Notes From October 5th Presentation By Ed Poll of LawBiz on How to Grow Your Law Practice
Last Friday October 5th, Birol Growth Consulting sponsored Ed Poll of LawBiz who led an excellent workshop to an invited group of lawyers on practice development. Attendees were Managing and Senior Partners of a cross section of large, medium, and small Cleveland firms. Here are my notes amd observations from the presentation.
Please post your comments, reactions or questions at the bottom or contact Ed Poll atedpoll@lawbiz.com or Andy Birol at abirol@andybirol.com.
- There is a direct correlation between a law firm’s business proficiency (not their legal prowess) and a law firm’s profits.
- Lawyering is a true team sport. If your client participates in the process to achieve their outcomes they won’t criticize themselves or their lawyer. Show your client that you are on the same team in implementing their success.
- Most lawyers don’t bill for learning curves when starting to work with a client and lose 15% of revenues for not doing so. Lawyers also lose revenues through pre-bill write-offs (due in part to the learning curve problem lowering their realization rates. Lawyers finally lose more if they don’t collect at least 90% of what was billed.
- The reason lawyers lose so much in uncollected work is by not knowing enough about their client. Since the client assumes the lawyer is an authority figure there are only three reasons the client won’t pay:- They did not want the work
- They did not expect the bill
- Too much time was spent on the work
- Raise rates annually and gradually by selling first to yourself, then to prospects and finally to clients.
- Rainmakers are the most valued people in a firm, despite most lawyers preferring not to sell. You can always find a lawyer to do the work if you have sold the work!
- Remember 60% of prospects come from referrals. You start a client relationship with full trust and can only screw it up with insufficient service
- It is never the client’s fault that they don’t pay it is always your fault you did not do something right.
- Running a successful law firm means being proficient at getting business (marketing), doing the work (being productive) and thirdly getting paid (administration).
- While the bar association will never give continuing education credit for developing sales or marketing expertise, it will do so for repositioning the lawyer’s need to better communicate with the client which falls under the category of ethics so lawyers should seek out educational opportunities accordingly.
As the host of the event, I found it eye-opening to listen and learn how lawyers see their businesses operate from “their side of the table” and how similar yet different a law firm is from any other service business. While the legal vocabulary is quite different from that of other industries, I saw common ground in the challenges of balancing any firm’s need to sell, deliver and develop their businesses all at the same time as I have defined here. Whether you could attend or not or are a lawyer or not, what do you think?
