Part 4: Five Easy Ways to Help Your Network

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Giving and helping are everything. The ideal way to build and deepen your rapport with your clients, prospects, colleagues, referral sources and other important contacts is to learn as much as you can about each person and identify what he or she needs to be successful and fulfilled. Once you’ve done that, things get very simple. You just need to help meet those needs. Here are five more simple ways to do that — drawn from my own practice and that of my partners and clients. Part 5 still to come.

Be a Twitter Scout and Make Some Rain: How to Use Priceless News & Opinion to Build Your Practice

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I am amazed at the number of smart, savvy, competent and competitive friends, colleagues and former partners who have ignored the prodigious power of social media….Ultimately, it is bad business to reject efficient new technologies. As an example, Twitter offers you the chance to “curate” as-it-happens news, and the resulting observations of the smartest commentators, on behalf of your professional network. Be their favorite scout. Watch for ways to help, and ways to protect. At a minimum you’ll learn to speak the language of their careers, a critical step in developing any business relationship and in winning the confidence of a potential client or referral source. Knowledge is power. And the confidence of knowledge makes navigating tough situations and managing impossible people vastly easier.

Part 3: 5 Easy Ways to Help Your Network…and Grow your Law Practice

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Giving and helping are everything. The ideal way to build and deepen your rapport with your clients, prospects, colleagues, referral sources and other important contacts is to learn as much as you can about each person and identify what he or she needs to be successful and fulfilled. Once you’ve done that, things get very simple. You just need to help meet those needs. Here are five more simple ways to do that — drawn from my own practice and that of my partners and clients. Parts 4 and 5 still to come.

Part 2: 5 Easy Ways to Help Your Network…and Grow your Law Practice

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Giving and helping are everything. The ideal way to build and deepen your rapport with your clients, prospects, colleagues, referral sources and other important contacts is to learn as much as you can about each person and identify what he or she needs to be successful and fulfilled. Once you’ve done that, things get very simple. You just need to help meet those needs. Here are five more simple ways to do that–drawn from my own practice and that of my partners and clients.

Lawyers: It’s Official… “The Time for LinkedIn Has Come. Really.”

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BTI Consulting’s recent report on LinkedIn usage offers even more persuasive statistical support for advice that I and so many of my colleagues have offered for years: If you wish to access your clients, including the high percentage of general counsel actively using LinkedIn to find new ideas and new counsel, you must be present–and engaged–on this crucial professional platform.

Because It’s 2015: BU Law Adds Business Fundamentals to its Core Curriculum

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There is no getting around it: Until business fundamentals are taught in the core curriculum, even the elite law schools will continue to come up short. Only one top school, Boston University Law School, has taken the necessary leap. In so doing, BU has established an appreciable lead over competing institutions in offering meaningful business and financial training— preparing its students for a job market where employers and clients alike want much more from them than legal analysis and hard work.

Do it Yourself Business School for Lawyers: Bring in the MOOCs!

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If I had the time and capital to invest, I’d partner with Coursera or ApprenNet (Law Meets) and Wharton and build a “personalized” MOOC business training curriculum with wrap-around guides for three or four BigLaw practice groups. I’d hire the best and brightest JDs and KM professionals to write tailored content applying the B-school material to the real world of law practice. Then I’d license this product to premier law firms for a fraction of the cost of a business bootcamp. My client firms would, ideally, assign partner instructors to coach their associates through the curriculum–connecting the dots along the way. Just a thought.

What Do Blogging and Vegas Have in Common?? ….Building a Niche Law Practice in the Digital Age

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It’s not as easy as it was for me–but much remains the same: Industry and skills specialization is still the fastest and smartest route to practice growth. Client contact, on the client’s turf, is still critical. Developing a reputation within your target industry or practice area still requires vastly more than a thorough understanding of the laws and regulations that affect it.

Managing for the Long Term? Invest in Your Associates

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Law firms must accept responsibility for the ways in which they have failed their associates, both young and seasoned, and their young partners, setting them up to be set adrift when, inevitably, client demand for high priced legal services began to fall off. As “Legal Rebel” Ed Reeser suggests, in so many words, in a terrific ABA Journal article I read just this morning, law firms need to get back into the “people business”.