Associate Advice, Biglaw, pls hndle thx

Pls Hndle Thx: Building Your Book of Business

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Ed. note: Have a question for next week? Send it in to advice@abovethelaw.com.

Dear ATL,

In my review, I was told that a sixth year, I need to start working on business development and bringing in clients to the firm. Given that my last name isn’t Vanderbilt or Trump, I’m not sure how to go about doing this. Any suggestions?

— LinkedOut

Dear LinkedOut,

I am freaking exhausted this week. I went to a 30th birthday party on Monday and got hit on by a guy wearing a shell necklace from Hollister. I got food poisoning on Tuesday and Wednesday night I stayed out drinking Pimm’s Cups which are humiliating to order but refreshing to drink and then I rolled up to my apartment drunk as a skunk at 1:30 a.m. and found my dog cowering in the corner texting Child Protective Services….

Yesterday, I was so worn out I had no choice but to listen to the Wings channel on Pandora for eight hours and eat cookies while reading “unbiased” reviews of P90X. And now I sit at my one inch netbook because my real laptop died (it was 3 years old — don’t worry, I plan to sue), starving but too lazy to go get cash to pay a delivery man, annoyed because I haven’t been able to watch Bachelor Pad yet which is burning up my DVR and which no fewer than TWO co-workers said was the best show to air in the new millennium, and now forced to write “hilarious” ways in which YOU can bring in business so that the commenters can ignore all my hard comedic work and talk about Obama, Bonobos and other unrelated boring things.

Ugh. Here’s my advice to generate business: go to cigar “saloons” and steak restaurants and chortle and drink wine and order “nice cuts” and pass out your business cards to people. Get a share in the Hamptons and befriend some finance d-bags. Have your mom pimp you out to her friends from book club. Stand in the legal section at Barnes & Noble and look eager. Stockpile “recommendations” from friends on LinkedIn and hope people start using LinkedIn. Furiously update your Avvo profile (HAHAHA OMG – jk).

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And if these ideas all seem lame to you, just tell the partner that if you had a single entrepreneurial bone in your body, you wouldn’t have spent your life rotting away in a dingy law firm, you would have done something cool like start a smoothie business or go into finance and make ten bags of gold, but you don’t so you went to law school. He can hardly argue with that.

Your friend,

Marin

Since Real Elie is on vacation this week, we now welcome back the fourth ATL staff member, Ghost of Elie, to weigh in on the matter:

You know what saddens me? Caveman didn’t have the option of being bad at business development. He hunted. He hunted or people died. Now, instead of doing something productive like clobbering wooly mammoths into submission, we’ve devolved into a pack of perfumed pansies that sit at computers all day typing angry letters and threatening to beat each other down in court where the only bloodshed is a paper cut. Caveman could cry at this pathetic state of affairs, but functional tear ducts on men is a twentieth century development.

You firm didn’t give you a stack of fancy business cards because they wanted to clear the rainforests in Borneo. They expect you to take them and *use* them to network. As someone who makes a living from self-promotion (you have to if you’re gonna make it as a writer), networking is the single most useful thing that you can do with your time. It’s more important than your work, because if you spend enough time convincing people you are great, people believe it even if you turn in rambling piles of crap and call it a ‘brief.” Clients can get legal work done by any faceless cog; there’s no reason for them to patronize lawyers unless you give them one by brute force of personality. If you don’t have a personality, I hear B-school is good for that.

Them’s the breaks,
— Man with a Personality

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Ed. note: Have a question for next week? Send it in to advice@abovethelaw.com.

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