The Guaranteed Marketing Solution®

How to Make Friends And Generate Business

Ask an individual law firm partner to list the things they value in their fellow attorneys, and you’ll generally hear a few basic themes repeated. Legal skill, obviously. A pleasant demeanor. Willingness to pitch in as a teammate.

One topic will generally go undiscussed, which is odd given the central role it plays in a law firm: the size of their book. Law firms live and die on the books of business their partners generate. If there’s no work to be done, there’s no law firm. Attorneys with large, profitable books of business command the biggest salaries, the heaviest political clout, and the corner-iest offices. Talking about money may be gauche, but dollars generated per dollar spent remains the single most important statistic governing any private law firm lawyer.

Books of business don’t just happen overnight. Even the biggest rainmakers started out with nothing in their pockets but a Juris Doctorate and a dream. Scaling the mountain between first-year associate and business-generating dynamo has long been a process shrouded in mystery. Today, however, I’m ready to pull back the curtain. I’ve learned through years of hard work and observation the single most important thing you can do to develop your book. An attorney who pulls this off is practically guaranteed to find herself drowning in paying clients.

Alright, are you ready?

Drumroll please.

The guaranteed path to having a successful book of business is…be born rich.

How to Make Friends And Generate Business

Sponsored

While I’m obviously kidding around with that impossible piece of advice, there’s a kernel of truth in it. To get to it, though, it helps to step back and think about how business tends to be generated for most lawyers.

For all the advances our industry has seen in artificial intelligence and technology-based solutions, it remains intensely based on personal relationships. Clients generally remain more loyal to their attorneys than to their law firms. Very few of us generate most of our business from strangers who stumble upon us.

So how do you foster personal relationships with the kinds of people who generate paying legal work? The simplest way is just to be friends with them. Be the person they think of when they realize they have a problem that needs solving.

There’s a formulation of friendship someone once shared with me that I find illuminating. Friendship = Proximity + Frequency + Duration + Intensity. Some combination of these four features defines every friendship, and it’s by feeding and balancing these factors that we maintain our relationships.

The factors themselves are fairly self-explanatory. Proximity is simply a matter of being near someone. If you never spend time communicating, how can a friendship form? Frequency is how often you see one another, since you’re more likely to form a friendship with someone you see weekly than you are someone you only say hey to during Olympic Opening Ceremonies. Duration is spending time together in big chunks. Even if you spend time with someone every week, you’re more likely to befriend the person you spend three hours with than the store clerk you spend 30 seconds with. Intensity is how deep and meaningful the interactions you have are; one long night of soul-baring can bond people more than months of casual hellos.

Sponsored

Many adults report having difficulty making new friendships once they leave school for the real world. When you think about friendships through the lens above, it’s easy to see why. From pre-school to post-doc, schools force disparate people to be near each other (proximity), five days a week (frequency), for hours at a time (duration), going through the difficult process of acquiring knowledge (intensity). Education is tailor-made for generating long-lived friendships, whereas many people struggle to find similar opportunities to develop relationships once they’ve left school. In fact, it’s likely that the majority of the friends most of us have made since leaving school were through work, which has the similar effect of forcing people together for long periods of time. Without school or work to facilitate those interactions, making friends as an adult requires a big investment of time and effort, one that overworked attorneys rarely have the desire to make.

Networking For The 99.9%

Let’s return to the original problem we set out to address: how does one befriend the wealthy and well-connected people who typically make up Biglaw’s clientele?

Being born rich, going to elite schools, and playing lacrosse and field hockey with tomorrow’s corporate class is a great gig if you can get it, but not a game plan most of us can adopt. If we want to make friends with potential clients, we’re going to have to work at it. The only way to do it is to put in the time to be around the people you hope will generate that business down the line. It means getting out of your home, and your comfort zone, and finding reasons to spend time with new people.

How you go about that may be different for each person. For some, it means reaching out into the community and making a positive impact. By putting their face out there and making a name for themselves as a community servant they get face time with like-minded donors and corporate representatives who might spin off future work.

Others will find their marketing success in purely social avenues. I’ve known attorneys who have generated business by joining a more expensive gym. Some lawyers golf every weekend so they can see and be seen around the country club. Name a hobby, some lawyer has probably generated business off of it simply by hanging around long enough with fellow enthusiasts.

One attorney I know has had major success with their “three-a-day” rule. Every day, without fail, they make contact with three prospects, either people they want to bring on as clients or existing clients they want to develop more work from. It can be as simple as sending an email or text, or as involved as coffee, lunch, drinks, or setting up time to hang out. By consciously maintaining and cultivating their relationships, they grew a modest book of business into a multi-million dollar monster.

I would offer one important caveat: be sincere about any activity you decide to commit to. Doing something purely for the sake of networking rarely breeds success. People can smell an insincere opportunist. Be there first and foremost because you want to be there, whether it’s saving the whales, pumping iron, swinging clubs, or playing Dungeons & Dragons. You’ll enjoy it more, you’ll forge better relationships, and you’ll generate more business when you truly care about how you’re investing your time.

We can’t all be born rich, but we can all make friends, enjoy our free time, and build our networks organically.


James Goodnow

James Goodnow is an attorneycommentator, and Above the Law columnist. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and is the managing partner of NLJ 250 firm Fennemore Craig. He is the co-author of Motivating Millennials, which hit number one on Amazon in the business management new release category. You can connect with James on Twitter (@JamesGoodnow) or by emailing him at James@JamesGoodnow.com.