YOUNG LAWYERS NETWORK Get Known As a young lawyer, the early part of your career is spent learning your craft. You master the fundamentals of your practice area, and through repetition of tasks, you develop skills. For those lawyers practicing at law firms, you become aware that lawyers fall into two camps—those that bring business to the law firm, and those that do not. As an associate, especially at the junior level, most law firms do not expect you to generate business. Instead, an associate’s function at most law firms is to grind at the lower-skill level of tasks that you must master in your practice area before you are given the responsibility to handle more sophisticated work. If you work at a firm that bills by the hour, your value largely turns on your ability to bill hours. And while attaining your firm’s billable hour targets yields its rewards, even that does not make you indispensable. What makes you indispensable is having your own book of business with enough work to “feed” you and others at your firm. This article is about one of the most important things you can do to build your book of business—getting known. People Have to Know Who You Are There is a statistic that 80 percent of small businesses fail within the first 18 months because no one is aware the business exists. The problem is obscurity, and it applies to lawyers, too. If people do not know you and what type of law you practice, they cannot Young Lawyers Network Editor: Josh Crowfoot, Crowfoot Law Firm, 200 W. M.L.K. Boulevard, Suite 1000, Chattanooga, TN 37402, josh@crowfootlaw.com.
retain you as their attorney. As Grant Cardone, one of the greatest thought leaders in sales and marketing, likes to say, “If people don’t know you, they won’t flow you.” The ideas in this article to get known come from a new audiobook, The 10X Mentor: Take Charge of Your Business, Your Career, and Your Life by Grant Cardone, exclusively available on Audible. I have tailored it to a lawyer audience.
If people don’t know you, they cannot support you. To build a thriving practice, you must stretch your reach beyond your existing network of family and friends.
How to Meet People Who Don’t Know You Yet Become active in your local community. There are myriad ways to do that including, but not limited to, (i) attending neighborhood events, (ii) attending your children’s school events, Commit to Getting Known (iii) participating in local politics, (iv) According to Cardone, the effort to participating in events for a charibecome known must be constant and relentless. The ultimate goal is to be the table organization, and (v) attending industry conferences put on by trade expert in your practice area, not just a organizations in your practice area. participant. A successful outcome will You can also write articles for industry be that your ideal client recognizes publications, local newspapers, or magboth your face and your voice because azines to showcase your knowledge and you have taken steps in your marketing expertise. Find opportunities to collabto make that a reality. The more your orate with players in your community. target client recognizes you, the more This can come in the form of supportbusiness you will have. ing their businesses or participating as a guest on a podcast. The biggest lesDevelop Your Existing Network son here is that you need to leave your Like every lawyer, you have an existing office and promote yourself in the marnetwork of people who know you. This ketplace. Make sure people see you, hear network includes family, friends, colleagues, people you went to college with, about you, and read about you. Let your community know what you can people you went to high school with, do for it. And then do it relentlessly. and people in your neighborhood. But do they all know exactly what you do as How to Accelerate Meeting a lawyer? Be sure to let them know and People You Don’t Know to remind them. Client referrals from Your most valuable asset as a lawyer your existing network are your “lowest is your accumulated knowledge and hanging fruit.” ability to provide legal counsel in a chosen area of law. The best way to marReach Out to People You ket your legal services is to share that Don’t Know knowledge for free. At first blush that The most limiting factor to buildsounds counterintuitive because cliing your book of business (and your ents should be paying us for our time income) is who knows you. The ultiand expertise. The point, however, is mate size of your book of business to share your knowledge with as many in the practice of law directly correpeople as you can, so people get to lates with how many people know you.
Published in Probate & Property, Volume 36, No 6 © 2022 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American Bar Association.
6
November/December 2022
