Business Development

If you’re wondering whether blogging helps with your search engine results, it does. Here’s what happened when I started blogging about a new law. My goal was to break this law down into the elements that businesses need to know about and ...

Let me tell you a story about a brainy brief writer. She was smart, hardworking and loved practicing law. But she had few clients of her own. This made her beholden to others at her firm. Over the years, she came to believe she could never be a ...

In the years it takes before your lawyering skills develop to where you can produce work product that clients will pay for, you cost your firm a lot more than you generate. That’s expected, but it doesn’t mean that in the interim you can’t ...

When discussing business development, we often talk in terms of strategies — identifying top prospects, building niche practices or targeting selected referral sources, for example. But every now and then, I am reminded there are terrific ...

Ryan Nevin’s article “Ways to Get Clients After Hanging Out Your Shingle” has some great tips. He’s right that you should network with attorneys who don’t do what you do to get referrals. But that’s only part of the answer. You should also make ...

Straight out of law school, I joined a small law practice. I didn’t start out as an associate with a large salary and plenty of document review projects to hit my hours. I had to eat what I killed and immediately begin bringing in clients. If ...

Welcome back to our "Year of Publishing Strategically." Having covered a variety of writing tips and tactics in this column, this year we are exploring the ins and outs of content strategy. Put another way, we are all about getting your content ...

Over the years, I’ve conducted thousands of client interviews to gather feedback on outside counsel. The discussion frequently turns to how a firm first started representing the client, leading to stories about what lawyers do well — or not so ...

Unfortunately, there is no template or set of instructions that works for every lawyer. I have seen a lot of tactics executed with varying degrees of success. What seems to work best is engaging in an activity that is natural to you. What do I ...

You passed the bar and got your first job in a law firm. Congratulations. Now it’s time to start becoming a rainmaker lawyer. “Whoa,” you say. “Slow down. Become a rainmaker lawyer? I still have to become a real lawyer. You know, one whose work ...