RJon Robins

Philosophy of law firm marketing.

August 9, 2006 by RJon Robins

One of the most common excuses I hear from attorneys about why they don’t do more to market their services is that they think it’s somehow “unprofessional”. I’m so tired of hearing that weak & worn-out excuse. And it’s just that, an excuse! The fact of the matter is that when done right, Rainmaking is the highest example of professionalism, and meets or even exceeds all Bar Rules I know of or could even imagine (even in New York!).

The philosophy of marketing a law firm that the most successful Rainmakers have, and that you can have too, is that selling legal services is really nothing more than identifying people’s problems and helping them to find solutions. The very best Rainmakers don’t even miss a beat when the problem they’ve helped a prospective client to identify happens to not involve the services of their own law firm. After all, it never hurts to cultivate a Referral Source by including their services in your solution for a problem.

Be A Problem Solver
One of the best Rainmakers I know, a man who has sold literally hundreds of millions of dollars worth of legal services in his career calls this philosophy for selling legal services “Problem Solving Selling”. He even carries around a baseball glove to remind himself that “. . . when I’m sitting with a prospective client, my job is to focus on what they are saying so that I can catch the problems that person is struggling with, and help them find relief.” What could possibly be more professional and ethical than helping people with important problems, to find solutions to those problems?

Advertising, networking events, authoring articles, and conducting seminars are all tools that have a time & place. And when used the right way, these tools can be used to get you the chance to be in front of a prospective client. But you can only Make It Rain when you connect with a person who has a problem, and demonstrate how you can help them to make it better.

Should lawyers accept credit cards?

August 8, 2006 by RJon Robins

Every week I speak with attorneys who have trouble reconciling the conflicts in the relationships they have with clients: Creditor and Advocate. They call me on the telephone and they invite me into their offices for on-site consultations. They tell me of their troubles and ask me for help. I am a Practice Management Advisor with How To Make It Rain.com and these are my stories:

I visited “John” in his Orlando, Florida office. He called me to ask for help. He was working harder than ever but never seemed to take home enough money. He thought his expenses were too high. John was even considering letting a secretary go whom he was sure, was taking office supplies home for her kids. (Office supplies typically represent less than 1% of a law firm’s annual budget.)

ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE: Clients pay us to solve their problems, we are not supposed to pay for them!

Once John understood the importance of screening Prospective New Clients in a systematic and professional manner to weed out the potentially bad ones, he was ready to think about business. The first thing we had to address was the ridiculous level of old & dusty accounts receivable that were indirectly costing him money each month.

One of the reasons for John’s unhappy condition were his conflicting feelings. These feelings were never discussed in his professional responsibility course during law school. Instead, John learned the hard way how really difficult it is to serve someone as both their creditor and their advocate. These two roles have inherent conflicts.

John eventually decided to require all of his clients to make a lump-sum deposit to his trust account to cover the entire cost of his services, up-front. He discovered that more clients than he had expected, actually had the money to do this & for the others he now offers them the option to pay by credit card. Now John can fight like crazy to advance his clients’ interests and protect their rights and he let’s Visa or Master Card worry about being their creditor.

Not only does this arrangement remove the inherent conflict, allow John to do a better job for his clients and eliminate costly accounts receivable problems, it even makes the client’s life a little easier.

Attorney Tracy Griffin, President of Attorney Card Services (727) 341-2323 (ACSINC@DIGITAL.NET) observes: “Contrary to what many attorneys think, clients who have not paid their bill do feel uncomfortable communicating with their attorney/creditor. It’s no fun for either the attorney or the client to talk about a case or matter when they both know about, and are trying to politely avoid the subject of past due bills.”

Accepting Credit Cards Will Make Your Firm More Profitable

When John decided to get serious about wanting to be a more profitable, ethical and professional lawyer he made the decision to focus first on properly managing his law firm. John realized that despite what he had been hearing and repeating to others for years, it really is possible to budget a case or matter ahead of time with an adequate degree of accuracy in all but the most complex contentious cases. Better yet, John realized that if he over-budgeted he could always impress the client when he returned some of their unused money.

Case-budgetiung puts John much further ahead of the game than when he used to ask for retainer deposits at random. Best of all though, by investing the time to budget a case in the beginning, John now finds that he is able to be more pro-active in case or matter management and he has virtually eliminated the worst part of being a lawyer: Collections.

In the beginning it was a little scary for him, but today, John recognizes that requiring clients to make a large lump-sum deposit into his trust account to cover all anticipated fees and costs has the effect of dramatically increasing firm income for three main reasons:

There is less tendency to write-down the bill when you already have the money sitting in your trust account.
There is less tendency for the client to negotiate down the bill after it’s already been paid.
Collections are far more timely, i.e. reduced (or eliminated) accounts receivable. This improves firm cash flow and actually reduces firm overhead.

Think about it: You have your own credit card bills, car loan, line of credit or home mortgage all of which are charging you every day for the use of their money. If your client owes you $1,000 for three months, you are in effect borrowing money from your own highest interest rate creditor in order to be able to afford to loan that money to your client at no interest!

In the past, John would do the work and send a bill to the client at the conclusion of the representation. After three months, he would often end up writing the bill down 10% from $7,500 to only $6,750 just to get some money flowing in. After three months, the $6,750 really ended up benefiting John the equivalent of only $6,402 after the discount and interest expense. $7,500 vs. $6,402 = $1,098 or 15% reduced revenue. If John let this happen in only half of his cases each year and he regularly collected 1,500 hours per year, John could have taken a entire month off of work and still had the same income had he simply gained control of his A/R.

New Business Leads Only $0.25

August 8, 2006 by RJon Robins

Hardly a day goes by that I don’t find great leads for a half-dozen different practice areas in my local newspaper. In fact, before I cut-back on my private consulting work to focus on expanding the membership portion of the How To Make It Rain.com website so we can open it to new members soon, I used to earn quite a bit of money feeding leads I’d find in the papers to my Rainmaking clients.

If you’re not getting new business for your law firm from yoru local paper, what’s stopping you? Post your comment & we’ll see if we can help you out.

REWARD RAINMAKING ACTIVITIES, NOT BUSY WORK

August 7, 2006 by RJon Robins

REWARD RAINMAKING ACTIVITIES, NOT BUSY WORK

I’ve only met a few lawyers whose law schools offered even a single course on Rainmaking or the business of managing a law firm. So I don’t blame either the would-be rainmakers, or firm management who cannot distinguish between nonsensical busy-work that looks like Rainmaking, and the truly effective and productive activities that put hundreds of thousands of extra dollars in Rainmakers’ pockets each year.

Much of the distinction has to do with how a given activity fits into the overall system. But without a plan (and the right set of skills) most of what passes for rainmaking ends up just being a waste of time & a poor excuse to get out of the office

Four of the biggest & most frequent time wasters are:

Writing articles. Unless you can say exactly what you’re going to do with the article once it’s been written & published, it’s probably going to be a waste of your time. Go play with your kids instead!;

Networking events – especially bar functions. Most would-be rainmakers use these events as an excuse to get out of the office to socialize. And they compound the problem by wasting time talking to people they already know. My Rainmaking clients & I attend networking events to work. That’s not to say networking and meeting prospective new clients and referral sources can’t be fun. When you learn how to network effectively, it can be profitable and fun. But not nearly as much fun as being out on the boat with my friends so I attend networking events to work; and

Schmoozing with ad reps looking to pick your pockets. This is not only a waste of time, but also a big waste of money if you don’t know what kinds of ads to run and if you don’t know ahead of time how the ad is going to fit into your overall marketing plans – some ads are educational, some are for positioning, while still others are strictly a call to action. Don’t waste your time or money until you understand the difference and how to use each one in your marketing plans; and finally…

The BIGGEST waste of time is taking prospective clients and referral sources out to lunch. If you want to know why, post a comment with your question or better-yet download the FREE e-book entitled “Ten Rainmaking Mistakes Made By Solo Practitioners.” Even if you’re not a solo, I suspect you’ll still find it a valuable use of the 15 minutes it will take to read the whole thing.

Motivating Yourself To Get Out There & Make It Rain

July 7, 2006 by RJon Robins

Recently there’s been a lot of blog traffic on the subject of how to motivate oneself and our associates to go out and make it rain for our law firms. It seems the blogosphere has figured-out what the most successful Rainmakers already know: Rainmaking is not a passive activity. There is a BIG difference between waiting around for it to rain, and implementing a system, a set of skills and a plan to Make It Rain.

Doing good work and waiting for appreciative clients to refer more business to you is a nerve-wracking way to go through life – been there/ done that so don’t feel bad if you’re still learning how to avoid it too.

One of the most effective ways to institutionalize Rainmaking activities in a law firm (large or small) is to pose the question “So, how can I/we do better next time?” after EVERY sales call. Of course, this assumes there is no such thing as a perfect sales call. . .because there isn’t! If answered objectively and with sincerity, this question always leads to improvement.

Get into the habit with your partners, associates, or just you and some friends from other firms with whom you can engage in some two-way peer coaching, of talking critically but constructively about your respective Rainmaking experiences, with the goal of self-improvement – not competition.

And if you can’t find anyone with whom you are comfortable, feel free to send-in an e-mail briefly detailing your experiences & I’ll post it as a new discussion so you get the benefit of multiple interpretations, opinions, ideas & suggestions from attorneys in other markets who are not competing with you.

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