Offer to speak at workshops, professional conferences, or community seminars on legal topics you know well. For instance, a family lawyer might give a free talk on “10 Things to Know Before Filing for Divorce” at a library. Such presentations raise your profile and often lead to attendees approaching you for help afterward.
- The key to growing your practice lies in deeply understanding your ideal clients and creating meaningful connections with them.
- Use these insights to double down on what’s working and adjust what isn’t.
- There is no substitute to wearing out shoe leather, getting out and about talking to those who may give you work directly or who may recommend you to others.
Instead, it’s about building your firm and relationships and setting up revenue streams with the long-term end goal in mind. Start small, and list the goals you want to accomplish in the next year. This can look like reaching a broader clientele by taking on a new practice area or partnering with another lawyer. You may have specific revenue goals you want to achieve and want to better define your law firm’s finances. Referrals and reviews are a great lead generation strategy for law firms. Referred leads tend to have a higher conversion rate as they come from clients you’ve worked with and established a line of trust.
Prioritize Your Goals
Face-to-face contact is the key to building trusting relationships with users/buyers of legal services by understanding their problems and suggesting solutions to these. Therefore, the more people you talk to, the more opportunities you will unearth. Another way to boost your firm’s local profile is by sponsoring or participating in community events. Whether it is a charity fundraiser, a local sports team, or a neighborhood festival, sponsorships get your name in front of the community in a positive way.
Join Industry LinkedIn Groups
A well-optimized website enhances your credibility, improves search engine visibility, and creates a seamless user experience that guides visitors toward taking action. Kamron Sanders is the Senior Content Marketing Specialist at PracticePanther, an all-in-one legal practice management software. She is responsible for creating engaging content across multiple channels including social media, articles, videos, and more. Kamron views marketing through a customer-focused lens and equips legal professionals 10 business development tips for attorneys with the information and tools to automate their practice.
First, most attorneys don’t have a written marketing plan and rely on word of mouth or networking. They also don’t have set goals or metrics that are tracked and thus have no sense of urgency or control with prospective clients. This leads to the attorney offering free consultations without meaning to, and prospective clients not understanding the value you can bring them.
- A well-optimized website enhances your credibility, improves search engine visibility, and creates a seamless user experience that guides visitors toward taking action.
- By actively listening, you uncover their “pain points” and why they’re motivated to change.
- Kamron views marketing through a customer-focused lens and equips legal professionals with the information and tools to automate their practice.
- Publishing informative content (like blog posts, articles, or videos) is a powerful way to attract and engage clients.
- A survey by iLawyerMarketing found that 75% of consumers won’t travel more than 30 miles to an attorney.
My estate planning colleague built her clientele through business and bar associations, handshakes, and cocktails. Prove it by committing to writing a few articles this year or committing to speak at a bar conference or other legal conferences, such as ClioCon. You can even see if there are any conferences outside of the legal industry that are relevant and might lead to more business referrals from non-lawyers. Law firm business development essentially means anything you do, in a systematic way, that expands your firm’s revenue streams. It takes into account strategies to grow revenue from a big-picture perspective rather than one-time transactional decisions.
If your current or past clients will be there, go out of your way to touch base with them or consider setting up a time to meet them for lunch or dinner prior to the event. Don’t forget to bring business cards (and ask for business cards) and be prepared to answer the “What do you do? By integrating these strategies into your daily routine, you’ll find that business development becomes a natural part of your workflow, not an additional burden.
Once you’re more comfortable, you can think about how to get more out of your networking. One might say that marketing is the here and now, putting your law firm in front of a client who needs your services and securing retainers. Unlike marketing, business development for law firms is about the long game—adding revenue and sales streams, practice areas, and relationships that build your practice over time. Implementing a law firm business development strategy can seem daunting. It requires time spent outside of practicing law, is easy to brush aside, requires patience, and trial and error.
Set up Zoom coffee meetings, host online seminars or webinars, and more. In addition to using technology tools to automate marketing and sales efforts, there are plenty of platforms that allow you to continue networking. Look into which tools will help you foster more digital relationships. In business development, your focus is still generating revenue, but it’s less of a focus on selling.
Traditional networking remains one of the most effective lawyer marketing tactics, especially for small firms. Building relationships in person – at local bar events, business mixers, or community gatherings – can lead directly to new client referrals. In fact, networking is often cited as the #1 marketing source for small law firms. By attending events and actively engaging (bring business cards and be ready with a quick introduction of your services), you keep your name top-of-mind among potential referrers. Over time, the contacts you make can turn into a steady stream of client referrals.
Regular attention to your online presence, just like regular client communication, builds trust and keeps relationships strong over time. The key to successfully develop business is to build a brand for yourself. Sure, you can cultivate relationships with lots of people, but if you do not have a strong brand no one will know what you do or how you can help them. Write out your elevator pitch, practice it until it’s perfect, and then translate it into your online profiles. Then, start posting on social media regularly by telling your story and sharing your expertise. The legal industry is always changing, and lawyers and legal professionals need to learn and grow with it.
Local search engine optimization (SEO) ensures your firm appears in results when people search for a lawyer in your area. Start by claiming your Google Business profile and keeping it updated with your address, hours, and positive client reviews. Use relevant keywords (like “your city estate lawyer”) on your website. Being visible in local search is vital – most clients now use web search at some stage of finding a lawyer.
One of the reasons I started working in the legal industry was because I saw a massive gap in business development skills among lawyers. First impressions translate beyond that initial meeting — prospective clients can also make a judgment based on the technology you have or don’t have. With PracticePanther, you can have a seamless intake process with customized forms that you can put on your website or load up on your iPad in the office.
Mastering Business Development: The Essential Skills for Lasting Success
To ensure that past clients lead to referrals for new clients, law firms need to become client-centered and develop strong client relationships, both during and after the case. There are many ways to do this, but it largely boils down to making the client experience exceptional. While networking events build valuable relationships, their impact on client acquisition can be harder to quantify directly. You can still track metrics like new contacts made and follow-up meetings scheduled. Digital marketing provides more concrete data through analytics platforms that show exactly how users interact with your campaigns. The most common roadblocks that Steve has seen amongst the attorneys he has worked with can be narrowed down to the same 10 elements.