Encourage your Clients to Look Back From the Future
Want clients to spend more on legal services? Ask them to step into the future. From this article from Psychology Today about economists studying why people pay premiums for immediate over future rewards (called temporal discounting), we learn that people who better connect their present with their future selves make better long term decisions:
Stanfordresearcher Hal Ersner-Hershfield has preliminary results from a studyin which virtual reality lets people experience old age. Subjects puton video goggles and move through a world where they look just likethemselves, or similar, but with gray hair and wrinkles.
Standingin front of a virtual mirror, they're asked to decide how to spend athousand dollars. Gifts? Parties? A retirement plan? Those with theelderly avatar put more than twice as much into long-term savings.Ersner-Hershfield says that embodying your future self may alsoencourage more responsible planning in other domains, such asrelationships (should I cheat?), the environment (should I recycle?),and health (should I smoke?).
So what if youdon't have a VR system at home? You might get results from simplythinking about what you'll be like when you age. "Realize that yourinterests and values will be similar when you retire,"Ersner-Hershfield says. "Sure, a 25-year-old avid rock climber mightnot be as into scaling Everest when he's in his 60s, but he'll probablystill like outdoor activities." Once identified with your future self,you might suddenly care whether he looks back on you and curses you forbeing such a knucklehead.
What does this mean for lawyers? If you're working with clients and encouraging them to make better long-term decisions for themselves or their businesses (estate planning, incorporating, succession planning, etc.), you'll get better results -- the study suggests -- if you ask your clients to look to future and imagine themselves already there.
Ask clients to see themselves twenty years from now. What have they accomplished? What challenges have they overcome? What are their children doing? Who's running their business? Etc.
I think you'll find them far more open to your advice and less likely to say, "Well, we'll just wait 'til we get there" because they already are.
Pop the Bubble on Each New Day
I have to admit, I LOVE the Bubble Calendar. It is a "poster sized calendar with a bubble to pop every day." If you're looking for something cool to give your customers, you can even have them customized. Just one customization idea: if you're a tax attorney or CPA, imagine having one with your logo as well as April 15th (and other appropriate deadlines) highlighted in red. I'm ordering mine today.
Do it all Online.
Mashable has a comprehensive list of over 270 Online Tools to Help You Run Your Business. If you're thinking of moving more of your business functions "into the cloud," you should check out this list. Sites covered can help you with Accounting, Billing, Invoicing, Scheduling, Collaboration, Meetings, Presentations, etc. Lots of cool things I'd not seen before. Enjoy!
What Will Change Everything?
Each year the World Question Center rounds up dozens of experts from multiple disciplines and asks them a simple question. This year's question: "What will change everything?" Among the essayists answering the question are anthropologists, philosophers, physicians, artists, humorists, biologists, novelists, playwrights, psychologists, actors, mathematicians, and physicists (though not a single lawyer makes the list).
Check out the entire list of essays. I'm certain you'll find more than a few big, new ideas that will stretch your brain in a good way. While you're reading what others have to say, think to yourself:
In my profession, what will change everything?
Are you prepared?
Ten Resolutions for the New Year
As 2008 draws to a close, it is natural to think about New Year's resolutions.* We think about our businesses, our clients and ourselves and resolve to do better next year. If you'd like some help, or just some inspiration, here are Ten Resolutions for the New Year. Enjoy:
1. Resolve to be better to everyone. Start with yourself.
2. Resolve to choose your customers as carefully as friends, knowing that you’ll work best when they’re one in the same.
3. Resolve to know your business better. Recognize that being good at what you do is unimportant if you’re not good at being in the business you’re in.
4. Resolve to stop doing the things your customers don’t pay you to do, unless you love doing them so much, you’d do them for free. Because you are.
5. Resolve to value your life by the things you experience instead of the things you possess.
6. Resolve to eliminate the things in your life that wake you up in the middle of the night -- unless you’re married to them, or they need to go outside for a walk.
7. Resolve to become more useful to your customers. Stop thinking about what they expect from you, and focus instead on what they don’t expect from you.
8. Resolve to help the people who work with you (and for you) become better at what they do. Give them what they need to excel at their jobs, and you’ll find you’re more likely to excel at yours.
9. Resolve to understand the difference between what you do for clients and how long you take to do it. They care about the former, and can’t understand why you charge for the latter.
10. Resolve to do the work you long to do, instead of the work you’ve been doing for too long. Follow your passions, honor your principles and strive to add value to every relationship you’re in. “Next Year” begins now. Get started on making it great!
I'd love your input, and feel free to add your resolutions in the comments. If you enjoyed these, check out my other posts in the series: Ten Rules for Law Students, Ten Rules for the New Economy, Ten Rules for New Solos, Ten Rules of Legal Innovation, Ten Rules of Legal Technology, Ten Rules of Hourly Billing and Ten New Rules of Legal Marketing.
Also, if you'd like to get more ideas like these in real time, follow me on Twitter.
* Thinking about Resolutions for Lawyers is something I've been doing for quite some time. Here are my 30+ resolutions from 2004, 2005 and 2006.
Do Anything Online
From Mashable: How To Do Almost Anything With Social Media. Bookmark it, and read one or two of the linked posts each day and you'll be a social media wiz in no time.
Taking the "Less" out of Jobless
Looking for a simple way to help the jobless in your community? A local bar here in St. Louis (where lots of Anheuser-Busch employees are unemployed for the first time) has a great idea: Host a resume-writing clinic.
What else can you do to help the members of your community in their time of need? Just a few ideas:
- Do a seminar on unemployment law, including the rights/responsibilities of employers or employees.
- Donate a portion of every payment you receive to a food pantry.
- Collect interview-appropriate clothes for job-seekers.
- Partner with the local copy shop or printer and offer coupons for free resume printing and mailing.
- Enlist local schools and ask them to provide non-peak use of computers (with student mentors) to job hunters.
- Donate (and ask clients to as well) used computers, appropriately reformatted, to those who need them.
- Teach about LinkedIn, Craigslist, Facebook and other online services that can help job seekers.
- Ask your business clients to volunteer to do practice interviews with -- and give feedback to -- the newly unemployed.
- Create and sponsor a job fair in your town.
I'm sure they are hundreds more. The point is, help those in need. They'll thank you and you'll thank yourself.
Ten Rules for Law Students
Over a year ago, I wrote 15 Thoughts for Law Students. It was one of my first "Rules" posts, though I wasn't calling them that at the time. Since then, it has been one of the more popular items on this blog, and was even republished in the Canadian Bar Association magazine.
I've revised it just a bit, and shortened it to 10 "rules" for the law students out there. Enjoy.
1. Law school is a trade school. The only people who don't believe this to be true are the professors and deans.2. Being good at writing makes you a good law student. Being good at understanding makes you a good lawyer. Being good at arguing makes you an ass.
3. You can learn more about client service by working at Starbucks for three weeks than you can by going to law school for three years.
4. Law school doesn't teach you to think like a lawyer. Law school teaches you to think like a law professor. There's a huge difference.
5. The people who will help you the most in your legal career aresitting next to you in class. Get to know them outside of law school.They are pretty cool people. They are even cooler when you stop talking about the Rule Against Perpetuities.
6. Law is a precedent-based profession. It doesn't have to be a precedent-based business. Challenge the status quo. Somebody has to.
7. When you bill by the hour, getting your work done in half the time as your peers doesn't get you rewarded. It gets you more work.
8. Your reputation as a lawyer begins now. People won't remember your class rank as much as they'll remember how decent and honest you were. They'll really remember if you were a jerk.
9. There are plenty of things you don't know. There are even more things you'll never know. Get used to it. Use your ignorance to your benefit. The most significant advantage you possess over those who've come before you is that you don't believe what they do.
10. People don't tell lawyer jokes just because they think they are funny. They tell lawyer jokes because they think they are true. Spend your career proving them wrong.
If you enjoyed these, check out my other posts in the series: Ten Rules for the New Economy, Ten Rules for New Solos, Ten Rules of Legal Innovation, Ten Rules of Legal Technology, Ten Rules of Hourly Billing and Ten New Rules of Legal Marketing.
Also, if you'd like to get more ideas like these in real time, follow me on Twitter.
Designers Don't Have a Monopoly on Design
If one of your goals for the New Year is to upgrade your firm's image, here's a bit of inspiration for you. Andy Mangold a 20 year-old design student, took a something we all take for granted (the Monopoly board game package) and looked at it in a different way. Here's his stunning re-design:
If you asked a 20-something design student at your local college to take a crack at re-imagining your legal brand, what could it look like? I bet there are a few design students who'd be interested in tackling the challenge. Do you have the guts to let them?
(via TheDieline)
Make Meetings Shorter
Here's an easy way to make your meetings shorter: Fill your conference room with seating from The Slightly Uncomfortable Chair Collection. It is a series of chairs that look just a bit more than "slightly uncomfortable." Follow the link to see the whole collection.
Get Paid Faster
Some great advice from Howard Mann on ways to get paid faster. Here's my favorite:
4. Make the invoice an experience not a pain. You work so hard to deliver a great experience to your customers -don't you? Why stop when the product or service is delivered? How canyou make the delivery of your invoice a memorable event to therecipient? It is a chance to ask for feedback. It is a chance to thankthem for their business. 2 suggestions:
a) Make your invoice look nice great! Your invoice represents yourcompany. Does it do it well? Have the designer that designed your logo,web site or brochure design your invoice. Make it clear and pleasantto read. Forms do not have to be ugly. Make it stand out from theothers.
b) Add a message to the invoice that is memorable. Maybe it is afunny quote or a fun way to present the total due. If you don't sendmany invoices then take the time to write a personal email with eachone. If you send a ton, then this is impractical. But you can create acover email that briefly thanks them for entrusting the work to you. Change your message every month or so. Even a variety of facts aboutyour company or staff works. Make it memorable and make it work withthe personality of your business. I had one vendor who mentioned intheir invoice when staff members had a birthday or had a baby, whichdrove home their family oriented nature.
An absolutely dynamite idea! Look at your invoices, are they interesting or memorable?
What I like is...
A quick tip from Johnnie Moore, from this post on improvisation, that's worth keeping in mind when negotiating with opponents, listening to clients or making restaurant plans with your significant other:
Respond to all offers with, "What I like about your idea is ...."
Ten Rules for the New Economy
This economic downturn provides a tremendous opportunity for lawyers to look at their practices in a new (and different) way. Here are ten "rules" for lawyers facing an uncertain economic future. I hope you find them helpful.
1. Your best response to bad economic times is to become indispensable to your clients. What can you provide to them that they can’t do without? If you can’t answer that question, it is unlikely your clients can either.2. Never assume your current clients know all you can do for them. Never believe your former clients remember all you did for them. Reach out to both and remind them. New business will follow.
3. “Advertise more” is the advice you’ll get from the yellow pages salesperson. “Blog and Twitter more” is the advice you’ll get from social media consultants. “Serve more” is the advice you’ll get from your clients.
4. In a bad economy, you can be proactive, reactive or inactive. Chose the first, knowing most of your competitors will pick the other two.
5. Don’t lower your rates, increase your terms. The easier you make it for people to pay you, the more likely they will.
6. There’s a fine line between compassion and pity. Your clients aren’t paying you to feel sorry for them, they are paying you so they’ll no longer feel sorry for themselves. Instead of saying “I’m sorry,” tell them the six words all clients long to hear: “I’ll help you get through this.”
7. When your worst clients use the economy as yet another excuse to not pay you, use it as an excuse not to keep them.
8. Though you might earn less of your clients’ money, never deserve less of their trust.
9. Your clients never hired you because they wanted a lawyer, they hired you because they needed one. When they leave you, it isn’t because they suddenly need you less, they just need other things more. Don’t take it personally, you’d choose food and heat over advice, too.
10. Remember all those rainy day, practice-improvement projects you’ve put off ‘til “someday” because you’ve never had the time to do them? Guess what, today is someday. Now is the time for you to make big changes in your business. What are you waiting for?
If you enjoyed these, check out my other posts in the series: Ten Rules for New Solos, Ten Rules of Legal Innovation, Ten Rules of Legal Technology, Ten Rules of Hourly Billing and Ten New Rules of Legal Marketing.
Also, if you'd like to get more ideas like these in real time, follow me on Twitter.
Twelve Days For You
As a thanks to everyone who's made my personal and professional life as great as it has ever been, I'm going to give away 12 days in the New Year to you. Each month, I'll give a day away to someone to help them make their business better -- no strings attached. I'm working out the details now, and will post them by the New Year.
Here's my challenge to you: Can you find your best twelve clients (or their favorite causes) and give each a day of your time and talent in 2009?
Amazing things will happen if you do. I promise.
London, England
I'm in London from 12/7 - 12/13. If you'd like to connect, give me a shout: Matt (at) LexThink (dot) com.
The Blawg 100
Thanks to the folks at the ABA Journal for naming this blog to The Blawg 100, their list of the "best legal blogs" for the second year in a row. Check out the entire list, there are tons of great blogs you should be following.
Ten Rules for New Solos
As our economy sours and the legal job market dries up, there are lots of lawyers looking at solo practice for the first time. As a former solo myself, I’m sharing these ten “rules” for new solos. There are more to follow, and please share yours in the comments.
1. The good news: As a solo, you are your own boss, can do whatever you want and answer only to yourself. That’s also the bad news.2. Your solo practice is far more likely to fail because you’re a bad business person than because you’re a bad lawyer.
3. If you are a bad procrastinator, you’ll be a terrible solo. Nothingwill impact your ability to succeed as much as your inability to manageyour time. It is unimportant how great you are at lawyering when youdon’t send your bills out on time.
4. Never underestimate the value of the water cooler. You can find many "co-workers" online in Solosez, Blogs, Twitter, etc. Just don’t spend all your time there.
5. Would you let your plumber appear in court for you? Remember your answer next time you’re fiddling with your phone system, computer network, etc... You can’t expect someone to appreciate your expertise if you fail to appreciate theirs.6. If you’re looking for a guru, you can have Foonberg. I’ll take Elefant.
7. If you’re thinking of opening a “general” practice, remember this: Your clients don’t have “general” legal problems, they have specific ones. They’ll hire you because you’re able to help them, not everyone else.
8. Your friends, family and business contacts may hire you eventually, but they’ll rarely do so right away. They have to need to hire you, not just want to.
9. Never tell prospective clients that being a solo makes you cheaperto them. Show them that being a solo makes you better for them. Ifyour clients hire you because your rates are low, they will fire you assoon as your rates are no longer low enough.
10. There is no shame in going solo. Your clients don’t care thatthe legal market tanked, that you got laid off from BIGLAW or that you“wanted more time to spend with your family.” They have their ownproblems, and are looking to you solve them. When you do, you’ll bothprofit.
If you enjoyed these, check out my other posts in the series: Ten Rules of Legal Innovation, Ten Rules of Legal Technology, Ten Rules of Hourly Billing and Ten New Rules of Legal Marketing.
Also, if you'd like to get more ideas like these in real time, follow me on Twitter.
Ten Rules of Legal Innovation
"Innovative Lawyer" shouldn't be an oxymoron. Lawyers -- who are constantly applying their creative, problem-solving skills to help clients -- too often turn their innovation engines off as soon as their "billable" work ends.
If you're a lawyer, and willing to set aside some time to innovate, I am happy to help you. Until then, I give you my Ten Rules of Legal Innovation. Enjoy!
1. The practice of law requires precedents. The business of law does not. Knowing that other firms aren’t doing what you are isn’t cause for concern, it’s cause for celebration.2. There are (at least) ten things your clients wish you’d do differently, and I bet you don’t know what they are. Innovation begins with conversation. Engage your clients so they’ll keep engaging you.
3. If you’re the first lawyer to do something that other businesses have been doing for years, it isn’t innovative, it’s about time.
4. When you focus on being just like your competitors, the worst thing that can happen is you might succeed.
5. If you have to tell your clients you’re being innovative, you probably aren’t.
6. Innovation is just like exercise. It isn’t particularly hard to do, but you won’t see results if you don’t practice it regularly. Also, the more you do it, the better you’ll look (to clients).
7. The best ideas in your firm will come from your staff. While you’re paying attention to your clients, they’re paying attention to your business. Ignore them at your peril.
8. To be a more innovative lawyer, look inside the profession for motivation, but outside the profession for inspiration.
9. Your failure to capture your ideas is directly proportional to your failure to implement them.
10. Remember, though your clients may tolerate your failure to innovate, they’ll never forgive your failure to care.
If you enjoyed these, check out my other posts in the series: Ten Rules of Legal Technology, Ten Rules of Hourly Billing and Ten New Rules of Legal Marketing.
Also, if you'd like to get more ideas like these in real time, follow me on Twitter.
Get Started Today!
From Daring Fireball comes this nugget of advice that should serve as just enough of a push to get you to start that something you've been putting off:
Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell out of the experience.
So, what's stopping you now?