Small Law Firms

Make Friends, Not Contacts: Some Thoughts On Business Development In The White-Collar World

By staying in touch with your friends, you may be planting seeds that won’t sprout for a decade -- but eventually, they will.

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When I was leaving the U.S. Attorney’s Office and deciding what I wanted to do next, what stressed me out the most was figuring out how, if I went to a law firm, I would bring in business, whether white-collar or otherwise. At the time, it seemed like a complete mystery — how is it that some people are able to bring in business, while others are not? What distinguishes a good business plan from a bad business plan? (And what is a business plan, anyway? Does it have to have a plastic cover and a comb binding? I hate comb bindings!)

Is there, in fact, a secret, or is it all just luck?

Some five years later, I’ve come to believe that there are two main ways to generating business in private practice, especially in the white-collar world — get fancy, or get friends.

Let me address each of those.

First, getting fancy.

Here’s what I don’t mean by that: graduating from a fancy law school and doing fancy things while you’re there. It is difficult to overstate how little that matters, especially if you’re working in a big city like D.C. or New York, where you can throw a rock and hit someone who went to a fancy law school.

You were magna at Harvard and on law review? No. One. Cares.

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Here’s what I do mean by that: usually, getting fancy means leaving a government job with either enough subject-matter expertise or a title that will pop enough that people will want to hire you and that — just as importantly — your firm can market. So if you’re, say, Eric Holder, or a section chief in the Criminal Division, or head of the trial section of the SEC, clients will likely flock to you. They will do that for your access, for your knowledge, and for the judgment that you will likely have honed over years of government service. Clients like to hire people who can tell them how the decision makers think and what the process is like from the inside.

Of course, it’s usually hard to get fancy. There aren’t but so many Attorneys General and section chiefs out there. Getting those jobs usually requires a combination of smarts, political sophistication, and a willingness to spend a substantial amount of time in government. Few people get those kinds of jobs in their 30s, and often not even until their mid- to late-40s. So if you’re going to go for one of those, you need to plan to stay in government for a while. (Or, I suppose, be friends with the president. That helps, too.)

There’s a danger to this strategy, though. If you’re not careful, you can rely too much on your fancy government job and become what I call the “render unto me the business” lawyer. That’s the person who was, say, deputy chief of this or that and assumes that, as soon as they come out of government, clients are going to trip all over themselves to get their sage advice.

Sometimes that works. But sometimes it doesn’t. You can generally tell who it doesn’t work for when you see someone who was a fancy former government lawyer skip from firm to firm, often taking a bit of a prestige hit with every move. Those people tend to be fancy but not have much hustle. That is, they are very good at sitting at their desks and waiting to get phone calls so they can tell people how much they know, but they’re not good at doing what you need to do to get people to hire you — often, just getting out there and meeting people (or, as I’ll discuss below, making friends). Most people, as it turns out, don’t get rendered unto themselves the business. Unless you’re Eric Holder, you usually have to hustle for it. (And I suspect even Eric Holder hustles, too.)

The other way to develop business is making friends. By this, I mean make actual friends, not contacts. There’s an important difference.

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I’ve found that the people who have sent me the most business are the people who I’ve known for a while or who I’ve met more recently but hit it off with in a really genuine way. They’re not people I randomly met at a conference and networked with on a shallow basis. (“We should work together sometime” is, to my ear, roughly as appealing a thing to say to someone as “PLEASE GIVE ME WORK RIGHT NOW PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE,” and about as subtle.)

Other people may get business that way, but I have generally found that I don’t. My wife once said that she is only friends with people who are “emotionally open” — that is, people who, when you ask them how their day is going, will actually tell you the truth. That’s how I am, and it’s how most of my friends are, too.

So the people that I’ve connected with, and ended up getting the most business from, are people like that — people I genuinely like, who don’t feel like I’m playing them for business (because, as it turns out, I’m not). I think that’s probably because referring someone a case is very much an expression of trust in that person. Whether you’re sending them a family member, a friend, or just someone who trusts your judgment, the person sending the case needs to believe that you will do a good job and not make them look bad. So people tend to want to send cases to people they like and trust.

To be clear, you can do this even if you’re a young associate at a Biglaw firm. Are you the junior person who usually interacts with the other junior person in the GC’s office at the client? Sure, that person may, like you, be low-level now, but like you, she’s also probably ambitious. If you become friends when you can’t really do much for each other, then there may come a time when you can — and it will be genuine. Maybe another client tells you about an opening at his company, and you relay that to her, along with a strong recommendation. If she gets the job, maybe she will one day rise to a position where she can send out work — and because you’re friends, she won’t forget that you helped her get that job.

I think people get in trouble when they try to make contacts, not friends — when they believe more in glad-handing than genuinely connecting with people.

It’s hard to say how to do this, of course. As simple as it sounds, I think you just have to like people and be someone who sees the best in people.

I also think that you have to play the long game, which to some extent involves not seeing it as a game at all (see supra, “make friends, not contacts”). Many young lawyers don’t understand that by staying in touch with your friends from high school, college, or law school — or, you know, from other parts of your life, but I really didn’t get out that much — you may be planting seeds that won’t sprout for a decade.

But they may well sprout if you continue to tend them. Too many lawyers leave government in their mid- to late 30s, or suddenly find themselves up for partner, look around, and realize they haven’t talked to their old friends in a long time. Then they think they can look them up on LinkedIn, see that they are in-house now, and get business. That might work sometimes — and if you’re fancy enough, maybe it will — but I bet it doesn’t work too often. That’s because people know when you are hustling them, and people don’t like to be hustled.

To be clear, I’m not counting here business that you inherit from someone in your firm. I think that’s a different thing. If you can find a good rabbi at your firm who will turn his or her book of business over to you, fantastic. But that’s a big bet to make, especially because other people in your firm will be looking to inherit that book, too. So I don’t think that’s generally how someone should plan their career, and I would suspect that even people who have inherited good books still do their best to go out and find more work. As Andy Grove famously said, only the paranoid survive.

In the end, I think making friends, not contacts, is the best way to go — even if you happen to be fancy, too. It’s also, to my mind, the most personally rewarding. Because even if you fail completely at business development, at least you’ll have friends who will listen to you complain about it.

Justin Dillon is a partner at KaiserDillon PLLC in Washington, DC, where he focuses on white-collar criminal defense and campus disciplinary matters. Before joining the firm, he worked as an Assistant United States Attorney in Washington, DC, and at the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. His email is [email protected].

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