Katherine Cavanaugh and William Sleight,
The Daily Record Newswire
Like planting and growing a tree, developing a law practice takes time, but time is often one of the biggest issues lawyers face when trying to grow their client base.
Urgent client and case matters are often prioritized over important business development issues. In an industry where time is literally money, tracking the success of your business development efforts is a must. The time you spend, or save, tracking your efforts can be as valuable as the time you spend making those efforts.
Take a second and think: Can you confidently demonstrate that your efforts are worthwhile?
The answer to that question may be right under your nose. Instead of reinventing the wheel, take a look at your top 20 clients and matters. Those top clients and matters make up your client “family tree.”
In order to understand how your tree has grown, it is important to take a look at its roots. Understanding the seeds that have grown into your current clients and matters is essential to making the right marketing and business development decisions moving forward.
A deeper evaluation of your top clients and matters will reveal where you should be investing your time. Reverse the path and identify where and how those clients and matters came into your practice. That information will help you understand which business development efforts historically have bore fruit for your practice.
If, for example, you’ve been spending a couple hours per week at a weekly networking group, but none of your clients and matters can be linked to that “root,” you need to evaluate whether your reasons for joining the group are aiding the growth of your family tree or stunting its development.
If five of your top clients come from your involvement in Cambridge’s Venture Café, you obviously know that the decision to involve yourself with that venture has had a positive impact on your practice.
In both of those examples, using minimal effort, you have been able to directly track your organizational involvement and can now demonstrate that one organization is clearly paying off in both time and money, while your goals surrounding the other organization need to be revisited.
That information can prevent wasting time on initiatives that will not grow your practice. You can begin pruning any efforts that have not impacted the development of your top clients and matters.
No tree grows overnight. It takes water, nurturing and time to grow. Keep in mind that, sometimes, smaller goals build up to the larger one: obtaining new clients and cases. Tracking your business development efforts will help you define what small successes lead to new clients and matters.
If you already know that building a presence in your legal community is important to establishing credibility and remaining top-of-mind with your referral sources, you should track your attendance at Boston Bar Association events and any BBA seminar presentations. If, after a handful of events, you get a call from one of the lawyers who attended your seminar and they refer someone to you with whom you are now working, you can clearly track the new client and matter to the lawyer who attended your presentation.
By identifying where your top business is coming from, you begin planting the right seeds that will save you time and money as you continue to water and grow your tree.
If your firm is not currently tracking and maintaining information about where your clients and matters are coming from, start now. If it is, but you haven’t examined the information, do it today. Use the data you have at your fingertips to cultivate only the choice seeds.
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Katherine Cavanaugh is client development administrator at Ferriter, Scobbo & Rodophele in Boston and a member of the Legal Marketing Association New England chapter’s board. She can be contacted at kcavanaugh@ferriterscobbo.com. William Sleight is business development coordinator at Jones Day in Boston and co-chairs several LMA New England committees. He can be contacted at wsleight@jonesday.com.
