Selling The Law: Lawyers Are Salesmen Whether They Like It Or Not

To be a good attorney you must be able to sell not only yourself, but your position, to someone with beliefs contrary to your own.

Lawyers and salesmen often come from different educational backgrounds, but the biggest difference between them is what they are selling: salesmen sell services and products and lawyers sell their client’s case or position. I never had any interest in sales when I was in school, but after I graduated law school and started working, I wished I had given sales a try.

Selling Yourself

Practicing law requires more salesmanship than most non-attorneys (including salesmen) would actually believe. To start, lawyers and firms need to sell themselves to potential clients. Selling yourself is one of the most important skills everyone — whether an attorney or not — should have. In order to bring in business, lawyers need to sell their own skills, their firm, their experience, their colleagues, and even their personality. However, lawyers need to be careful not to oversell, which often results in overpromising, so as to not give clients an unrealistic expectation.

Depending on the area of law you practice, some clients will have never had experience working with a lawyer, making it all the more difficult to sell yourself (imagine trying to sell a car to someone without a license, or better yet, selling cooking utensils to someone who has never cooked a meal before). However, this is exactly what you need to do, because in the case of a person who has never cooked before needing utensils, you need to explain why you, the utensil, are the best for their meal, their case, without getting overly technical.

However, it can be just as difficult selling yourself to someone who works with lawyers all the time. Those who work with lawyers all the time tend to have a predisposition to how things should be done, what “type” of lawyer they want, and also typically have a “go-to” firm or attorney. This can make selling yourself even more difficult, requiring you to either sell your particular style and brand of law or selling that you can do what the client wants to be done, how the client wants it to be done.

There is no “right” answer as to how to sell yourself, just like there is no “right” way to litigate a case. Different styles, tactics, strategies, and personalities work in different ways for different cases. Styles, tactics, and strategies should, for the most part, be altered by what is needed for the case, requiring not only that attorneys sell themselves to particular clients, but also sell themselves for particular cases, even when the same client has multiple cases.

I previously wrote about the renaissance attorney, arguing that lawyers who are more well-rounded are arguably capable of better advocating for their clients than attorneys who regularly practice in only a niche sector. This holds true for different cases in the same general practice area as well; lawyers need to alter their style based on their case, client, and adversary (consider a baseball pitcher; the best pitchers have a number of pitches that they throw well — fastball, curveball, slider, sinker, etc. — because they keep the batter off guard, but a pitcher with the best slider in the major league but nothing else won’t be as successful because the batter will know what is coming). Like the best baseball pitchers, at our firm we adapt to whatever a case requires and have a vast skillset that enables us to litigate in whatever way will best impact the case.

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Selling Your Case

The selling does not stop when the client selects a lawyer and a firm. Rather, my colleagues‘ and my main goal in litigation is to sell our client’s case through advocacy. This requires attorneys to sell not only the facts of the case to the finder of fact (either the judge or jury), but the law as it applies to those facts in the instance of dispositive motions. This is what sales is, having a product (in this case your client’s position), and selling it to a buyer (in this case the judge or jury).

However, good lawyering requires more than selling your case to a neutral third-party of the judge or jury, but also selling your case to your adversary in settlement discussions. Imagine a Coca-Cola salesman trying to sell Coca-Cola to the Pepsi cafeteria; a Microsoft salesman trying to convince Apple to use Windows; or a Verizon employee trying to convince NBCUniversal – Comcast to use Fios in their corporate headquarters. The longer the litigation goes on, and the longer the history between the clients, the harder it is to settle (or sell in the sales world).

This is what lawyers must do when settling cases and negotiating with adversaries, sell their position to someone with a complete opposite position (rather than someone neutral choosing between options) in a zero-sum game, such that any benefit to one side must harm the other and vice versa. This necessarily leads to more difficult “selling” than in a situation where the “purchaser” is not also the adversary.

To be a good attorney you must be able to sell not only yourself, but your position, to someone with beliefs contrary to your own.

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brian-grossmanBrian Grossman was an attorney at Balestriere Fariello, a trial and investigations law firm which represents clients in all aspects of complex commercial litigation and arbitration from pre-filing investigations to trial and appeals. You can reach firm partner John Balestriere at john.g.balestriere@balestrierefariello.com.