By Larry Bodine, Esq.

Larry Bodine is a business development advisor based in Glen Ellyn, IL.  He has helped law firms nationwide earn millions of dollars using strategy, business development training and individual attorney coaching. He can be reached at 630.942.0977 and www.larrybodine.com.

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You can join the lawyers who reap more revenue than they did in 2008, regardless of the recession.  We’ve all read the headlines about the decline in corporate legal spending, the trend of companies taking work in-house and the layoffs at AmLaw 200 law firms.

Smart lawyers will disregard this as background noise and realize that in every market, someone will land a great client and earn a nice fee.  If you make these resolutions, that lawyer will be you.

1. Calculate how much you earned in 2008 and add 25%.  You need to have a goal or you’ll never make any progress. “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will not themselves be realized," said famed Chicago architect Daniel Burnham. Therefore don’t settle for holding your own or making only 10% more – and certainly don’t accept for a pay cut.  Think big.  Believe it and you’ll achieve it.

2. Identify your areas of practice and activities that yielded the highest revenue.  Focus on these services like a laser.  Make it your strategy to seek out clients who provide these high-yielding assignments, and steer away from work that takes your eye off these clients. Turn down the little transactions and claims that ate up too much time last year and generated minimal revenue.  "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," said poet and philosopher George Santayana.

3. Make it a point to visit or meet high-fee clients face-to-face.  Clients give work to lawyers they know and like.  You can’t develop a good business relationship with a client whom you see only occasionally.  You must get up out of your office and go see them; you won’t generate any new business eating lunch at your desk.  When you meet these high-fee clients, inquire about what plans and changes the company has in mind for 2009.  Lawyers thrive on change, and there will be a lot of it in the coming year.  Study your clients in advance and determine if they have more work you could be doing.  Inquire if the client is sending work to other lawyers that otherwise could go to you or lawyers in your firm. Your goal is to get as close to 100% of the client’s legal spending as possible.

4. Learn the business trends that will affect your clients and offer them ways to make more money.  “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care,” said President Abraham Lincoln. Clients expect lawyers to bring them new ideas. They want lawyers who know their business and are familiar with their industry.  Clients want to hear how you can:

• Help them make more money.
• Help them keep more money.
• Help them save time.
• Help them cut costs.
• Help them reduce risk.

This means you’ll have to subscribe to the trade magazines clients get, read the local business magazine and the Wall Street Journal, set up Google Alerts to bring you news about your clients and their industry, and follow bloggers and e-newsletters that cover business issues that affect your clients. 

5. Be the lawyer who informs clients what they need to know.  To get more business, you need to be “the answer man” or “the answer woman” that people turn to when they’ve got big plans or big problems. When you meet with your clients, always bring along some news they can use.  If they’re far away, call them up and tell them.  Start writing alerts to send them by e-mail and start writing a blog that clients can follow. You have to notify clients that you have the answers.  Take calls from the press to comment on public issues, seek speaking engagements at trade associations where you can talk about a hot topic, and present seminars on new legal developments that affect a client’s bottom line.  If lawyers and GCs will be in the audience, find a way to give them CLE credit for attending.

6. Plan the conferences you’ll attend in 2009.  Pull out last year’s calendar and scrutinize all the conventions you attended – with an eye for business development.  Did the state bar association meeting generate any referrals? If not, don’t repeat that mistake.  Did you go to a trade association meeting and fail to plan breakfast, lunch and dinner meetings with sources of new business?  Again, don’t repeat that mistake.  Your overarching goal must be to get high-fee assignments from target clients.  Cross off all the time-wasters from your 2009 calendar and focus only on the conferences that produced work.

7. Litigation will lead the legal profession out of the recession.  Be sure to ride this wave.  In 2009, the high-growth, premium fee practice will be litigation – especially IP, class action and bet-the-company cases, according to new research by The BTI Consulting Group. “Litigation is the largest market opportunity,” said BTI President Michael Rynowecer.  “The suits and actions that were not bet-the-company last year now ARE bet-the-company cases.  Companies are viewing risks more deeply.  There is also growing concern about new class actions against high-tech companies. Overall the top concern of GCs is to resolve cases, so if you are a litigator, the clients that used to settle or litigate at all costs are now spending more to reduce risks.”

He gave three examples of bet-the-company cases:

• Any litigation that will affect the core brand or a “mega-brand” in which companies have a lot of equity in the brand name of a product.
• Any litigation that might affect the stock prices, like an SEC investigation.
• Antitrust and IP cases – because they question core business model of corporations.

There will also be more regulatory work for clients in the financial services, energy, pharmaceutical and healthcare industries.

8. Exploit weaknesses in relationships that other lawyers have.  Lawyers in smaller and mid-size firms are successfully luring away prize clients of large law firms. Every business client already has a law firm, and during the recession, one successful way to prosper is to take advantage of weaknesses in the relationships that competing law firms have with their clients. “In 2008 small and midsize firms increased their presence on corporate ‘short lists’ from 24.5% up to 38.2%. This is a staggering change!” Rynowecer said. “For a GC to bring one firm in is really quite easy; there is no shortage of law firms marketing to them or venues to meet law firms. But the big change is in the GC’s mindset: the corporate counsel we surveyed said, ‘I will open my pocket book to hiring small and mid-sized firm.’”

• Read the news and seek a company that lost a case or failed to close a deal – they will be very unhappy clients who will be looking for a new law firm.
• Target clients that have been with another firm for less than one year.  This is a time when the relationship with a new client is most tenuous.
• Target clients where the lawyer or the client is about to retire.  Target the clients of law firms where the profits per partner are going down and firms with partner defections. Chances are good that there are service issues as well, because lawyers at a firm in turmoil will forget to call back clients or spend enough time visiting clients. For further discussion of this approach, read “Premeditated Business Development” from the December issue of Originate!

9. Make sure that your clients recommend you.  Referrals are an excellent source of new business, and nothing beats one from a person whom you’ve worked for.  Corporate counsel will call their peer GCs to find out what law firms they like; these recommendations are 2.5x more influential than any other activity that gets the firm chosen, according to BTI research.

How to get recommended:

• Demonstrate exceptional client focus: Try to understand client needs and help clients work through their issues.  Look at how the GC at your target clients are spending their money, and look for ways that they can reduce costs (like consolidating all their work with you).
• Give individualized checklists to clients: For example, ten things a client should ask before moving into a new region, CLE training for staff or training your client on how to mitigate risks.
• Thought leadership: Provide clients with information not otherwise available on the defining issues of the day.  Take a position or provides new information that’s helpful.
• Stay top of mind: Remember to let clients know you’re interested in active referrals. Emphasize areas of practice most likely to arise in their contact with others.

10. Cancel your *&$%x Yellow Pages Ad.  When you invest in Yellow Pages ads, you’re setting fire to money.  Yellow pages attract low-fee cases and are appropriate only for immigration, slip-and-fall and workers comp practices – if at all.  They also attract bottom-feeding clients who don’t know a lawyer, and don’t know anyone else who knows a lawyer, so they must resort to the Yellow Pages.  More consumer clients today use Google to find a local lawyer.  Businesses do not use the YP to find lawyers.  See “Cancel That #*$%! Expensive Yellow Pages Ad” for further discussion.