Monday, October 15th, 2007 Posted in Leadership | Permalink | Enter your password to view comments.
Saturday, September 1st, 2007
As a business coach working with lawyers one of the most common concerns that arises for my clients is the fear of coming across as insincere and in the words of some associates I know: “salesy” or “oily”.
They have a point.
When business development is badly done that is exactly how it can come across. We have all met sales people and other professionals who have made us feel like some commodity they are trying to get off the shelf.
David Maister has drawn the analogy between our relationships with clients and our relationships with our romantic partners. In those terms, asking for business right away is like asking someone to get into bed with you on the first date.
I have even heard some business coaches tell their clients to “just get over” their reluctance to ask for business. I don’t agree. That reluctance likely stems from your own deeply held values. It comes from wanting to do the right thing. The right thing is always to focus on building a trusting relationship first. The right time to ask for the business will present itself, or in many cases the client will ask you for help. By starting with a focus on the trusting relationship you will not risk coming across as insincere or salesy.
How do you start building trust?
Start with listening.
We naturally trust those people who genuinely listen to us and take the time to understand us.
In David Maister’s post on “Earning trust when there is too little time” he writes:
“The first point I’d make is to ensure that, in the limited few interactions you can afford the time for, you succeed as coming across as sympathetic and understanding. I don’t necessarily want a lot more of my doctor’s time when I see him or her, I just want to be treated a certain way when we are together.”
Listening is the key to coming across as sympathetic and understanding. As Stephen Covey points out in his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, use empathetic listening to first seek to understand, then be understood.
To get ready to do your best listening, prepare for meetings with potential clients by thinking about what challenges they might be facing. Develop a few truly thoughtful and open ended questions that you can ask them during the meeting. These are questions that will open up the conversation and help you learn more about their interests, background, work, company, and any challenges they are currently facing.
Engage your curiosity.
When the person responds, listen attentively, watch their body language, try to keep the analysis in your own head to a dull roar and instead really focus your attention on the other person. Let them know they have been heard by repeating back a little of what they have told you and then follow with another insightful question.
Insightful questions highlight your intelligence far more than a soliloquy on your experience ever could.
Posted in Business Development, Leadership | Permalink | No Comments »Sunday, August 19th, 2007
First the CBC aired its radio documentary this summer “Mother’s in Law” about the increasing exodus of women lawyers from private practice. Now in an address to lawyers at the 2007 Canadian Legal Conference held in Calgary last week none other than Supreme Court of Canada Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin has spoken out against the unhealthy legal business model in a panel presentation entitled “Supporting Women in the Law”.
The Globe and Mail on Wednesday August 15 offered the following quotes from Chief Justice McLachlin:
”The reality is that women entering the profession in droves have suddenly found themselves confronted with a very difficult, inflexible model of practice.”
“The strict, inflexible business model is increasingly questioned by men,” she said. “This is the question, I believe, for the future. How do we structure the way lawyers – women and men – work; the way they live, the way they serve the public?”
As a lawyer coach I see many of my clients grapple with these issues. The expectation in many big city law firms is that lawyers will work 70 to 80 hour weeks. The billable hour target for lawyers has steadily climbed, as have the demands that lawyers invest additional non-billable time in marketing and business development activities. Many male and female lawyers are no longer interested in sacrificing parenthood to their legal careers and are leaving private practice.
The lawyers I know aren’t afraid of hard work. They are not against putting in long hours. The issue is that the demands of the profession have become extreme. How will the legal profession respond to this central question raised by Chief Justice McLachlin: “How do we structure the way lawyers – women and men – work; the way they live, the way they serve the public?”
There is an opportunity here for the Canadian Bar Association to get involved by convening a task force. This is an issue that deserves to be discussed by Managing Partners and Executive Members of law firms and indeed lawyers of all year of call around the country. The legal profession will always be a hard working profession, but there are ways to adapt the business model such that it becomes more flexible, more supportive of lawyers who parent, and healthier for legal professionals in general. Law firm clients should also be involved. What are the expectations and needs of Corporate Counsel from their lawyers? The Corporate Counsel subsection could be invited to take part in these discussions.
As for making time for business development, there are many innovative ways to bring family life into the picture. Lawyers with young children can connect with other professionals and business people with children. Instead of going to a hockey game, arrange for tickets to the children’s festival. Or ask your client to bring his/her children to the game. Hold social events for parents and their children. Your clients with young children face similar time challenges. Since one of the primary goals of client entertaining is to build trust and deepen the relationship what could be better than to make the focus of these events the children who are such an important part of your clients’ lives? I know one firm that holds a large skating event for clients, lawyers and their children in December each year which is hugely successful and greatly enjoyed by all. But entertaining of this kind needn’t be so large scale, smaller scale events for key clients and contacts can be held throughout the year.
The answer to the very important issues raised by Chief Justice McLachlin and others isn’t to accept the status quo. It’s time to begin the discussion and truly explore the opportunity for revamping an old and outdated business model.
Posted in Leadership | Permalink | No Comments »Sunday, July 29th, 2007
I was speaking with my colleague Joan Paul in Calgary last week. Like me, she is a Royal Roads University trained business coach who works with lawyers. She and I like to share ideas, and collaborate on articles and projects. This week we were talking about the optimum investment of lawyers’ non-billable time in business development.
How much time do lawyers really need to invest each week in business development activities?
Joan quoted Sally Schmidt’s book “Business Development for Lawyers, Strategies for Getting and Keeping Clients”, which suggests that if you are new to the practice of law you should spend 50 to 100 hours a year or 1 to 2 hours a week. If you are a senior associate then you are advised to spend somewhere between 100 to 200 hours annually. And if you a partner rainmaker you are likely spending in the range of 250 to 500 hours a year.
Joan and I both find that the challenge for many professionals is about how then to invest this business development time for best results. Joan told me she always begins by asking her clients:
- What are the results you want to achieve and by when?
- Who is your target audience for best results?
- What is the best way to reach that audience?
- What are the skills you can capitalize on to reach out to that audience? Are you a great writer? Speaker? Networker?
- How do you hold yourself accountable for your business development activities?
- How do you market yourself inside your firm or organization?
- What’s stopping you from developing and implementing a business development plan?
These questions can serve as a guide to making the best choices. In addition I like to consider the lawyer’s network of relationships. How developed is it? For newly-called lawyers it is important to be building relationships, and raising their profile both within and without the law firm. For senior lawyers with a well established network the question is how are you keeping actively in touch with the people you know?
And always it is vital to start with current client relationships. Existing clients are the best source of new and repeat business. Communicating with clients about their level of satisfaction, their needs and concerns, is always the first place to invest.
Posted in Business Development, Leadership | Permalink | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 25th, 2007
Delegation is one of those soft skills that when mastered will have a major impact on your profitability, quality of work, and overall success as a lawyer. The hitch is that like so many of these essential skills, it’s not taught in law school, and is generally not on the CLE curriculum.
This week I met with Adam Pekarsky, Director of Professional Development and Recruitment at Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP (FMC). Pekarsky is great to speak to about soft skills like delegation. He is a former securities lawyer who discovered he had a passion for training and development. He gets excited about stuff like delegation, much like a senior litigator talking about his most recent court appearance. Pekarsky’s associate training program at FMC includes a seminar on the art of delegation. Over coffee he shared the highlights with me.
Delegation from 20,000 feet.
Pekarsky started by giving me the big picture: “It’s all about leverage”.
Law is a business. There are revenues and expenses. Partners are the biggest users of overhead. They have bigger offices, use more support staff, and more resources than associates. They also have much higher rates and can generate considerably more income. Pekarsky likened them to expensive race cars. If partners don’t delegate the lower level work then it’s like “driving a formula one race car around a Safeway parking lot”.
Delegating work to others is known as spin, as in “how much work did you spin down to the associates this year?”
Really successful partners keep the high quality work for themselves and spin the rest to others. They meet their billable targets as well as generating considerable spin. Pekarsky gave the example of a partner who bills a million dollars and no spin vs. a partner who bills 700,000 dollars and spins an addition million. It’s much better for a firm’s profitability (not to mention the lawyer’s lifestyle) to bill less and spin more. And Pekarsky added, the savvy compensation committees will reward partners accordingly.
What are the other rewards of spin?
Interesting work. A lawyer who spins down the work, keeps the most interesting, highly paid work for his/herself.
Making more money. The lawyer who spins doesn’t have to write down bills and gets paid at a higher rate.
Given the advantages, why wouldn’t a lawyer delegate?
One reason lawyers don’t delegate is they don’t have enough work. They might need to hold onto every piece of work in order to meet their billable targets. But when a partner is doing all the work, including the low level stuff, it means that he/she is going to have to reduce the fees. As a result their effective billing rate lowers and they have to work more hours to hit their target. They would be better off spinning work to juniors and investing some non-billable time on marketing and business development to bring more work in the door.
Another reason is that the lawyer may have picked up the bad habit as an associate watching other lawyers at the firm. Many firms have chronic hoarders, and they set a bad example.
When is it best for associates to begin delegating?
As an associate you are ready to spin work when you are at the level where you have some experience under your belt and there’s legal work that you have done twenty times and don’t really need to do again.
Pekarsky divided delegation into two types, healthy and unhealthy.
Heathly delegation is:
- Well intended. You want to pass on a piece of work to a junior who will have a chance to learn something new.
- Based on experience. You have done this type of work many times previously and no longer have anything to learn from it.
Unhealthy delegation is:
- Getting rid of a dog file. This is when you have a tough file that you are struggling with and instead of working through the issues you just pass it to someone else.
- I’ve never done it and don’t want to. You pass some work on that you have never done yourself.
To illustrate Pekarsky offered a quote from his drama instructor at Brentwood College:
“You can’t act on a stage unless you’ve swept it.”
Or in other words don’t delegate your dirty work to subordinates and hit the golf course. Don’t unload your dog files.
What can get in the way?
Here are some of the common objections to delegation:
“I can’t delegate because it takes too much time. It’s faster if I do it myself.”
That’s true, the first time. But the second, third, tenth, thirty-eighth times, it’s faster. And by delegating you will get to spend more time on interesting work at your top billable hour. If you don’t delegate you are going to get stuck in the trenches working even longer hours for a lousy effective rate.
Another common objection is:
“I don’t trust a junior to do the work as well as I can.”
Pekarsky’s response, “drop your ego.” Successful people surround themselves with talent. Your challenge is to help develop the juniors so that they do the work as well if not better than you do.
Closing thoughts¦
Delegation is one of the lawyer behaviors that need to be rewarded by compensation committees. For a law firm to be most profitable partners are required to spin work down to juniors. Savvy compensation committees look at the combination of billable hours and spin earnings when allocating partner income.
For associates, delegation is one skill to start practicing early. Share the work that has become routine with the juniors. Reach for work that is challenging.
Spin your way to more interesting work for better money. Get out of the parking lot and onto Route 66.
Posted in Compensation, Delegation, Leadership, Training and Retention | Permalink | 1 Comment »Wednesday, June 20th, 2007
For those of you who are interested in learning more about executive coaching or are thinking about working with a coach Fast Company’s blog site features a helpful introduction to coaching by Grace Andrews.
Andrews writes in her post Executive Coaching – Fuel or Folly?:
I believe that the answer to this question comes down to who is selected as the coach and how the selection process is structured. Just like most things you search for, like a good doctor, dentist, hair stylist or mechanic, it generally comes down to how well you know what you want and how good you are at researching who is the real deal versus who is a quack.
You have to be careful. I agree with Andrews that it is important to have a clear goal for what you want to get out of coaching and that you find a coach whose approach best suits you. She also provides a great list of questions for you to ask your potential coach, here are a few of them:
1. Tell me about your coaching process and philosophy? (Here, you are looking for a feel of what type of coach the person is and the length of the process, time commitment, and frequency of meetings. Also probe for some of the tools and resources the coach might use.)
2. Give me an example of a previous coaching experience that you would consider a success and what made it so?
3. How would you describe your coaching style?
4. How do you measure success?
In addition to the questions she recommends I would say look into the coach’s background. What education and training have they received? How much experience do they have? What references can they provide? Try out a couple of coaches. Many coaches will provide you with a short sample session. It’s a great way to find the coach that will work best with you. The key to achieving powerful results is in the relationship you form with the coach. It is essential to have a strong foundation of trust, respect, and communication. Don’t settle for less!
Posted in Leadership, coaching | Permalink | No Comments »
