I was on the other side — the law firm side — of the business development coin for 25 years. And those 25 years taught me this about generating business: Raise your profile; stay in touch with people; and get lucky.
I was never once retained by dint of good looks or charm. (Anyone who’s seen or met me won’t find this to be surprising.)
And I don’t play golf.
So what’s a lawyer to do? What business development efforts worked for me, and what might work for you?
We’ve repeatedly discussed the importance to lawyers of networking. It matters whether you’re at a small firm or at a large one. It’s a necessary skill, in terms of getting the best assignments, making partner, and remaining a partner — no longer a guaranteed outcome, in these challenging times.
But networking also raises some ethical issues. When does it cross the line in to unethical solicitation? What are the limits on entertaining clients? How can you ethically handle referral fees?
This week’s Continuing Legal Education offering, handpicked by your ATL editors from the extensive CLE catalog of our friends at ALI-ABA, is all about how to network effectively and ethically. It offers those elusive ethics credits (required in many MCLE states), it’s reasonably priced, and it’s a telephone seminar — so you can participate from the comfort of your own office or home.
Check it out, and sign up, via the link below. Happy networking!
As we mentioned last week, Above the Law, in cooperation with our friends at ALI-ABA, will be assisting you with your Continuing Legal Education needs. We regularly review the comprehensive CLE offerings of ALI-ABA and pick out selected courses that look particularly interesting to us. Here are the two for this week:
Estate Planning 101: Practical Strategies for Estate and Gift Planning: Due to the demise of the estate tax in 2010 and the resulting complications, this area of law has gotten very tricky. Not every client has the impeccable estate planning sense of George Steinbrenner. If you’re new to estate planning, if you’re a seasoned attorney looking for a refresher, or if you just want a basic working knowledge of estate planning and related tax issues — perhaps you expect to come into an inheritance in the next few years? — you should check out this course.
Public Speaking and Oral Advocacy: How To Do It Well: Effective public speaking is a skill that every lawyer, regardless of practice area, needs to possess. This reasonably priced course will teach you what you need to know. And really, knocking off some CLE hours while also learning how to speak nicely — in a bar or at the bar — is a no-brainer.
Both of these courses are taking place this week, so don’t delay on registering. You can take them live, in New York City (Estate Planning) or Philadelphia (Public Speaking), or you can access them as live video webcasts. To learn more, click on the links below.
In cooperation with our friends at ALI-ABA, Above the Law will be helping you out with your Continuing Legal Education needs. We’ve combed through the extensive CLE offerings of ALI-ABA and picked out a few courses that struck us as particularly interesting, even sexy (at least by the standards of CLE). Today we bring you the inaugural offering; others will follow in future posts.
The new Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act has been described as “the biggest expansion of government power over banking and markets since the Depression.” It overhauls rules and regulations “touching every corner of finance, from ATM cards to Wall Street traders.”
Even if you do not specialize in financial services, this is the kind of information that makes lawyers look intelligent and educated at cocktail parties. It’ll give you something to talk about when your crazy uncle (played by Michael Moore) starts rambling about the evils of Wall Street during Thanksgiving dinner. And it’s a much better way to fulfill your CLE requirement than 90 minutes on seafaring tax law in the post whaling age.
This is a course that you won’t want to miss. You can take it live, in Washington, D.C., or you can access it as a live video webcast. To learn more and to sign up, click here.
If you’re at a firm that’s experiencing a slowdown due to the downturn, with many free (and non-billable) hours to kill, now is a good time to rack up CLE credits. In Notes from the Breadline, Roxana wondered: can CLE credits be rolled over, like cell phone minutes? In some jurisdictions, yes.
To take the survey, which serves both editorial and marketing purposes for us, please CLICK HERE. You can also share your thoughts on CLE in the comments.
Lots of good stuff in the comments to our Lawsuit of the Day. It’s well on its way to becoming an official Comments Clusterf**k. This comment might be our favorite:
Wedding flowers: $27,000.
Damages sought for wrong color wedding flowers: $400,000.
Being delinquent in your attorney registration, while filing a public lawsuit on your own behalf: Priceless
It appears to be true. From the New York State Attorney Registration site:
Maybe Elana Glatt should spend more time attending CLE courses and less time suing florists. We recommend the City Bar class on Service, Therapy, & Emotional Support Animals (which we once sat through, even though it had nothing to do with our practice, ’cause we were desperate for CLE credits).
But Elana “Party Pants” Glatt, predictably dubbed “Bridezilla” by many of you, has her defenders. Read on, after the jump.
A CLE allowance of five grand sounds pretty great. Is our tipster correct about this? And is any other firm similarly generous?
P.S. CLE is on our mind because we just paid our New York bar dues (and filled out our CLE certification). We still keep up with our CLE requirements, ’cause you never know. And we’ll be scooping up some CLE credits on Friday and Saturday, when we’ll be covering the 2007 ACS National Convention here in DC. Marsha Marsha Marsha!!! Update: Yeah, we know we aren’t required to stay current with our New York CLE. But doing so gives us a warm and fuzzy feeling inside, that’s all.
(Yes, we know. According to Gawker, the formulation “Best. [X]. Ever.” is a blog-media cliché. But we don’t care. And we doubt that this cliché has ever been deployed in the context of Continuing Legal Education — so we get a free pass.)
If you’re (1) short on New York CLE credits, and (2) as transfixed as we are by the Biglaw train wreck called Charney v. Sullivan & Cromwell, have we got a suggestion for you.
A reader tipped us off to this CLE event, taking place on March 8 at the Princeton Club in New York:
Employment Law for the General Practitioner and Corporate Counselor Thursday, March 8, 2007
7.5 TOTAL CREDITS: 6.0 credit hours of practice management and/or professional practice; 0.5 credit hour in skills; 1.0 credit hour in ethics
This popular, basic-to-intermediate level program, updated and revamped from previous years, is structured to cover on a practical basis the issues and problems typically arising in today’s workplace on which corporate counsel, or a private practitioner with a general practice, may be called to handle on behalf of the company or the employee.
What’s so interesting about this? The presenters. Two of the lecturers are A-list celebrities of L’Affaire Charney: Zachary Fasman of Paul Hastings (at right), who represents the embattled megafirm; and Theodore Rogers of Sullivan & Cromwell, who is working on the case in-house.
We have advice for Mr. Fasman on how to structure his CLE presentation. Check it out, after the jump.
Watch to find out what some of our subscribers received in their May box!
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We currently have a number of active openings for associate roles at US and UK firms in HK / China, Singapore and two new in-house openings. As always, please feel free to reach out to us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com in order to get details of current openings in Asia, as well as to discuss the Asia markets in general and what we expect for openings later this year. Our Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney will be in Beijing the week of March 25 and Evan Jowers will be in Hong Kong the week of April 1, if you would like to meet them in person.
The US associate openings we have in law firms are in the usual areas of M&A, cap markets, FCPA / white collar litigation, finance, and project finance. The most urgent of our top tier (top 15 US or magic circle) law firm openings in Asia (among many other firm openings that we have in Asia) are as follows:
• 2nd to 5th year mandarin fluent M&A associates needed in Beijing and Hong Kong at several firms;
• Korean fluent 2nd to 4th year cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 5th year Japanese fluent M&A associates needed in Tokyo;
• 4th to 6th year mandarin fluent cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 4th year M&A / cap markets mix associate needed in Singapore.
The last time I flapped my wings your way, I tried to make at least enough noise about your mobile phone to make you more than a little bit uncomfortable. I hope I did. If enough of us become anxious enough about the known and unknown unknowns and knowns in our mobile phones, then we can start making wise decisions about how to manage that information and its resultant investigations.
Today, I’d like to put a finer point on the last installment’s topic by asking a question that seemed to catch most attendees off-guard at a conference panel that I moderated last week: is there discoverable personal information in a mobile app? Our panelists’ answer was a uniform “yes” with one stating that, if he had to choose only one type of data that he could discover from a mobile phone, he’d choose app data. Why? Because there’s simply so much of it and because almost all of it is objective – not just user-created like an email – but machine-tracked like GPS, usage duration, log in and log out times, browsed web addresses, browsed actual addresses. Also, most of us seem to have the idea that data doesn’t actually “stick” to our mobile devices the way it “sticks” to our hard drives. Maybe there’s a disconnect based on the fact that our phones are mobile so we assume the data is mobile to?
The traditional job application and interview process can be impersonal, and applicants often struggle to present themselves as more than just the sum of their GPAs, alma maters, and previous work history. ATL has partnered with ViewYou to help job seekers overcome this challenge. ViewYou NOW Profiles offer a unique way for job seekers to make a personal, memorable connection with prospective employers: introduction videos. These videos allow job candidates to display their personalities, interpersonal skills, and professional interests, creating an eDossier to brand themselves to potential employers all over the world. Check it out today!
Ed. note: This is the latest installment of Inside Straight, Above the Law’s new column for in-house counsel, written by Mark Herrmann.
Continue reading “Inside Straight: Business Development (Part 1)”
