Networking & Business Development

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We’re almost through a full month in 2019 – are you still feeling fresh and inspired about the new year? Or are you feeling bogged down by your routine and flagging resolve already?

If you’ve thrown your resolutions out the window, never fear – I’m not a big believer in them anyway. What I DO believe in is finding ways to find new inspiration that will allow you to freshen up your goals, your thinking, your business development, and ultimately, your practice.
Continue Reading Lawyers: Three Ways to Inspire Your Practice in 2019

Regular Zen readers will know that I’m a runner. When you first start running, you tell yourself that it’s the cheapest sport – all you need is a pair of sneakers, and you can head outside and do it. While this is (essentially) true, we runners love our gadgets and our products, and sharing our favorites of the same.

It won’t surprise you to learn that I’m in a couple of Facebook groups dedicated to running, including a pretty large one, and we often share products we love. A popular one among the group is the sunglasses brand, Goodr, who have been known as a fun, edgy brand with glasses that stay put on your face during long, sweaty runs, have a basset hound mascot, and catchy names for their sunnies. I own three pairs myself. 
Continue Reading Good( r ) Leadership Means Having to Say You’re Sorry

Has everyone got their “fa la la” on yet?

While the holidays are often a mad rush for all of us, it seems that this year especially, everyone is behind with wrapping up their end of the year duties (and wrapping up their gifts), while we try to figure out shortcuts for how to manage to get everything done before family and friends descend on us (or you head out the door yourself). In among all of the holiday madness are your professional pressures, which, of course, take priority.

So instead of adding to the pressure of asking you to throw some crazy business development, relationship building activities into your holiday mix, let’s look at a few easy and mostly quick ways you can sprinkle some engagement into your final weeks of 2018, and set yourself up for early success in the new year. 
Continue Reading 7 Ways to Sprinkle Business Development, instead of Bah Humbug, Into the End of December

Successful communication comes in many forms, and we may be already convinced either by virtue of our training or personality that we’re naturally good communicators. Whether you’re confident in your communications skills, or looking for a refresher, there are four tasks you can undertake today to improve your business communication skills.

Audit Your Communication

How do you currently communicate with others on a professional level? For this purpose, we’re going to consider all of your means of communications to be “professional.” The list may surprise you:

  • Verbally
  • Written (articles/blogs)
  • Email
  • Phone
  • Text
  • Social Media

All of these are means of communication and translating the message of who you are as a lawyer to colleagues, clients, potential clients, and referral sources. Knowing what channels you use is helpful to ensure that your communication skills are up to par across all of them.
Continue Reading 4 Tasks to Improve Your Business Communication Skills

A question I get ALL the time is whether using social media actually has any impact at all on referrals and business development.

Actually, the way it typically goes is this:

Come on, really. Tell me. Does anyone get matters or referrals because they post to LinkedIn?”

The short answer is yes, sometimes, it does happen. But it’s really atypical. Anyone who tells you that lawyers need to be using social media because clients see them there and hire them there is selling you something. But it IS part of a bigger picture, and as part of that picture, it’s essential. 
Continue Reading Referrals and First Impressions: How Technology Has Changed Them

As you’re reading this post, I want you to think about whether you’d consider yourself to be a fairly good networker and business developer. What does “networking” mean to you? Do you think of it as a complete waste of time? If the answer to that last question is yes, keep reading, and I hope you’ll change your mind.

A quick story – if Steve Jobs had never met Steve Wozniak, the Apple I would not have been invented in 1976. A year later, this machine became the Apple II, the bestselling computer of all time. Steve Jobs had the vision, the ideas, but it was Wozniak who knew how to assemble teams. Their change meeting results in a multimillion dollar business. It is often the power of a chance meeting that sparks a revolution.

Sure, that sounds like a one-off, something that doesn’t apply in the legal industry. But it happens every day, and even in legal. How do busy lawyers get to these revolutionary opportunities? It’s about the difference between ordinary networking and power networking. 
Continue Reading Lawyers: Put the Kibosh on Random Acts of Business Development TODAY

We’re continuing our series on soft skills that lawyers require in order to achieve success. We’ve looked at some suggestions for improving networking and presentation skills, and the next item in our series is raising the level of our business writing.

You may feel that this is something that you’re already pretty adept at, since you do a lot of writing – but my guess is that it’s primarily focused on legalese. And while you, and other lawyers, will understand this clearly, most of your clients and potential clients don’t want to be reading a lot of phrases like “inter alia” or highly technical writing. Even the lawyers among them will want you to get right to the point, and distill your writing into direct, actionable items that they can understand efficiently.

So how do you practice that?
Continue Reading 3 Tips to Raise the Level of Your Business Writing

We’ve been talking about the soft skills that young lawyers need to hone in order to become successful, and how these translate for more experienced lawyers. Another skill I reviewed for the ABA student law blog was that of presentations (and I think we can agree this is something that many of us can work on).

A quick note on this – for some, the idea of public speaking will make you want to run for the hills (and I totally sympathize). It’s entirely possible that you focus on other types of business development and professional activities in your legal career, and these are better suited for your personality. However, even if that’s the case, getting comfortable with public speaking can be an excellent talent to keep in your back pocket. It’s one of my least favorite things to do, as an introvert, but I’ve done it so frequently over the course of my career, that I’m now both comfortable speaking in front of an audience, and also speaking in other situations, like networking opportunities, on the spot in meetings, etc. So, it can really have wide-reaching benefits – I promise, it’s not that awful, even if it’s not your strong suit.
Continue Reading 4 Ways to Improve Your Presentation Skills

In addition to understanding the area of the law that you’ll specialize in, there are a variety of “soft skills” that will be essential to navigating the practice of law successfully. Your professional skills may need to be further expanded over the coming years as the industry itself changes and stretches, but for now, there are a few tried and true ones you can rely on that will serve you well regardless of where you end up practicing.

A law student recently asked his connections on LinkedIn to rank the following five skills in order of importance – networking, presentation skills, business writing, communication, and time management. I’ve been exploring these topics for law students over on the ABA Law Student blog, Before the Bar, but they’re equally valuable for more experienced lawyers as well. So let’s take a look at how we can adapt these tips for practicing lawyers.
Continue Reading 5 Essential Networking Tips for Lawyers

We’re already almost mid-way through September (can you believe it?) and this time of year can feel like a new beginning! Though January is typically the time for resolutions, September can also feel like a refresh as kids go back to school, and we jump back into the grind after our own summer holidays and a quieter period with our clients away for their holidays.

Bearing that in mind, it’s also a great time to refresh your goals and business development efforts. Yes, business development is an ongoing effort, but it doesn’t end simply because the calendar year is wrapping up.

There will likely be three groups of you reading this – those who started the year with business development plans and goals, who split them up throughout the year and made progress on them; those of you who had those plans, but who may have only made some inroads here and there; and those of you who had no plans or goals set at all. But no matter where you are, think of September as your do-over month, and the opportunity to plan for the remainder of the year. (Not sure about planning? Take a look at our recent guest post from Joanne Thorud for some help.)
Continue Reading Restart Your Business Development Efforts