Rainmakers are most often associated with the kind of firms that have a list of names on the door as long as your arm, and an entertainment budget alone that would cover your mortgage.
But that doesn’t mean there’s no rainmaking in a small or solo office. The scale might be different, but essentially the great and powerful rainmaker just does what you must do every day.
“A rainmaker is a lawyer who, through contacts in the community, generates a great deal of business for themselves and their law firm,” says Irene Leonard in an article titled Rainmaking: Building Great Relationships. “They generate referrals and work from their contacts by the relationships they build with their clients.”
According to a 2012 research study undertaken by LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell in association with the Canadian Bar Association, the “majority of law firms surveyed earned at least 20% of their total income from inbound referral. More than one in 10 firms earned half their income from this source.”
More than half of survey participants said they receive more work than they send out. And for the most part the kind of work being referred is “litigation, arbitration or dispute resolution, or sub-specialities of this contentious area of practice … Real Estate and General Corporate still feature within the top three types of work most commonly referred.”
The most common reasons for referring a file are conflict of interest or the specialized nature of the work.
“Despite the rise of formal networks for law firm referrals,” the LexisNexis survey says, “Canadian firms in this survey were content to rely on existing, informal ‘best friend’ relationships with other lawyers and/or legal practices, especially in domestic markets.”
Being your own rainmaker means developing those informal “best friend” relationships, and starts with getting yourself noticed. Regardless of whether you’re targeting lawyers who can refer cases, or members of the community who might keep you in mind if they or someone they know needs legal help, you need to meet them and position yourself as someone who would know what to do.
Here are some tips and tricks culled from various sources around the web:
Getting to know you
First, know yourself. Pick the area of law where you want to attract work, and the kind of clients you want to work with. Even in a rural area or small town where the most successful lawyers do a bit of everything, it doesn’t hurt to give a few items in your toolkit an extra special polish if you want people to ask you to use them.
Second, meet people. Coach a team, volunteer, join an athletic or service club, or a professional association. Take prominent roles on committees, actively contribute in a way that brings you into positive contact with people.
Third, make yourself visible to people who can give you work. Write papers that get published in places they’re likely to read; offer to speak at service clubs or trade or industry association meetings; give presentations on points of law that are likely to interest the audience. This helps set you up as an expert in your chosen area.
Fourth, be good at what you do. “The quality of your work is the key to attracting more work,” says Calgary lawyer Craig G. Gillespie.
Getting to like you
Hugues Boisvert, who founded the boutique firm HazloLaw in 2011 in Ottawa, says he won’t take on a client he doesn’t like, even if the money is good, because the relationship won’t be genuine.
“My philosophy is if I don’t like you and if I don’t think I can make a difference, I’m not going to provide good value.”
Liking your client may be a luxury you can’t always afford, but there is a kernel of a consideration there that you should keep in mind. “You should generally avoid acting on files where you are unmotivated to help the client (or their cause),” Gillespie says. This goes back to his No. 1 rule, which is always to do good work. If you’re not going to do your best – and particularly when the file comes from a referral who will keep your success in mind for the next time – it may be better to turn it down than do a bad job.
Getting to hope you like me
“Networking doesn’t get you referrals. It’s as simple as that,” says Douglas Brown, a business coach for attorneys in Connecticut. Leonard agrees. “True rainmaking or business development comes from the relationship you build after the initial contact.”
Consultant Paula Black is big on setting goals – identifying a target amount of revenue to generate, for example, or a specific number of new clients. And once you’ve done that, set a goal for the number of contacts you’ll make in a day, and track what you’ve done, so the next time you call, you’ll know when you last made contact and what was said. Set a goal for the number of articles you want to write, or presentations you want to make, and then follow through.
The person giving you the referral must trust you, says Brown. He or she must know that you have the expertise, the skills and experience to do the job you’re being asked to do.
He suggests you present yourself in terms of the problems you solve rather than the area in which you practice. Have your elevator speech ready – “Be able to relate who you are and why you do what you do in a succinct way,” he says.
Keep track of the details you find out about the people in your network – dates and other things that are important to them – spouses’ and children’s names; religious holidays; hobbies. A birthday, or a big win by a favourite team, can give you a natural reason to contact a person in your network. Drop the occasional line, or take the source out to lunch.
Making the contact about the source, rather than your own interests in finding work, help make the contact more organic. But don’t soft-pedal the entire way – come right out and tell an attorney source, for example, that you’re looking for referrals, or let a third-party source know that you’re in the market. If you’ve built your network properly they already know your skills. Don’t make them guess whether you’re open for business.
Kim Covert is E-Publications Editor with the Canadian Bar Association.