This month we share with you what the best business getters in the profession are doing, along with their advice on what you can do to advance your career by making rain – getting new business and serving your clients in valued ways.
To honor their achievement, and to celebrate the first anniversary of our online newsletter/magazine Originate!, we are opening up all the articles free to the public. We've published over 100 articles to date (see our Archives), but these case stories are among the most important for the examples they provide.
The Rainmaker of the Year Awards are a joint effort by Originate!, the premier online newsletter dedicated to helping attorneys build their personal practices, and Legal Sales and Services Organization (LSSO), the only organization exclusively focused on sales, service and quality issues in law firms and legal departments.
In selecting among competing entries, we aim to show you the strongest models of effective business development and marketing we can find. Also, we hope to recognize and celebrate those lawyers who’ve put extraordinary thought, initiative and effort into their business building programs.
The judges' job was tough because they had to pick one winner in each category, even though the other entrants were hardly less accomplished, demonstrating qualities the judges thought admirable and deserving of recognition. But the distinguished panel assembled by LSSO President Catherine MacDonough understood that, while effort was one thing, demonstrated results were a critical measure of the best. All of our winners worked hard and smart in their marketing; each showed significant well-defined results as well.
All the winners will receive the personalized award depicted above. In our estimation, however, these other entrants did not lose, for what the runners-up as well as the winners actually achieved is the real trophy. In the benefits they delivered for themselves and their firms, they all won, proving to be terrific role models for other attorneys.
Here then are the winners of the 2008 Rainmaker of the Year Awards:
Partner – Transactions: H. Patrick Callahan, Baker & Daniels LLP
Woman Lawyer: Lorelei Graham, Miller Thomson LLP
Partner – Litigator: Peter H. Klee, Luce, Forward, Hamilton & Scripps LLP
Small Firm Lawyer: Wilton G. McDonald II, Truman Bodden & Company
Associate: Peter J. Bilfield, Withers Bergman LLP.
Our award winners include more senior attorneys and young ones, with an international flavor (one Canadian and one lawyer from Cayman Islands, with the rest from the United States). They’ve demonstrated different approaches to business development, from marketing to a specific industry like high tech to broad, intensive relationship building. But they share many convictions as well:
- A fundamental commitment to the highest quality of service for their clients. For our award winners that means going beyond the basics to transform the service itself or the delivery in order to maximize the value they give to their clients. It seems to work, since they report extraordinary levels of referral from existing clients.
- A belief in basic principles and techniques in marketing. Their innovations come not from some hot new idea or insight on marketing itself, but applying the tried and true in creative, thoughtful – and most importantly strenuous ways – to the markets they aimed for.
- Team work. Whether it’s building an effective team for their services, or improving their firm by gathering disparate practitioners into working groups, or forming alliances inside and outside the firm – these winners know they can’t go it alone. They lead, not just do.
As you read their stories, you’ll likely find those commonalities and differences that appeal to you in the conduct of your practice building. Take what you can use, but don’t just think about it. Do what all of our winners have done…commit to the hard work to make it happen.
© 2008 PBDI/SAGE PDI. This article comes from the September 2008 Issue of ORIGINATE!, the online monthly newsletter (with ongoing support resources) dedicated to helping individual lawyers develop business successfully in order to build their careers. The contents of this anniversary issue are complimentary; otherwise articles are usually available to subscribers only. Find out more about subscribing at www.pbdi.org/originate.
