- Give a damn about your clients. They will refer other clients to you.
2. Take your law school friends to lunch. They will be handing out work in a few years.
3. Hold your glass in your left hand when you are at a cocktail reception so your right hand won’t be clammy when you shake hands.
4. Ask potential clients about their business and their personal life. If you get them talking about themselves, they will think that you are a brilliant conversationalist.
5. Don’t try to impress people with your legal brilliance. They will assume competence. Try not to disprove it.
6. Figure out who has the clients that you want and hang out with them.
7. Under-promise and over-deliver. Remember that the best marketing that you can do is by making your own clients happy.
8. Give your clients recommendations as to which option they should take. That makes you useful. Just saying “it is a business decision” makes you a gutless wimp. Clients do not like gutless wimps.
9. If you do not already have one, get a sense of humour.
10. Be likeable. Think about what clients do not like about lawyers and be different than that.
11. Ask people what you can do for them, not what they can do for you.
12. Learn to give presentations without reading your material. Remember, the audience does not know what you were supposed to say.
13. When giving seminars, remember that unless you are speaking to lawyers, you are there to entertain and provide just enough information to give the impression that they should call you if they have a problem. Your job is not to be comprehensive, accurate and boring.
14. If you are giving seminars to lawyers, ask yourself why you are bothering, unless you think that there is a realistic opportunity to get referral work. If there isn’t, ask yourself if your ego really needs that type of validation and if you don’t have anything better to do. If you are truly motivated by the desire to give back to the profession, ignore what I just wrote.
15. Volunteering for a community association is a great thing to do, but it is not business promotion unless you have determined that the other volunteers are good referral sources or potential clients and you take the opportunity to get to know them outside of the volunteer work.