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.
What does it mean to be “newly admitted?” To us, it means endless possibilities!
We recognize that you already possess the ability and intelligence to succeed in a variety of legal professions. Our job is to expose you to various practice areas in a way that ensures those very attributes are successfully applied. Our seasoned and successful faculty present unique programs that provide an approachable and practical understanding of the avenues of achievement available as you launch a fruitful, enjoyable and promising career.
Our Live Bridge the Gap weekends satisfy the entire year of New York Newly-Admitted CLE Credits in only two days!
After physically attending a full weekend, you will receive:
• 3.0 Ethics CLE credits,
• 6.0 Skills CLE credits, and
• 7.0 Professional Practice and/or Law Practice Management CLE credits
Date: Saturday, June 8 and Sunday, June 9, 2013 Time: 9:00 a.m. – 4:35 p.m. (EST) Location:
55 Exchange Place
5th Floor
New York, NY 10006
Ed. note: The Asia Chronicles column is authored by Kinney Recruiting. Kinney has made more placements of U.S. associates, counsels and partners in Asia than any other recruiting firm in each of the past six years. You can reach them by email: asia@kinneyrecruiting.com.
Deal flow has clearly picked recently up for most US associates, counsels and partners in Hong Kong/China and Singapore. We are on the phone with a lot of these folks on a daily basis, many of whom we have known for years. Further, the head of our Asia team, Evan Jowers, and Kinney’s founder and president, Robert Kinney, frequently meet in person with leading US partners in Asia to assess their needs and keep on top of the inside scoop at as many firms as possible. The need for legal recruiting help in Asia from experienced recruiters appears to be live and well. In March, Evan and Robert were in Beijing at such meetings, in April, Evan was in Hong Kong, and for half of June Evan will be in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Thus its pretty easy for us to tell when there has been an across-the-market pick up in capital markets and corporate work.
On an average day in Asia when Evan and Robert visit firms, they typically have 5 to 9 meetings a day, mostly with US partners in the market. The reason they have these meetings is not simply because Kinney makes a lot of US attorney placements in Asia and that a particular firm may have openings; instead these are just visits with friends. After years of working together as business partners, the folks at Kinney are actually these peoples’ friends. The firms Kinney work closely with in Asia (which is just about every law firm – call us if you want to know the one firm in the world we will never place anyone with again, ever, and why) look forward to the visits, or at least act like they do. After seven years in the market, many of the client partners are former associate candidates. Also, these US partners see Kinney as a very good source of market information as well, because they know how deep their contacts are in the market and how frequently they are speaking to counterparts at peer firms.
In a land that is right here and in a time that is right now, a technology has arisen so powerful that it can replace basic human document review. Is it time to bow down before our new robot overlords?
First, here’s a little story about me: my life in the legal world began as a paralegal. My first case was a GIANT patent infringement case that was already six years old and had involved as many as five companies, multiple US courts, the ITC and an international standards committee. I knew nothing about any of this.
On my first day, my supervisor (a paralegal with at least eight other cases driving her crazy) sat me down in front of a Concordance database with a 100,000+ patents and patent file histories. “Code these,” she said. I learned that “coding”, for the purposes of this exercise, meant manually typing the inventor’s name, the title of the patent, the assignee, the file date, and other objective data for each document. I worked on that project – and only that project – for at least the first six months of my job. After a week or so, time began to blur.
What I know, in retrospect and with absolutely certainty, is that as time began to blur, so did my judgment. So did my attention to detail. If you could tell me that I did not make at least one mistake a day – one inconsistent spelling, one reversed day and month, one incorrectly spaced title – I frankly would need to see your evidence. I would not believe it. The human mind is trainable but it is not a machine.
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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)”
