Want to listen to the full episode and all our other episodes?
Hearsay allows you to fulfill your legal CPD requirements every year.
Our yearly subscription is only $299/year.
With a yearly subscription, you can access all of our episodes AND every episode we release over the next year.
Episode 11
Buy Episode
Professional Skills
You™ – Building your personal brand
Law as stated: 1 July 2020
What is this?
This episode was published and is accurate as at this date.
This episode explores how lawyers at all stages of their career can be involved in business development, and discusses how to build a positive personal brand.
Professional Skills| What area(s) of law does this episode consider? | The episode discusses Business Development (BD) tips for lawyers who mainly work in private practice. |
| Why is this topic relevant? | BD applies to all lawyers as it underpins the healthy pipeline of work that will sustain their careers. Our guests tackle the myth that only senior practitioners need worry about BD, as right from their first days in practice, lawyers build relationships, connections and their own personal brand. It is these early actions that can shape their own practice and support the firms where they work. The episode also focusses on the strategies senior practitioners can implement to progress their own practice, including thought leadership initiatives, grappling with commerciality and learning from accountancy firms. Our guests and BD experts, Chris Gingell and Araceli Robledo, who have a combined experience of over 35 years advising law firms in Australia and internationally on winning BD strategies give easy to follow tips on how lawyers can enhance their BD skills, no matter where they may be in their career. |
| What concepts are considered in this episode? | Business development for lawyers at different levels with different skill sets, branding for lawyers, building a pipeline of work, the benefits of a CRM system, the balance between legal knowledge and commerciality, the role of social media in business development |
| What are the main points? |
|
| What are the practical takeaways? |
|
| David Turner: | Hello and welcome to Hearsay, a podcast about Australian laws and lawyers for the Australian legal profession, my name is David Turner. As always, this podcast is proudly supported by Assured Legal Solutions, a boutique commercial law firm making complex simple. Joining me today to talk about business development and personal branding is Araceli Robledo, Business Development Manager at Assured Legal Solutions and my colleague there, and Chris Gingell who has a long history of business development and marketing experience in all sorts of professional services firms. Araceli and Chris, thanks so much for joining me on Hearsay. |
| Araceli Robledo: | Thank you David. |
| DT: 1:00 | Thank you. Now I wanted to start talking about your experience a little bit because we have quite a wealth of accumulated experience sitting around the table today, Chris. Why don’t you tell me a bit about your career? |
| Chris Gingell: | I’ve got a long history of working for law firms and accounting firms, but I guess my relationship with marketing in the professional services goes right back even to my days in public relations, where you have to you know about bringing the work in for yourself and then doing the work for yourself. So I guess it really spans a whole, you know, very integrated, very personal style, right through to large scale seeking work from big pocket organisations. |
| DT:
2:00 | I’m glad you described it that way because that description of seeking the work and then doing the work yourself really encapsulates the the business development experience for lawyers, or for anyone in professional services I suppose, and one of the balances of juggling business development activities and fee-earning activities we’ll talk about it later. Araceli tell me a bit about your part? |
| AR:
| So I’ve been working for law firms for about 15 years now. I’m originally from Spain and I worked for a large firm in Spain, then moved to the UK, Canada, and then back here to Australia. I started my career actually working as a PA for one of the partners at the law firm in Spain and I did that job for about a year, and I think it’s one of the best things that I could have done to start a career in the legal BD industry just because it gave me this very strong understanding of how partners work, how time constraints and pressures affect them, and yeah it’s all been through there. So it’s a bit of a mixture of larger firms and then down to more boutique firms. |
| DT:
3:00 | Because of course all three of us worked together in a large international law firm some years ago, and Araceli and I now work for a boutique and Chris, just before you retired, you worked for a very large big 4 accounting firm, but what I really want to touch on today I think, and if it’s the thing we can leave our listeners with the end of this episode, it’s that all the tips we’re talking about today are probably universal to that environment. Whether they’re a large firm or a small firm, legal or accounting, here in Australia or abroad, it’s really about personal brand, isn’t it Chris? |
| CG:
| That’s right, and it’s important if you’re going to market that you think about how the market would like to see you, rather than what you need to tell the market. And if you can kind of put it in that kind of context, I think it starts to shape how you approach the business development opportunity. And particularly one thing I think we’ll talk about a lot today is the investment in time that you need to make to get your brand as perfectly formed as possible. |
| DT: 4:00 | There’s two themes there, isn’t there? On the one hand there’s personal branding, what you’re communicating to the market, but I love what you describe first is that it’s not what you want to convey to the market about yourself, but it’s about attuning yourself to the needs of the market and then conveying that you meet that need. Araceli do you think lawyers are good at understanding the needs of their clients? |
| AR:
5:00
6:00 | Yes and no. So a lot of the time lawyers will see the market from the prism of legal services and not so much the issues that clients are having in that respect. TIP: Too often, lawyers try to sell clients what they want to sell the client – usually some highly technical legal advice – and not what the client wants to buy. Our clients are usually more interested in the outcome for them than the legal work that has to be done to get there, and if you lose sight of that, that can have real consequences. It doesn’t mean technical ability, intellect and deep, broad knowledge of the law isn’t important, we all know that it is – but when it comes to business development, the more effective value proposition is the one that speaks to the outcome – the utility that your work creates for your client. I think I might just focus what I’ll say to more junior lawyers, the ones just starting their career just because BD, a lot of the time for the more of the junior lawyers, seems a really abstract term that they don’t think might be applied to them, they’re just partners there and they just stay there and do the work. When you’re starting out it’s important to note that you are your brand as a lawyer and I remember working at a law firm years ago and this partner said that the best thing that he did for his career would start as a graduate at a big four firm. And, not everybody can start at a big four firm, he just felt that all the connections that you make when you are a graduate will definitely be there when your career progresses. So even though you think you might not be adding that much value in terms of BD-wise, you as a personality are already creating a brand for yourself, and that something that people will remember as time goes by. |
| DT:
7:00 | Yeah I mean when marketing professionals talk about orientation, you sometimes talk about the relationship marketing orientation that you really focused on a long term relationship with your clients and a mutual exchange of value over the course of a long relationship. TIP: Relationship marketing orientation is a common focus for law firms, but it’s not the only one – a law firm might be focused less on cultivating relationships and more on offering the lowest price, for example, particularly for more commoditised kinds of work, so they might focus on having the most efficient operation for delivering that work – that’s a production orientation. Another highly specialised practitioner might focus on being the best, most qualified lawyer in a very specific field, so that work comes to them in that area even if they don’t have that relationship – that’s a product orientation. But in all three scenarios, it’s a strong brand that communicates that unique value proposition to clients. So no matter what your approach to success, branding is important. Araceli or Chris, can you think of an example of one of those long standing relationships? Perhaps one that’s built in early stages in the professionals career that pays dividends much later on? |
| CG:
8:00 | I think there are many examples of that. It’s sort of, without trying to identify a particular one, I’m thinking of, and I might talk now about senior partners, who went to law school with people who end up in client land. So they were friends once, all those years ago, but the trick of that is that they’ve kept those relationships going. They haven’t just sort of suddenly popped out of the woodwork to say ‘hey here! I’m a lawyer and I need your money’ or ‘I want your business,’ they’ve actually kept that relationship going in some shape or form. |
| DT:
9:00
| I suppose another example of what you’re describing there Chris is keeping in touch with your clerk or graduate cohort because that natural progression of moving from private practise to in-house, where you move from being a provider to a buyer of legal services is the same principle there. When I think about my own graduate cohort of 25, 26, 27 people, very few of them are now at the firm that we all originally began to practise in and indeed very few of them are actually in private practise. But that naturally as you say Chris, becomes a broad network of people in a whole range of different industries, some of them general counsel, some of them in commercial roles all of whom may one day be future buyers for your services, so I think it’s a really important point that both of you raised, that have you developed your network not when you are a partner you’re ready to start providing services to people and you desperately need this large network to spring up out of nowhere, but you develop it from the beginning of your new career. By the time you’ve reached that stage where you are a partner providing legal services to your network, that you already have that network there. Araceli you said that young lawyers can have a hard time identifying that business development and personal branding is part of their role. And that it’s more of an activity for the partners to take care of and they just need to focus on billing, what are some of the things that young lawyers can do to build their brand? TIP: In this part of the conversation Chris and Araceli dive deeper into the concept of a personal brand for lawyers, how it is formed and what it looks like. |
| AR: | So can we start by trying to explain what a brand is? |
| DT: 10:00 | Absolutely, yeah actually I’m glad you mentioned that because I think personal branding is something that probably a lot of our listeners have heard of, there’s lots of personal branding seminars, I definitely remember some personal branding training during my graduate programme, but I do think it’s a misunderstood or poorly understood exercise. Why don’t you tell me a bit about it? |
| AR:
11:00
12:00 | Yeah so if I explain it it really easy terms, let’s just say you need a good pair of shoes and you buy a pair of RM Williams and you go to RM Williams that’s the name of a brand, because it is a promise of the service you know that they’ll be really good quality shoes, they’ll last a really long time if you take care of them, you know all these things. Now that is RM Williams, we know that. So the same applies for a lawyer. If I say you have a relationship with your grads and you will have worked with them in the past and years down the line you will remember that this person was a bit lazy, or this person didn’t proofread, or this person just wasn’t very agreeable, all these things come into play and they are part of a lawyers personal brand. One thing that I remember seeing a lot, and it just never pays off. TIP: As Araceli says, a brand is a symbol for a whole range of information about your product; it distinguishes one product from another. A brand represents the beliefs about our products that our customers have. If we talk about brands in the automotive industry, for example, and I mention BMW, you will all know, without me saying anything else about that product, that I am talking about an upmarket, luxury product – BMW’s brand is synonymous with that kind of product. Similarly, if I mention Volvo, many of you will probably associate safety with that brand. Brands have real monetary value – brand equity – and brands can add value to your product. One way brand equity is measured is by how much extra a customer will pay for a product with a particular brand than an equivalent product without the brand. I’m paraphrasing, but a CEO of McDonald’s once said, “if every asset McDonald’s owned was completely destroyed, the company would be able to borrow all the money it needed to replace them almost immediately, because of the value of the McDonald’s brand; that’s brand equity. When listening to this episode, keep this question in your mind – how can my brand, and my personal brand, add value to the service that I offer? Another question, one that Araceli just addressed, is how can I avoid eroding the value of my brand? |
| CG:
13:00 | Could I just maybe add to that, I think to me it’s what are you known for? And that’s demonstrated through all sorts of actions and maybe things you haven’t done, that build to how people see you. I think it’s important for people to realise that life is a bit of a popularity contest and you know so if you’ve got a reputation for being a very easy person to deal with, smart, always switched on, then people get to know you for that. But if you have a reputation for being something quite different, then that’s the way the market will start to see you. So it’s what you’re known for, what you’re trusted, if you like, to be, is very important in personal branding. |
| DT: | I really like that summary of what a brand is, that’s what you are known for, I think that’s a really understandable description of personal branding, and there’s a lot of things you can be known for. Araceli, you described a few of them being hard working, or being competitive, or being over-competitive. Chris what are the things that lawyers should strive to be known for? |
| CG:
14:00
| It’s a really good question. and it’s probably hard to answer in a general kind of way. It might depend on the type of lawyer you are so, if you’re a litigator for example you probably want to be known as being ferocious in protecting your clients interest in the sort of court type context. Whereas if you’re known as perhaps more on the reconstruction side of things, you want to be known as someone who’s a problem solver, you know. I think it can vary from what type of work you’re doing and maybe there are some people who can reach a number of different sorts of styles that they are known for. I don’t think there’s a magic answer for it, but for young lawyers I think particularly you know they probably want to be known as being smart, you’re having ideas, and ready to articulate them to their partners necessarily before they might try them on the client. But you know that they want to be seen as being the next wave of really really smart professional people that are good to deal with. |
| AR: 15:00
| Can I add to what Chris said about lawyers wanting to come across as being very smart, and sometimes that has another effect where there’s a fear of talking about where they don’t feel that smart, they feel that they’ve made a mistake, they feel that they don’t quite understand a concept, and the impetus to be seen as this you know person who’s across everything kind of murks the waters a little bit, so it’s always I think it’s a sign of intelligence to show that actually if you don’t understand something you can ask. You’re not always across things, and that’s not something that I’ve seen throughout my career that younger lawyers tend to struggle to say when they don’t understand something, or when they have made a mistake. |
| DT: | Yeah and I think that is something that people struggle with, but I think it’s probably the case that you can convey a lot of other positive connotations in your personal brand by admitting the limits of your knowledge. |
| AR: | Absolutely! |
| DT: | Expertise is one thing that you can convey but you could also convey curiousness or thoughtfulness or insightfulness by being mindful of the limits of your knowledge. |
| CG: 16:00
17:00
| Having worked in a large accounting firm that is actually almost a badge of honour because there’s someone who will know the answer to all those questions, and that provides an opportunity to bring back that person with those skills, and for you to create another meeting or another opportunity to display the full suite of services or the in depth services available in particular area. TIP: What Chris is describing here is that as a lawyer, the market for your services is made up of more than just you and your competitors on the one hand, and your clients on the other. Other participants in the market – referrers who might send you work, and influencers and promoters who might recommend you to others, participate in the market in more indirect but nonetheless important ways, and how those individuals perceive your brand is important as well. If you’re hopefully receiving lots of referrals, is it part of your brand that you refer work to others? My memory of so many law firm roles was many, even partners, would declare where their particular expertise ended and leave it at that and not take the opportunity to, if you like, tell a broader story of how assistance can be provided, or who might be available to come in and help in a situation in the broader firm. |
| DT: | But even in our context Araceli, in the more boutique part of the market, there is still an opportunity there isn’t there? Because referral outside of your own firm has a lot of advantages as well, it’s not revenue for the firm but it can be part of your personal brand that you’re a bit of a rainmaker, that you provide work to others and it can create that reciprocity of referrals, can’t it? |
| AR: | Yeah absolutely, and it’s been a really interesting source of revenue for us and you know you scratch me behind my ears and I scratch you kind of relationship. |
| DT: 18:00 | Yeah absolutely. And I think particularly important in the areas we work in when we do so much work for other professionals like accountants and insolvency practitioners. We were saying earlier that in a sense everything you do at work is part of your personal brand, because the way you do your work will be remembered, but of course it’s not enough to do your job and expect that the high quality of your work will communicate itself to your clients, you do have to engage in dedicated business development activities. I guess again starting again with the young lawyers, our listeners who might be closer to the beginning of their careers, what can they be doing as a business development activity to get their brand out there? As you say Araceli I think sometimes it’s hard for them to even conceive of it as their role. |
| AR:
19:00
20:00 | So I think the key here is too within organisations that our clients of your firm to find the counterparts through at your level. As a young lawyer how do you meet these people? Sometimes in deals you might not be in contact with them, and I worked in a law firm once where the younger lawyers were actually incredibly proactive in establishing these relationships and they went to the partners and said listen, this particular organisation has been a client of our team for a long time, we would like to get to know them better, we’d like to meet the people at our level that work for them, is there something you could organise? And they organised just a very easy drinks event for the more junior members of their teams and that was incredible. The way it’s incredible is that now 10 years later, I looked them all on LinkedIn, and they’ve all made partners from a very young age. I think it comes to show that when they were junior lawyers they were able to establish a lot of relationships that throughout time have definitely paid off. But sometimes partners I don’t think about helping junior lawyers develop these relationships, so I think another key is definitely try to make these situations happen and ask partners to join them in meetings if they can. Even if it’s just to take notes, and to really push for these more junior relationships to start to develop. |
| DT:
| Absolutely. TIP: The conversation shifts here towards commerciality and how lawyers, at any state of their careers, can have a more commercial approach in the way they provide advice and value to their clients. |
| CG:
21:00
22:00 | Yeah well I was thinking that the relationships are so obviously crucial, but the other really important thing to start building is knowledge of particular industries. You know, what I call the ‘commerciality’ type aspect of a relationship because there isn’t really anything worse than someone who knows a lot about the law, that may not know so much about a particular industry in which that law needs to be applied. This means some sort of priority towards understanding, you know reading newspapers, reading journals, reading so that you have an understanding of the commercial drivers for a particular industry or particular sectors that your work may be working in. So that it doesn’t come as a surprise to the client where you keep learning about what they are actually doing. And maybe this is also applies to senior practitioners as well, that you kind of need to be able to demonstrate an understanding for their situation, you know we sometimes talk about what keeps you awake at night, a good lawyer should be attuned to what it is that keeps commercial people and, if you like, the in-house lawyers awake at night in their organisations. You will never know the full detail because every organisation is different and has some unique challenges, but I think once you start narrowing that gap between the black letter law type issues and what are the commercial issues, you can start narrowing that gap considerably. You’ll be a far more effective lawyer, and you’ll be able to speak with a lot more confidence that what you’re saying is actually being listened to and appreciated |
| DT:
| I’m so glad you mentioned commerciality, it’s a big topic of personal branding for lawyers and it’s a really elusive concept but the way I define it is that it’s being focused on outcomes. It’s the ability to translate legal expertise through the lens of practicality into an outcome for your client, that you’re not just selling legal services in the abstract, you’re not even selling legal solutions like a particular type of document or legal proceeding, you’re actually selling the outcome that your client wants to reach. And as you say Chris, you need to understand your client’s industry to understand the outcome. Araceli, do you have some examples of commerciality? |
| AR: 23:00
24:00 | I do actually, more than an example I have more of some tips for younger lawyers to get that and as I was talking about before, about establishing relationships with your counterparts and the client, it’s always good just to ask them what is happening? What do you guys want to achieve through this document? What are your goals for the team? Any financials? And you get a lot of information just by asking those questions. In terms of getting a sense of what’s happening in the industry, I remember years ago at another firm, I was a very junior BD member of this team but what they did was we created this calendar of industry events so we would know exactly when there was an industry event, there would be people from the industry attending them, and we made sure that a couple of junior lawyers were always in attendance to those, and then at the next team meeting they would relay the information to the rest of the team. This obviously was such a win-win situation because the younger lawyers were again able to have those more relaxed conversations with people who work within the industry and hear the information first hand, then as an organisation their brand was like ‘oh there’s somebody from this particular firm coming to these events they’re all over it.’ And then it’s always good to give the opportunity to join you lawyers to talk at team meetings and to add value slowly so yeah |
| DT: | Yeah, great. Chris do you have any tips about being outcome focused or commercially focused? Perhaps for more senior lawyers who are principles of their firms or close to it? |
| CG:
25:00
26:00 | Yeah, and I’m a real big one for investment of time. And this is a huge problem for lawyers once they get past the very early years of law, in that they’re so rewarded for stuff they’re working on at the moment, that they tend to forget about the pipeline, they worry often about the pipeline when it’s a bit too late, but the investment time they need to make is to understand their clients, to get back to the commercial imperative and what it is that organisations trying to achieve. Now it’s very easy if it’s a public company because you can pull out the annual report and that will give you some relevant information, or if there are stockbrokers reports of all that sort of stuff. For smaller organisations, client organisations, I think so long as you can have a meaningful and helpful discussion with your client, they’ll probably give you almost everything you need to know. You may not have to respond immediately to ‘ah have I got the approach for you,’ but to take it on board and go away and formulate what your response might be and come back when you’ve got something that really will come very close to what what they need or certainly what they would that be interested in. The other aspect of commerciality that shouldn’t be forgotten is that very often you can make an investment thinking that that might lead to some work. I think actually you need to step back away from that a little bit because I have seen on so many occasions where coming back with a good commercial solution from the legal team about what needs to be done, has actually been rewarded by a job in a completely different area because a deal has fallen over, or the organisation is no longer interested in pursuing that acquisition, or you know there could be a myriad of reasons. But there is a reward for you because you’ve made the effort somewhere else down the line. And that was very very often the case when I worked in accounting firms. So they would make the investment knowing that they get a reward they wouldn’t know exactly when, it wouldn’t necessarily be in the area that they thought, but if they were patient and they kept the relationship going then there would be the reward- |
| DT: | Further down the track. |
| CG: | Further down the track. |
| DT: 27:00
28:00 | What you described first about recognising that you might not completely understand your client’s objectives or needs initially is almost a mirror of what we were describing earlier about junior lawyers understanding the limits of their expertise. That it’s actually a positive aspect of one’s personal brand to be inquisitive or curious or interested in your client’s needs and being a listener rather than coming to you and saying ‘well I’ve read the latest Ibis World Report about your industry and I know it better than you do.’ But let’s talk about pipelines because I think this is a challenge for junior lawyers as much as it is for senior lawyers, perhaps for different reasons, we do have this weakness of focusing on the billable work that’s on our desk today and not thinking about pipeline or sales. Which I think it’s a real particular weakness for professional services, you know, there’s so many other industries where sales is really the core part of the business, it’s the core business unit around which everything else operates. But in professional services we do sometimes forget to sell, and to build a pipeline, until as you say we have nothing else to do. How, Chris, maybe we’ll start with you, how can our listeners make time for business development or make time for generating that pipeline of work even when they are busy? |
| CG:
29:00
30:00 | It’s a six million dollar question, it really is because you know the number of times I’ve been out with a senior partner down to a client where I’d said ‘no before we go we’re going to discuss how we’re going to conduct this meeting, what we’re going to offer, where we need to listen carefully to so we can construct something that maybe we can come back on later.’ And it’s been reduced to in the cab on the way down, we’re only 10 minutes away and finally the phone, the partner’s phone, has stopped ringing and we can talk about it. You just have to make the time because unfortunately the culture is very much dealing with the present and not dealing with the future. Other firms will look at, in other sectors, will have a very big focus on pipeline and will actually ask you to nominate which areas of work you’re going to get from a range of client organisations, sorry, from that organisation across a range of fields and to put a value on it, and you have to submit a plan based on it, so a very different approach. Now I didn’t say that that’s a perfect approach, because it can also lead to padding out and maybe fudging figures a little bit, but somewhere in between, you know, of leveraging the work that you are currently doing to find other work opportunities. Now it might be, and I’m thinking of insurance law particularly, where you just want to do a lot of work on lots of claims, seeking to continue to get lots of claims work into the future, that’s fine, no problem, I’m talking about it in a situation where you may have some other services to offer, or you may have some partners or teams with particular expertise that you want to introduce. You need to make time to think about what’s the best way of doing it rather than say at the last minute ‘oh would you be interested in speaking to Jill or Joe or whoever about something’ which doesn’t seem quite relevant at the time. You really need to give some thought to that and how it can be constructed properly |
| DT: | I suppose it’s easier said than done, but it really is a mindset shift to treat winning work as equally important as doing work. |
| CG: | Exactly, exactly and it is hard there is no doubt about it, you do need to make time to win work and secure your future. |
| DT: 31:00 | Finding that balance is particularly difficult for junior lawyers because in a way even if they’re capable of that mindset shift it might be that there’s limits on their ability to act on that depending on the mindset of their supervisors. Araceli, do you have any tips for some of our listeners who might be junior lawyers who want to spend more time on business development but aren’t sure how? |
| AR:
32:00 | A huge amount of tips, and you’re right a lot of juniors are pretty hamstrung by the partners that they work with. I worked for partner years ago and he said that he was an incredibly successful partner from a very young age and he said that the trick to everything was that he had a very good memory. He remembered clients, he remembered when things were coming up for them. Luckily for us and technology we don’t need to have great memories, we can set up a lot of things. So when you’re a junior lawyer you will be working for certain organisations and things that can really help you to set up Google alerts. I think we all know how to do those. So anything new that comes up for a client you get it straight to your inbox. The other point is obviously the again building on that relationship that you have with your counterparts at these organisations and just asking them straight away. I actually think there’s a lot of value in going to events and to keep on establishing relationships and trying to add value for those organisations. So you know, in an ideal world that we might think that we went to an event and suddenly somebody had an issue and they engaged us, that will never happen, but you can offer them, you can talk about speaking opportunities. Lots of firms will organise their own events so inviting people that you met at those events, so there’s a lot of background work that one can do as a junior lawyer. |
| CG:
33:00
34:00
35:00 | I think actually we are touching on what is sometimes called a client relationship management system. Now the system that Araceli has just sort of outlined is a straightforward one. You use a diary, you record what happened when you’ve encountered your clients in different sorts of environments including directly at work. You record birthdays, you know when family members of the client meet with you and you happen across this information by going through important events like weddings all those sorts of things, just to build up some general knowledge of what’s happening over there in client land and to be able to recall it quite easily. Now there can be very formal systems for that you know they’re very expensive, so we don’t really need to go into it in detail in this session, but I do think it’s important that people build up this knowledge and have it retained. You can’t always remember it, but you can actually write it down and you can keep it in your book for future reference. TIP: The formal client relationship management system (or CRM for short) that Chris is referring to are important software platforms for law firms. The software is used to manage lawyer interactions with current and future clients. Each client has a profile on the system, which is updated whenever there is a marketing interaction with them. These include 1:1 meetings between lawyers and clients, emails, event invitations and attendance, etc. There is also other personal data stored there, such as birthdays, likes and dislikes or what type of entertainment they prefer. The data is then analysed to improve business relationships with clients, specifically focussing on retention and driving more work. Keeping all this information in one place helps larger organisations keep track of the information. It also monitors engagement from clients regarding any marketing materials sent to them, be it legal updates or invitations. The more sophisticated CRMs normally include a team of people managing them, who can then provide valuable insights on client behaviour. The important thing about CRM systems is that because they are a way of organising and accessing information, they are only as useful as the information going into them. How are you collecting feedback from your customers, and is it giving you insight into their preferences, insight into what they want from their professional advisers? |
| DT:
| Chris, I mean this really interests me about the way we go to the market, I suppose or the way we build client relationships, why do you think it’s important to clients that we have that kind of not just professional relationship but a personal one as well? That we do remember birthdays or events in the lives of our clients families. Why do you think a personal relationship is so important in professional services? |
| CG:
36:00
37:00 | It’s still a people-to-people business and it’s hard to see it shifting away from that, and it makes it so much more of a natural discussion you know if you can throw in ‘oh how was your trip to you know’ (if you’re allowed to travel still) ‘how was your last trip to… you know what happened tell me the good parts…’ It just makes for a far more easy discussion to have. Whereas if you don’t really know the client and you don’t really know much about them as people, you know it becomes quite stilted I think. It seems almost unnatural developing rapport from scratch. Whereas if you can be as natural as possible and with natural curiosity about your client and their businesses and their challenges, then you’ll receive a lot back, you just have to listen for it. And I probably can say that I was global account manager for Deloitte’s relationship with Macquarie Group, and they operate in 50 plus countries around the world and we would go down to Macquarie very often just to find out what was happening and they were happy to share that because they knew they could learn a lot from our expertise and knowledge of what works all around the globe and with other investment banks. They wanted to tap into that. Now once again it may not lead to work immediately, but we could always count on it leading to something |
| DT: | That less transactional approach of being focused on building the relationship not necessarily just well ‘I took you out to lunch, so send me a job’. |
| CG:
| Yes, yeah and look clients see through that immediately, and they also see through other things that are offered freely by law firms. So if you go down to the client and you’re running short of conversation and you say ‘well why don’t we have a CLE just for you.’ I still remember a general counsel of a very large investment bank, not the one I just mentioned but another one saying, ‘ah CLE’s are such a chore’. |
| DT: | They certainly can be yeah. TIP: That is, unless, you’re listening to Hearsay! Right!? |
| CG: 38:00 | And didn’t want them at all. So in that particular encounter we had failed I think in doing our research as to where their organisation was doing transactions, doing work, and so we weren’t responding to how we might help them and they just closed us down basically. |
| DT:
39:00
| It’s a great example you describe there because I think it shows you really need to understand what the attribute your client is actually looking for. How they decide between you and another provider, and I think your example described there that you are kind of selling to this client the expertise that we can educate you on this area of the law, but that wasn’t the determinant attribute in that case. I think often, and this is why I think that personal relationships are so important, I think often the determinant attribute is trust that there’s a base level of expertise that you expect from your professional in a given area and then once they have that level of expertise they tick that box. But to really select them over someone else you have to trust them and it’s so much easier to trust someone that you know. |
| CG:
| Yes, I think trust is a pre-qualifier and if you don’t get that you’re not going to get anywhere. And I mean I’ve talked about some large organisations but this can be applied to any organisation or client in your client base. It’s about building that empathy, trust and willingness if a job comes up. Very often the senior lawyer and the client will not know where their jobs are coming from necessarily. But when the job comes up they should feel very comfortable about calling you and getting you in to talk about it. |
| DT:
40:00 | The last area I want to talk about is going to market communicating this brand we’ve been describing up to the world at large. Araceli earlier we were talking about junior lawyers getting the assistance of partners to do that, to help them organise client events or put themselves out there, and I remember you know some years ago it was quite difficult to get yourself out there without riding on the coattails of a more senior practitioner, particularly for being published for example if you wanted to be published in a journal you’d be published on the second string after a much more famous name, but there’s a lot of ways to get yourself out there now as a junior lawyer without that isn’t there? It’s easier to be published and it’s easier to demonstrate your knowledge to the market. Can you tell me a bit about what junior lawyers can do to demonstrate their expertise? |
| AR:
41:00
42:00 | So we live in a time now that the more senior partners didn’t grow up with and that’s the time of social media, and with platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter junior lawyers can actually put out their content very comfortably and confidently and give actually a lot of of value. So I think learning how to work LinkedIn successfully is actually a brilliant idea. You don’t have to write really long pieces of case law study, even just short snippets of really good advice that you have picked up on working other deals work very well. Another thing is is just following those organisations that that you do work for, and interacting with them in a very compelling way. Be like ‘oh I saw this update congratulations on this promotion’ or ‘that thing that you wrote that was really great’ and maybe even be sharing some of those other updates by the clients. The other thing that works quite well is in large organisations whenever they organise events and partners notoriously always are very late for that and you have a bunch of clients in the meeting room just, you know, or at the reception just hanging around, such a great time for junior lawyers just to go down and introduce themselves and whilst you don’t have to talk about business per say you can just introduce yourself on a personal level. So touching on the point that you and Chris were making before that how the legal expenses out there, what is it that makes you so special? I think those times when you’re alone with, or with those clients, expect to bring about a bit of your personality, you know, what are your interests? Are you into I don’t know rock music? Do you play in a band? Are you a palaeontologist? What is something that will make you different. Through those snippets of your personality you might be able to engage much further with those our clients going forward |
| DT:
43:00 | It really comes back to developing a personal relationship and not just a professional one and that trust comes from that personal relationship. But I’m glad you mentioned social media, it seems always trite to say use social media to further personal brand but it is something that empowers junior lawyers in particular because it makes clients more accessible. You don’t need to rely on the reputation of a partner to be published in an academic journal. The example I think of, and I hope you don’t mind me mentioning here, is James D’Apice who posts a lot of great videos on LinkedIn, his coffee in the case notes series, a younger lawyer who has a great following on LinkedIn and a really powerful personal brand because of the way he’s used social media to communicate with his peers and his clients. And it might be that the majority of his followers are lawyers in private practise right now but as we were saying right in the beginning in this episode, who knows where they’ll go. Chris, speaking now to our more senior listeners, it’s a different dynamic for them going to market demonstrating what they can offer to clients. It’s a different dynamic for our more senior listeners. I’m going to market demonstrating what they can offer to their clients. Chris, do you have some tips for practical things that our listeners who might be principles or close to becoming principles, can do to convey their personal brand to the market? |
| CG: 44:00 | I do. Look I’m sure there’s quite a few things but a tried and trusted route, and if it’s done successfully works very well in establishing your brand, is this whole area of thought leadership. In other words what is it, what’s the next wave of concern, what is the next wave of legal service, what is happening that people need to be aware of, so in client land they can start thinking about it now. It’s sort of in a sense predicting when clients need to react to the future. And if you can get into that space that’s sort of fantastic. It’s tough and it’s grinding, and the good thing about senior people is that they can also rely on their legal team to help them with that, but you know predicting the future is a often good way to actually be seen as reliable, trustworthy and interesting…kind of developing that interesting brand with people that seek you out. |
| DT: | And almost finding a blue ocean where you’re not competing on the same expertise as everyone else. |
| CG: 45:00 | Yeah that’s right, and it’s not just about writing stories, it’s also about many of the things actually that Araceli has mentioned, trying to be put on the speakers list for example. Now if you can’t get on because that’s contested space, you can certainly do it within your own organisation in having many conferences or seminars or things of that nature, but I think ultimately you need to be seen as having something different, or something very interesting to offer the market. And look it’s all been done before you know it’s not rocket science I guess, but you know if there’s been a deal recently or a transaction or a very successful court result, what are the learnings from that? You know these are the sorts of things that you turn to automatically to try and establish your brand as someone to seek out. |
| DT: 46:00 | And I suppose again when we’re looking for a message to convey from one of those successes it comes back to commercial reality and conveying it in a way that is focused on the outcomes, doesn’t it? |
| CG: | Yeah and in plain English. You know because so many times you know you hear the story of ‘well you know we gave the sort of legal explanation to the general counsel or over to the more senior client but actually they wanted it written in terms senior management could understand. People forget that there are internal clients to deal with, usually senior management, who need to understand things without all the legal jargon. |
| DT:
47:00 | I’m glad you mentioned that delivering advice or even an update on a current issue in plain language. It’s relevant not just to large firms whose clients might have internal legal counsel in passing that on to the business, but also to boutique firms and smaller firms, and regional and suburban firms, who are speaking directly to clients without a legal background. Because I think it really is one of those determinant attributes being able to give advice in an understandable way, in a clear way, and it comes back to commerciality, doesn’t it? Being focused on outcomes for the client. |
| CG:
48:00 | And it’s called just making it easier for everybody rather than having to spend extra time to unpick what a legal meaning might be. Now I know there are some risks in saying that because you know we write in a legal way for a very good reason. But very often if it’s about what is the right decision for a business to make it needs to be phrased in simpler language. TIP: There is much that law firms can learn from accountancy firms when it comes to business development. In this segment Chris gives some examples of BD activities undertaken by accountancy firms which law firms could replicate. |
| DT:
49:00 | And coming back to the work itself, I think lawyers sometimes think of themselves as selling ‘well I’m selling this shareholders agreement or I’m selling this statement of claim that’s my product’ but I think a lot of clients are quite ambivalent about the legal document or the legal output, they’re interested in the outcome that it ultimately achieves and that is really the valuable service, is converting that expertise into an outcome. And as you say, if you can deliver advice in that way that’s a real distinguishing feature and the same goes delivering and updating business development contacts. Chris you’ve had experience not just in legal services but in other professional services disciplines as well, particularly and most recently in the big four accounting firms, do you think that there’s anything that law firms, big and small, can learn from the way accounting firms approach business development? |
| CG:
50:00
51:00 | I do actually, I’ve already touched on the idea of having a pipeline and knowing what that pipeline looks like so that you can go chase it. So that is automatically making you think about the future and allocation of time and effort towards chasing that work. The other thing that I think accounting firms do quite well is if a new person arrives at a client in a senior position, they will endeavour to facilitate the success of that person in that role. They’ll workshop it and essentially bring in some different expertise, but by and large what they’re using is the opportunity to embed themselves you know in the organisation by saying ‘we’re here to help that person be successful in the role.’ It gives them lots of opportunities to interview, for example, all the people that person will report to and some of the people who will report to that person and talk about the role. They will talk about the individual, very often the person has come from there internally or is well known in the market, what are the challenges that person might face? So the accounting firm is putting themselves right at the centre of the organisational need for that organisation. I haven’t seen many law firms do anything like that in my history with them. I think that’s quite good. There are some other investments that they will make. Now this might apply to a larger law firm than a smaller one, but still it’s around making sure that as many different services from that legal service provider are knowledgeable to the client or the client is aware of them. And they’ll make some investments. So if you’re going for a longer term pursuit, so we’re talking not just what’s going to keep us busy next week, next month, but maybe up to a year out, they will allocate budget for this investment to chase that work to occur. And they could be even supporting, I’ll convert it to law firm talk, that will be if you like underwriting the cost of a legal team to develop a product or service in an area of interest. So that this team doesn’t have to worry about filling up this book with current work and then at the end of the day or maybe on the weekend, then having to think about the work that’s a year out. They’re a given resource if you like to start work on it now. I think that’s something that I haven’t seen many law firms do. So it really is much more than an eye to the future and filling your book of work over a longer period rather than just over the short term horizon. |
| DT: 52:00 | That mindset shifts towards a more longer term way of thinking and approaching sales and pipeline with equal importance to doing work that’s on your desk today. |
| CG: | That’s right. |
| DT: | That first example you gave is a really evocative one for me, I think that’s fascinating, because it approaches the client in two waves, as you say their embedding themselves within the organisation and in that way conceiving of the client as the organisation, but they’re also conceiving of the client as the person that they’re committed to that individual’s success in that role and that’s kind of their entryway into the organisation as a whole. And that’s such an evocative example of what you’ve been describing all through today Chris that it is a people to people business and that personal relationship is so important, no matter what the size of the client service provider. |
| CG:
53:00 | And I mean you just can’t barge in with that sort of offering you do need to have the organisational support for it from both you know the law firm and also from the client. But what it does do is it opens up a whole range of new issues that you were never aware of before because you’re interviewing very senior people in that organisation. Let’s not worry if it’s a big organisation. It can be a smaller one, you get to know many of the issues that are really important and the mind then starts ticking over about ‘oh they might need to know all these other things’ or be introduced to other people in my law firm, where you’ve got some particular expertise. So it really then comes back to the word commerciality, it forces you to understand the commercial sort of environment in which your client’s organisation is operating. |
| DT:
54:00 | And a different way of thinking about being outcomes focused as well because you’re not just focused on the organisations outcomes, but you’re also thinking ‘well what does this individual, who I’m dealing with this as my client, need to succeed in their job?’ I think that’s something that all lawyers should be contemplating, ‘what makes my client, if they’re an employee of the client organisation, what makes their job easier day to day? |
| CG:
| Where I think it’s heading is to say that the client, the individual who has received the promotion or if you like appointment, the success of that and the success of the law firm, are aligned in achieving success.The objectives of each are beautifully positioned together rather than being separate. It’s not that transactional ‘I want you I want work from you,’ it’s together we can be successful together and once that starts to happen, even if that individual moves on, they will remember that you had their back and when they move to their next role whether it’s at the same organisation or elsewhere, they’ll invite you back. |
| DT: 55:00
| Araceli and Chris, we’ve talked about a lot of topics today, we’ve talked about personal branding, we’ve talked about the elusive nature of commerciality being outcome focused, and how both junior and more senior lawyers can go to market. If you had to leave our listeners with one tip from our conversation today what would it be? Chris? |
| CG: | You have to make time for business development. You can’t wing it, you can’t push it aside, it needs to be prioritised. Where your work will come from in the future is so important it’s not funny. I know it’s stating the obvious but organisations, law firms particularly, find ways of prioritising the here and now, over the future. |
| DT: | It might seem obvious but a lot of us are not doing it, that’s a great tip. Araceli? |
| AR: | So for me it would be you as a junior lawyer you already have a brand and you can still work around your brand. So just be mindful that everything you do, all the interactions that you might have, will come to bite you or help you in the future. |
| DT: 56:00
| I think that can be almost a fearful or paralysing thought but you already have a brand and reputation is everything, what if I do something to damage my reputation? But you can think of it in such an optimistic way there are so many opportunities now to build my brand and cement my success long into the future. I definitely really enjoyed this conversation Araceli and Chris thanks so much for joining me on Hearsay! |
| AR: | Thank you David. |
| CG: | Pleasure. |
| DT:
57:00 | You’ve been listening to the Hearsay podcast. I’d like to thank our guests Chris Gingell and Araceli Robledo for joining us on the show. Now if you’re an Australian legal practitioner you can claim one continuing professional development point for listening to this episode. Now whether an activity entitles you to claim a CPD point is self assessed, but we suggest that this episode constitutes a point in the practise management and business skills field. If you’ve claimed 5 CPD points for audio content already this CPD year, you may need to access our multimedia content to claim further points from listening to Hearsay. Visit htlp.com.au for more information on claiming and tracking your points on our platform. The Hearsay team is composed of Tim Edmeades who produced this episode, Kirti Kumar who researched it, Araceli Robledo our guest and who also manages our marketing, and me David Turner the interviewer. Hearsay is masterminded by Nicola Cosgrove and Chris Cruikshank the co-founders of Assured Legal Solutions making complex simple. You can find all of our episodes as well as our summary papers, transcripts, quizzes and more at htlp.com.au. That’s HTLP for Hearsay The Legal Podcast.com.au. |
You must be a subscriber to access this content.