Lexpert magazine features articles and columns on developments in legal practice management, deals and lawsuits of interest in Canada, the law and business issues of interest to legal professionals and businesses that purchase legal services.
Issue link: https://digital.carswellmedia.com/i/933993
LEXPERT MAGAZINE | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018 69 | COLUMNS | MARKETING Donna Wannop, LLB, MBA, is a practice develop- ment coach (www.donnawannop.com) who has worked exclusively with the legal profession for 30 years. Reach her at donna@donnawannop.com. BY DONNA WANNOP ing skills and to becoming actively involved in business development, regardless of whether or not their firm requires it. It is never too early to begin to generate visibility and a profile through such activities as writing, speaking, teaching, and joining professional associations and organizations, or to work on developing relationship manage- ment skills and building networks. Junior lawyers can and should be supported in their business development efforts. It is the re- sponsibility of firm management, through its professional development de- partment or marketing department, to provide resources for developing basic mar- keting skills. at should include educating junior lawyers on the importance of busi- ness development and conducting train- ing programs to help them to acquire and refine their marketing skills. General group training programs are appropriate and ef- fective at this stage, and if group training programs are conducted by members of the firm, they will also prove to be a highly cost- effective form of training. In addition to these formal training programs, junior lawyers should also be en- couraged and supported in more informal ways by the firm's senior lawyers, who can act as marketing mentors and guides, and who can provide juniors with business de- velopment opportunities that the juniors simply couldn't access on their own. For ex- ample, senior partners can involve juniors in client relationship-building activities through having them attend client meet- ings and client entertainment events, they can include junior lawyers as team mem- bers in proposals and pitches, and they can create opportunities for juniors to give pre- sentations and publish materials. As a lawyer's career continues to ad- vance, he or she has likely started to develop marketing skills and, at the same time, his or her practice typically has become more focused and specialized. At this stage, a lawyer can identify and more narrowly de- fine his or her target markets, and he or she can develop and communicate more mean- ingful, relevant messages to those markets. Lawyers at this stage of practice can and should be much more deliberate and selec- tive when it comes to marketing, focusing on those initiatives and activities that will allow them to directly access individuals in their chosen target markets. For a senior lawyer, it is no longer necessary, nor is it prudent, to take advantage of every market- ing opportunity that comes along. Instead, senior lawyers should become increasingly discerning when deciding which opportu- nities and options to pursue. At this point in one's career, it's no longer a matter of do- ing more marketing, but rather of doing better and more productive marketing. In other words, it becomes a matter of setting marketing priorities. For more senior lawyers, their firms can best support them by providing resources that are more specific to the objectives, action plans and skill levels of the given lawyer. Senior lawyers should be encour- aged to develop their own individual busi- ness development plans that reflect exactly who they are and where they are going. ey should be provided with opportuni- ties to participate in forms of training that are more directly relevant to them: for ex- ample, one-on-one coaching. And impor- tantly, they should be given budgets ample enough to enable them to implement the activities that they have planned. A lawyer's approach to developing his or her practice should change and adapt over the course of a career THE WAY THAT a lawyer approaches business development should change over the course of her or his career, and in this month's column we examine some funda- mental differences in how junior and senior lawyers should approach marketing. e practices of most junior lawyers tend to be relatively general, and the mar- kets that they serve are broad and diffuse. During the early stages of a lawyer's career, when their practice is less specialized, many young lawyers devote all of their time and energy to the development of their techni- cal legal skills and to maximizing their bill- able hours. ey oen believe that business development only begins to matter later on, when the substantive skills have been mas- tered and their firms begin to exert pressure on them to actively generate work. Senior lawyers commonly share that same view and they oen counsel young associates to turn all of their attention to simply grind- ing through billable work. Although both junior and senior lawyers tend to dismiss or underplay the impor- tance of business development during the early stages of practice, juniors should nev- ertheless be diligent about devoting time and energy to building their basic market- Building Business over Time PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK