new client prospects

Meaning, get out of your office, meet people, and Grow Your Practice! This can be a real struggle for small firm lawyers generally and particularly for people who tend to be introverts…and if you don’t face the problem it can be a practice killer. Here’s an older post, Do You Make These Mistakes, describing the conflict between the “worker bee” mindset conflicting with the business owner/rainmaker/CEO mindset. And if you’re like me and lean a tad toward being an introvert, it’s often easier to do that great legal work than it is to get out and meet people.

But unless you’ve got a critical deadline tomorrow, you MUST put those social engagements and professional networking events ahead of your day-to-day legal work...because you never know who you’re going to run into.

Here’s a personal example and a true story:

Some two years ago my wife and I attended a 1st birthday party for the child of some friends of ours. Quite frankly they aren’t particularly close friends of ours and they live a fair distance away from us…but we went anyways. And I met another person there who was very personable who happened to be a financial planner and we struck up a conversation and subsequently got together for lunch. Shortly thereafter he referred a friend of his to my office to represent this guy buying a home (he’s actually referred several clients to me over time). Then at the closing I met several other colleagues who had also been referrals of the financial planner to the buyer…both the Realtor and mortgage lender. Interestingly, this Realtor who I met through the financial planner has also become a great referral source for me. I’d also expect that the 5 or so clients who I’ve worked with as referrals from the financial planner and Realtor have been pleased with our work and likely the sort of people who will get my name in front of their spheres of influence over time. This financial planner and Realtor are now probably among my top 5 business referral sources.

So one dumb birthday party has turned into some $6,000 in legal fees and likely considerably more to come in the future. One new client or new case or new professional referral source can literally change your life. How many law firms out there just sort of took off simply from the success of one individual client or business? It can happen. There’s always time to do more work, but you may never have an opportunity to meet that single person again if you don’t GET OUT THERE!

My initial word association with a “Third Way” would be Tony Blair’s centre-left Labour Party government in Great Britain and his attempt to meld a different sort of political alternative to the extremes on the both the left and right. Although that’s not a wholly inaccurate description of my political leanings this ain’t the Politico so lets talk growing your law practice and specifically initial client meetings.

How to handle initial meetings with potential client prospects is VERY IMPORTANT to your practice but I don’t think there’s a real clear black/white answer on how to handle these and specifically, to charge or not to charge. Here was a previous post and an earlier evolution of my thinking on this matter. Generally the debates I hear and have had within my own mind are should you offer free initial consultations or should you charge for all meetings. A brief summary of my thinking (see link above) being that in the early days of your practice you’ve got plenty of time and should offer free initial consultations to more recent times as the practice fills-up you’ve got to charge for every minute of your time.

However, is there a third and better way? These are 3 questions guiding our current Initial Prospect Meeting Policy:

1. What’s the source of the prospect and/or how did the prospect find you? The underlying thought here is to treat your best referral sources well indirectly though their referrals. Meaning, I’m much more liberal about offering a free initial client meeting to the person who got my name from that great referral source who sends me a new prospect every month versus the new prospect making a cold call and having no previous relationship to the Firm.

2. What’s the case potential and/or why does the prospect want to meet? Simply, might your 1 hour meeting turn into thousands of dollars of profit in the future or is the prospect looking for your expertise limited to that initial hour meeting with no potential for future payoff. Now you might say that there’s potential future payoff just from a prospect meeting with you (just getting to know you) but personally that’s too indefinite and unlikely for my taste.

3. What’s the Trade-off? Here I’m talking Opportunity Cost: What’s the value of the next-best choice available when you obviously have several options of how to spend your time. This question is why I think this whole subject-matter tends to change and evolve because your law practice like any business is a sort of living thing that constantly changes and evolves. So say six months after opening my doors if I’m balancing between organizing my office, creating legal forms, or taking a free initial prospect meeting I’d say the free meeting would be the best available cost. However, these days there’s a better chance that I’m choosing between actual billable legal work versus a new prospect meeting and trading $200 for that hour versus $0 isn’t usually a tough call.

Is there a 4th Way??

**Update** GAL re-posted here some ideas from Ed Poll:

The issue: whether to charge a prospective client a fee for an initial consultation, the meeting before being engaged. The wisdom of charging in this situation has long been debated, and it comes down to three fundamental choices:

1. Free initial consultation
2. Paid initial consultation at the lawyer’s regular rate, exclusive of any subsequent engagement
3. Paid initial consultation at the lawyer’s regular rate, with the payment applied to the total bill if the consultation results in an engagement.