Legal Research

"Are You Building Relationships or 'Mining' for Business?"

This post was written by Allison Shields: "A lawyer recently sought advice from a group of peers on a list-serve about marketing his practice and mining his current and former clients for business. While there is nothing wrong with the concept of trying to build your practice through referrals from current and former clients (in fact, I encourage it), lawyers need to be careful about the way they approach these business development efforts.

There has been an increasing shift towards viewing a law practice as a business with economic realities that must be faced and one of the biggest economic realities for any law practice (and indeed, any business) is that without clients, the practice does not exist. The most important person in any law practice is the client. But, as Duncan Manley, a lawyer whom I like and respect, recently wrote in the Primerus Paradigm magazine (I've written about the Primerus organization before, here and here) for law firms especially, marketing is all about building relationships.

In order to gain the confidence of your existing clients, to develop a loyal client base who will refer business to you over time, Manley reminds us that the clients needs to "know that you are a good lawyer,...have confidence in your ability,...trust you and know that you are genuinely concerned about them and their company." But this knowledge and trust, almost by definition, must be built over time. It is never built by focusing primarily on yourself, your firm, your knowledge, expertise, legal skill, etc...

You need to be careful about making clients, former clients and strategic alliances feel that you're completely in this for you, or that you're browbeating them or making them feel guilty about not referring you to others. If people feel even the smallest bit turned off, if they feel that someone is attempting to control them, use them for their connections or make them feel guilty, there's going to be a backlash - even, and maybe especially if they do refer someone else to you in the short run..."

Read some "Dos & Don'ts," get the full text and active links by clicking on the author's name.

Source: Legal Ease Blog, 10 June 2010, reproduced with permission of the author.

Full post as published by Stark County Law Library Blawg on June 14, 2010 (boomark / email).