Monday, June 1st, 2009

There’s a lot of talk about goal setting in the new year but there is no better time for really thinking about strengths and goals then while relaxed and unplugged in the summer sunshine with the blue sky above.

This summer why not engage in some quality lawn chair thinking?  Sit back, enjoy some sunshine and with a cold drink in hand allow yourself to contemplate. Start by exploring your strengths.  What have you got going for you? How are you making the most of your strengths in your professional life? Here are some of my favourite strength questions:

• What do you consider to be your greatest abilities and talents?
• How are you employing these gifts at this time?  How could you make the most of them?
• Where do you find yourself most often wanting to help or be of assistance to others?  What are the things that you are most motivated to do?
• What would your closest friends say are your top ten strengths?
• How are you/could you put those strengths to work in your practice?

Next, move on to some goal setting.  What is it you want to make happen in your legal practice?  Do you want to grow your practice?  Bring in new clients?  Move your practice to another firm or in-house?  Here are some questions to lead you in your lawn chair pondering:

• What would count as a really big professional win for you?  This question is a way to explore some of what motivates you at the office.  One client once told me “having a patent client make a huge amount of money from their invention”.  Another client told me “winning the lottery and never having to come back here” which just said loud and clear that a career transition was called for!
• Looking forward five years what do you want to be doing?  This question gives you a chance to think beyond the next twelve months.
• Who are your preferred clients? It’s always good to explore who are the clients you most enjoy working with.  What is it about them?  How can you get more clients like them?
• What are the opportunities right now you are not taking advantage of?  This question is a helpful reminder about the opportunities around you.

And the best questions are quite simply:

• What do you enjoy most about your legal practice?  And the converse, what do you least enjoy? What percentage of your time at work is spent, on a weekly basis, doing what you most enjoy and conversely least enjoy?

These get to the heart of what lightens your life and what weighs you down.  Ultimately whether you are on a job hunt or in a secure position in a law firm, the question always comes down to: “how can you get more of the good stuff on your plate and the bad stuff off?”  When you move out of your comfortable summer seat and into action what can you do to make your work life more enjoyable?

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Thursday, October 25th, 2007

Building a successful legal practice takes time and effort.  You can make all the right moves, build the right relationships, and develop your expertise and profile but it may take a number of years for the results to appear.  This is a test of your patience and resolve.  Sometimes the best things are worth waiting for. 

I was just speaking to a lawyer friend I worked with a few years back. I asked him the usual “how are you doing?” and he replied with a great “happily ever after” success story.

He works in a particular niche area of litigation and because of the seeds he planted over several years he is now the recognized expert in the niche and getting the biggest and best files. He absolutely loves his legal practice.

Here’s what made it happen: 

We met when he was a senior associate who had just joined the firm as a lateral hire. He had a goal to build up his practice in a particular niche litigation area. He’d been junior counsel on a number of important cases and it was time for him to take the lead.

At that time there were not many files in the area. But the prospects for the future were good. We developed his personal marketing plan. The emphasis of the plan was on building relationships with referral sources and potential clients and raising his profile.

He invested a great deal of time and effort in developing and expanding his network of contacts. He used his lunch hours for meeting people and developing existing relationships. He wrote articles and presented at conferences.  Always with a focus on the niche area of law.

Then he took the initiative and pitched the idea of a book on the subject to a legal publisher who agreed.  Of course not everyone at the firm supported the project.  Some wondered if the time might be better spent on further relationship building.  It was a gamble. Nonetheless he persisted and the first edition was published, followed by a second edition the following year.

Still the files were not coming in.  Had all that effort been for nothing?

All this marketing and business development and still only a small trickle of files. What was crucial is that he did not give up. Nor did his firm.

He began speaking at the law school. Kept writing. Kept presenting. Kept relationship building. And he stayed the course.

The word spread and finally after four years the files began to flow in. My friend is now the lawyer “who wrote the book” on this area of law. He has a completely full plate of his favorite type of legal work and is having the time of his life.

It’s a real success story.

And the firm?  The firm supported his investments of non-billable time, partners gave him work to keep his plate full and he was made partner even before the tides had turned in his favor.

What did he do right? He knew what he wanted. He completely focused his marketing and business development efforts on the goal. He invested a lot of time and effort. He took the initiative and created opportunities for raising his profile. He was not dissuaded by the naysayers.

And he just didn’t give up.

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Tuesday, January 16th, 2007

In several of my blog posts since December I have been stressing the importance of strategic planning.  A lot of time, money, and effort gets wasted because lawyers and law firms engage in meaningless acts of marketing.  Strategic plans are the most important tool for ensuring you act wisely.  In order to help you to accomplish this, I have developed a rough guide to strategic planning, which I will share with you in blog posts over the next month.

The first chapter of my guide starts with Mission, Vision, and Values - three simple concepts that are easy to get mixed up. 

Your Mission Statement describes what your firm does and who your clients are.  It captures the very essence of your practice – the relationship with the client.  A Mission Statement is focused on what you do in the present.

A Vision Statement describes how the future will look if the firm achieves its mission. A Mission Statement gives the overall purpose of an organization, while a Vision Statement describes a picture of the preferred future result your firm is after.  Your Vision Statement will tell a compelling story about the future you are going to create. 

Once you have your Mission and Vision figured out, it is important to take some time to think about values.  Values are the core beliefs at the heart of your firm’s culture, and are the foundation of all the actions you will take, and investments you will make. 

Here is a list of questions to guide you through the process of determining your firm’s Mission, Vision, and Values.  You can also use these questions for developing your own personal plan.

Mission questions:

What do we do?
Who do we do it for?
What is the benefit to the clients?

Vision questions:

What do we ultimately want to achieve with our practice – in terms of service to others?
What do we want the firm to be known for? 
What reputation do we wish the firm to have in the business, legal, or other communities?

Value questions:

What professional and personal attributes do we value most?
What professional and personal qualities do we wish to be known for in the legal community and by our clients?
What qualities and attributes do we wish to characterize our firm?

The answers to these questions form the foundation of your plan.  The next step is strategy.  Stay tuned for that next week!

If you have your own questions and ideas on this topic, I would really enjoy hearing from you.  I am always interested in learning powerful new questions for exploring Missing, Vision, and Values.   If you have some you’d like to share, or other suggestions, please add them in a comment below or send me an email. 

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