marketing; and (b) if you did somehow manage to apply yourself to marketing and were successful in generating more work, you wouldn’t be able to do it anyway.
Clearly this kind of thinking is tied to the idea that the purpose of marketing is to generate “more” work. If you are an overworked lawyer who tends to think like this, you should consider what the real objective of marketing is — to generate better work.
Many an overwhelmed lawyer could improve their practice dramatically by doing work of a higher quality that is more profitable. By marketing effectively, they could actually reduce their hours and, in doing so, improve their return and profitability, and continue to grow their practice.
Donna Wannop, LLB, MBA, is a practice-development coach (www.donnawannop.com) who has worked exclusively with the legal profession for over 25 years. Reach her at [email protected].
Regardless of whether any given lawyer has too little work, just enough work, or too much work, the tendency is the same: to think about marketing in terms of the amount of work it will generate. This article takes a look at how and why lawyers in each of these three categories tend to think about marketing in these terms, and how using marketing to improve quality of work rather than quantity of work is the real key to success.
Scenario 1: The UnderOccupied Lawyer
What if you don’t have enough work to keep busy? In this situation, isn’t the objective of business development simply to bring in more work?
Yes and no. Although it may well be true that any lawyer who is operating under capacity ultimately needs to get “more” work, the focus should actually be on getting the best work possible — not just any work.
If you take on low-quality work in order to occupy yourself and bill hours, there will be less time available to accommodate high-quality work, less time available to engage in the kind of marketing that will bring in that high-quality work, and you will be actively positioning yourself as a lower-end lawyer who takes on lower-end clients and charges lower-end fees. All of which is fine if that is how you want to be seen, but if that is how you get people thinking about you now, it will be very difficult to reposition yourself later. It’s better to deal with lower volume over the short term in order to help you build a better practice over the long term.
Scenario 2: The Lawyer Who Has Just Enough Work
Rare is the lawyer who strikes the right balance and regularly has just the right amount of work. However, this enviable state of affairs can lead to a very dangerous kind of complacency that can eventually undermine future success.
Even if you have all the work that you need, it is always possible to change the composition of the work. If the volume stays the same, but the quality of the work improves in ways that make for more profitable and interesting work with higher potential for future growth, you would ultimately have a much improved practice without increasing the number of hours that you are billing.
For these reasons, even if you are content with your current volume of billable work, you should nevertheless always be actively engaged in business development, with a view to continually upgrading the quality of your practice.
Scenario 3: The Lawyer Who is Overextended, Overcommitted and Overworked
Lawyers who are too busy present the most interesting challenge when it comes to shaking the “volume” mindset. Too much work is not a bad problem to have, and most would agree that it’s better to have too much than not enough. However, being overextended poses some real challenges in terms of business development, and often it’s the busiest lawyers who are among the worst when it comes to marketing.
The problem here is quite obvious: if you already have too much to do, you will be tempted not to bother with business development because you think that: (a) since you don’t have enough time to adequately attend to your files and billable work, you certainly don’t have any “extra” or “spare” time to allocate to marketing; and (b) if you did somehow manage to apply yourself to marketing and were successful in generating more work, you wouldn’t be able to do it anyway.
Clearly this kind of thinking is tied to the idea that the purpose of marketing is to generate “more” work. If you are an overworked lawyer who tends to think like this, you should consider what the real objective of marketing is — to generate better work.
Many an overwhelmed lawyer could improve their practice dramatically by doing work of a higher quality that is more profitable. By marketing effectively, they could actually reduce their hours and, in doing so, improve their return and profitability, and continue to grow their practice.
Donna Wannop, LLB, MBA, is a practice-development coach (www.donnawannop.com) who has worked exclusively with the legal profession for over 25 years. Reach her at [email protected].
