Darin M. Klemchuk 1/8/19 Darin M. Klemchuk 1/8/19

Power Habits - Daily Action Plan

Want one thing to achieve success and be a high performer? Use the power habit of the Daily Action Plan — commit to and do daily your three most important tasks. Sounds simple. Surprisingly difficult.

This is the third in my series of “power habits” - routines when practiced consistently over time provide a strong compounding effect. The Daily Action Plan is a simple one — each day you will determine the three most important things you can do, commit them to writing, then do them. Sound simple? While powerful, actually crossing these three tasks off your list is extremely difficult for successful people.

Power Habits - Daily Action Plan

Here are my best lessons learned on implementing this system over the years.

1. Selecting Three Most Important Tasks

When people start out on this habit, they often pick easy tasks, sometimes even process tasks like “entering time” or “getting organized.” The real value in this habit lies in picking your highest value tasks to the exclusion of all the lower value activities. To pick high value tasks, you need to be crystal clear on what your priority is for a particular role. For example, if you are a lawyer that leads a team of other lawyers and service professionals, your role should be developing a high performing team that creates results. This means your priority should be working through others (the team) to get the results. The daily three then should be focused on team-centric tasks such as project management, providing strategy input and review of work, recruiting and developing professionals, customer relationship management, etc. If your Daily Action Plan is consistently focused on individual performance as opposed to team performance, you have a conflict between your role and your daily performance.

When selecting the three tasks, I recommend picking one that is a “must do” and your two next most important tasks. Your goal is to get the “must do” one done no matter what. Focusing your “must do” tasks on building habits and systems that compound over time is one of the best ways to produce more and be successful.

2. Time Blocking — Making Space for High Value Work

Despite what any of this think, the world is at best indifferent to each of us. That means we each face a constant stream of interruptions, other people’s crises, and new potential opportunities. I have found that if you are not proactive about the time devoted to your daily three tasks, it is very difficult — particularly for successful people — to get them done on a consistent basis. A great tool for production is called time blocking, where you devote a set amount of time to your daily three. This is an interruption free zone and best if you can devote at least two hours to your most important work. Successful time blocking may require putting the time block on your calendar, empowering your admin to protect you from distractions, turning off email and text messages, and may require physical isolation from others.

3. Accountability Tools for Daily Action Plan

We have used the app called CommitTo3 with success for this habit. It allows you to set up a team of participants, each person is allowed only three tasks, and the app shows you when people add tasks and complete tasks. This has the obvious advantages of transparency and allows teammates to see what others are working. But one of the best advantages is the app allows for productive discussions about whether teammates are doing tasks consistent with their role as perceived by other team members. This has lead to some great conversations about workload, priority, and roles.

4. Writing the Tasks for Success

A word of caution on this exercise. It is important to draft your tasks in language that you can control. Otherwise, your success will be dependent on the actions of others or circumstances outside your control. This will position you to lose too often. For example, if one of your daily three is lunch with a client and you draft the task as “meet Jane for lunch to discuss new project,” you could be setting yourself up to fail if Jane cancels on you. Best to draft it in more positive language like “ready for lunch with Jane to discuss new project.” You can control your preparation and therefore score a win even if there is a cancelation.

Final Thoughts on Daily Action Plans as a Power Habit

This power habit is maddening hard. But it is one of the most effective tools to high achievement. To maximize this tool, you will likely need to pair it with the time blocking power habit to prevent intrusions and make space for this work.

Putting the Daily Action Plan Power Habit into Action

What: Each day, you commit to one “must do” and two other high value tasks. Your game plan is to organize your day to leverage your ability to achieve these high value targets. Your Daily Action Plan is your weapon to fight off intrusions.

Why: Committing to doing your highest value work is one of the best ways to become a successful, high achiever.

Apply: For the next 30 days, commit in writing to your daily three tasks and don’t stop working until you get each of them done each day.

Additional Evening Routine Resources

Organize Tomorrow Today by Dr. Jason Selk. See Chapter 1.

The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan.

I hope you have found this blog post helpful and welcome comments from readers.

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In addition to Thriving Attorney, Darin M. Klemchuk is founder of Klemchuk LLP, a litigation, intellectual property, and transactional law firm located in Dallas, Texas. Click to read more about Darin Klemchuk's practice as an intellectual property lawyer as well as IP mediation services. For more on the latest developments in IP law, see Ideate blog and IP Questions Answered blog.

Darin M. Klemchuk 1/6/19 Darin M. Klemchuk 1/6/19

Power Habits - Evening Routine

What’s one of the single best ways to improve performance? An effective evening routine consistently practiced. Read for a discussion of this power habit and in particular what activities make a powerful evening routine and what activities kill productivity.

This is the second in my series of “power habits” - routines when practiced consistently over time provide a strong compounding effect. In my first post, I discussed beginning the day with a powerful morning routine that generates energy that pushes you through the day. In this post, I discuss the evening routine, where we bookend the work day, transition to personal time, examine the day to look for valuable lessons learned, and prepare for sleep.

Power Habits - Elements of a Successful Evening Routine

1. Close the Professional Day — A key step to ensuring good sleep and an interruption-free transition to your personal life is to close out the work part of the day. The focus in this step is to know what you are not doing so that your mind can let go. Here are my typical steps to get this done:

Collect Incoming Communications — I use the Getting Things Done (GTD) organizational method made famous by David Allen. I highly recommend that system to organize your world at a high level. One of the central themes of GTD is being comfortable not doing things, which requires you to have a handle on all the things you could be doing and making a conscious choice not to do any of them. A critical first step in that process is to corral all the incoming inputs like emails, phone calls, texts, mail, etc. Before I leave the office, my goal is to survey all of those and summarize them in one place so I am comfortable with not working on them that night. See my post Project Planning for Lawyers — Upping Your Game in a Chaotic World for more on project management.
Inbox Zero — I am one of those odd professionals that operates on a “zero inbox” system each day. What that means is that every email I have received will either be handled or filed away in a variety of email folders such as “Action Needed,” Action Needed - Low Priority,” “Read-Review,” “On Hold-Waiting,” or “Someday-Maybe.” I find this discipline gets me along way toward the collecting step.
Review Daily Action Plan and Weekly Action Plan — Anyone that has any degree of success will presented with more opportunities than they have time to entertain. That means success is largely based on choosing the right actions in the face of endless interruptions. Some of the best tools I have found are to set a Daily Action Plan and a Weekly Action Plan to keep you focused on those high-value opportunities. The Daily Action Plan is your one “must do” task plus your next two most important ones. The Weekly Action Plan is your four most important targets for the week. The action step for this power habit is to review what you committed to do today (Daily Action Plan) and what you are committed to do the rest of the week (Weekly Action Plan).
Set Tomorrow’s Daily Action Plan — To truly let go of the day and plan tomorrow, I select my Daily Action Plan tasks for the next day in light of my weekly progress. I enter those tasks into my workflow management tool called “Things” as well as enter them into an app called “CommitTo3,” which shares my three commitments with my team to get peer accountability. Note - for lawyer’s due to our confidentiality concerns, I write my tasks at a high general level.

With all of that done, your day is complete and you are ready to begin transitioning to your personal time.

2. Transition to Personal/Family Time

Back in the early 1990s when I was an engineer at The Boeing Company, I had an early morning work schedule that allowed me to be at the gym by about 4:00 pm each day. In the military, unless we were on a mission, we had a clear break in the day between training and personal time. However, as I became a professional in a highly competitive service industry (law), technology evolved to constant connection and communications, and my role as managing partner/business owner became more prominent, my professional life blurred with the other areas of my life. In high-stakes litigation, there really isn’t much end to the day.

This creates an obvious problem of closing the professional part of the day and starting the personal part of the day. Email is one glaring example where work can be an omnipresent intrusion. I have found that picking an activity, preferably physical, is a helpful interruption between work and personal life. If you can’t engage in a physical activity, then I have found an activity that uses another part of your brain is also effective in breaking up your day. For example, if you work involves heavily left brain activities like law, switching gears to a right brain, creative activity can help the transition.

Another important step in the transition is to cut off business communications — emails, social media, Internet surfing, voicemails, etc. It’s nearly impossible to make the shift to your personal/family time while holding an iPhone. In fact, even having an iPhone in the same room, I have found to intrude on my attention. Best to put electronics away when you make the shift to personal time.

3. Examine the Day

As explained in Power Habits - Morning Routine, I think journaling is an invaluable activity. The evening routine is a great time to examine your day to look for lessons learned, areas of improvement, celebrate wins, reflect on helpful insights. As part of my evening routine, I do the second half of my journaling, which includes another round of gratitude, celebrating wins, and identifying lessons learned/areas of improvement. The compounding effect of this last step is enormously powerful. It is easy to justify not journaling for a day or two since not much value is to be gained from this. But 90 days of journaling in a row generates large gains.

4. Prepare for Sleep

Some advocate setting your mind in a positive direction before going to sleep as a means of getting your subconscious mind to work on your success while you sleep. I do not know if that works or not. But I do believe that right before going to bed, these activities have powerful effects:

Quick review and positive visualization on tomorrow’s Daily Action Plan tasks,
Set something you are looking forward to doing in the morning (helps with an early morning routine), and
Repeat a set of positive mantras or future me visualizations.

Final Thoughts on Evening Routines as a Power Habit

As I explained in my morning routine post, the focus for the morning time period is to earn wins before you start your day as well as engage in activities that have a strong compounding effect over time. Evenings can be devoted to protecting the morning routine by eliminating as many choices and tasks as possible that typically have to be done in the morning. For me, I set out my clothes for the next day, pack my gym clothes, pick my Daily Action Plan tasks for the next day, and generally have lined up the dominoes for success — the night before to minimize distractions in the morning. Evening routines like morning routines are flexible, and there clearly is no right way to do one. See additional resources for ideas on other activities.

Putting the Evening Routine Power Habit into Action

What: Dedicate 10-20 minutes to close out your professional day, begin a transition to your personal/family time, reflect on your day to uncover lessons learned, and prepare for sleep.

Why: A commitment to an effective evening routine, consistently practiced, is one of the most impactful changes you can make to increase productivity, reduce stress, and develop self mastery. A consistently practiced evening routine sets you up for success in your morning routine.

Apply: Commit to perform an evening routine Monday through Friday for at least 10 minutes per day for the next 30 days. Make it a priority over checking work emails when you get home.

Additional Evening Routine Resources

Unbeatable Mind and Way of The Seal by Mark Divine.

I hope you have found this blog post helpful and welcome comments from readers.

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Darin M. Klemchuk 10/29/18 Darin M. Klemchuk 10/29/18

Radical Candor at Law Firms - Building High Performing Teams

How can law firms build high performing teams? According to Kim Scott, a former executive at Apple and Google, a concept called “Radical Candor” is the solution. This post provides specific tips for lawyers to practice Radical Candor in their law firms.

Years ago, we published a blog post on The Importance of Honesty in the Workplace. It's still one of our most read pieces of content. This post explores a concept called “Radical Candor” created by Kim Scott, a former executive at Google and Apple, and provides specific tips for lawyers to practice Radical Candor at law firms.

Culture is Scalable, Relationships are not

Before getting to the essence of Radical Candor, it is important to recognize that the number of quality relationships a boss can maintain is limited. While that number depends on a variety of factors, six direct reports plus or minus two seems to be a commonly accepted number. The selection and quality of these relationships is often the driving factor for professional success. Radical Candor is about relationship quality.

* * *

Several years ago, I was lucky to spend a day listening to Gary Keller of Keller Williams explain the steps he took to create the largest real estate company in the world. He drew on a slide two companies, each with a boss and five direct reports — one company had 120,000 agents, the other had 6 people total. As Keller explained it, the difference was in the selection of the five direct reports. Put simply, Keller was able to scale a business and culture through his careful selection of the leaders on his team, who in turn developed high performing teams below them, and so on.

While simple, this is a critically important concept as a business grows beyond the scope of its founder’s ability to maintain a relationship with every employee.

Elements of Radical Candor

Kim Scott introduced the concept of Radical Candor through presentations and her book Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity. She argues that greater candor makes better bosses. The elements of her system are (1) providing guidance (2) to build high performing teams (3) that get results. As to the guidance element, Scott defines two fundamental dimensions of radical candor — “challenging directly” and “caring personally.” Using those dimensions, boss/employee engagements can be divided into four quadrants based on the level of each dimension involved:

Low Challenging Directly/Low Caring Personally — Described as “manipulative insincerity,” this is where the boss doesn’t address the problem either because they don’t have time or they wish to be liked more than being an effective boss.
Low Challenging Directly/High Caring Personally — This type of behavior can be described as “ruinous empathy,” where the boss cares too much to provide needed feedback.
High Challenging Directly/Low Caring Personally — This is obnoxious aggression where the boss employs no filter in providing feedback.
High Challenging Directly/High Caring Personally — This is Radical Candor and it is hard. Using this approach, the boss communicates directly with care to help a team member improve. That means not ignoring poor performance and choosing to be liked over results. This is where real improvement occurs, and is well worth the effort.

See our post Radical Candor -- Honesty at the Office, which explains these dimensions in more detail.

Tips for Lawyers to Implement Radical Candor

Here are some thoughts, based on over 20 years of being a lawyer, on how to best implement Radical Candor in a law firm environment:

Do not wait until employee reviews to provide guidance. Employees, particularly millennials, want performance feedback. Waiting months to give an employee feedback is not an effective way to develop performance or a high performing team.
Avoiding tough conversations usually does not pay. Scott describes this behavior as either “ruinous empathy” (high caring) or “manipulative insincerity” (low caring). Ironically, she believes that “obnoxious aggression” is more likely to get results than the two avoiding approaches. Best to handle tough conversations quickly and move on.
Look for opportunities to praise. People generally spend more time avoiding pain than seeking positives, which means we tend to remember what went wrong more than what went right. Radical Candor includes praising employees for jobs well done. Look for those opportunities to make deposits in your teams emotional bank accounts.
Does your law firm recognize the value of high performing teams? I’ve worked in companies where individual performance is more valued than team work. Trying to build a high performing team in this environment can be difficult, possibly counterproductive. But even in an individual performance environment no one rarely succeeds alone.

Final Thoughts on Radical Candor at Law Firms

Building high performing teams that get results is hard. The key to achieving this according to Scott is a boss’s willingness to provide guidance that challenges directly while demonstrating personal care. This is tough in any environment. Typical law firm cultures are not always open to direct feedback, and implementing this management style is likely to ruffle feathers initially. But the rewards of increased team performance is worth it.

If you liked this subject, you may be interested in our other law culture related posts, What Makes an Ideal Work Environment and Advantages of a Values Based Business.

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Darin M. Klemchuk 9/29/18 Darin M. Klemchuk 9/29/18

Power Habits - Morning Routine

What’s one of the single best ways to improve performance? An effective morning routine consistently practiced. Read for a discussion of this attorney power habit and in particular what activities make a powerful morning routine and what activities kill productivity.

This is the first in my series of “attorney power habits” - routines when practiced consistently over time provide a strong compounding effect.

Power Habits - Producing Power Through a Morning Routine

Before I started the morning routine power habit, mornings typically involved checking email before leaving the house and possibly surveying the news and social media. More often than not, I would go to the gym, then rush to the office to “get things done,” which typically was impacted by the priority of others usually through emails, phone calls, and office stop-bys. Scoring “wins” in this chaotic environment is difficult, and often, I would get to the end of the day feeling like I got nothing done — at least nothing on my list.

I’ve always been a morning person and fairly quickly figured out that my time before lunch was best used on analytical projects while after lunch I focused my time on people activities such as calls, meetings, and other communications.

By adopting a morning routine years ago, I positioned myself to start each day with a “win” before the world started imposing its will on me. Below are the various elements I found to be most effective for my business, which involves three distinct and competing roles — Managing Partner, business developer, and practicing lawyer.

Elements of a Successful Morning Routine

A little bit of research will uncover a vast universe of activities included in morning routines. The following is a list of my preferred activities developed through years of experimentation:

Hydrate with a large glass of water.
Checking in with my “why” (purpose) and my core values. Takes about two minutes. See Lessons 9 and 10 for a discussion of ethos in my post 10 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started Practicing Law.
Writing down 3 things for which I am grateful. Takes less than a minute. I have tried several journals and planners over the years. My overall favorite is the BestSelf Journal, which is a paper journal. For digital users, I recommend the 5-Minute Journal. Starting the day with gratitude puts you into a positive mindset.
Exercise - at a minimum working up a sweat. I usually commit 30-90 minutes for this. An added advantage of the morning workout is you can couple that with doing something really uncomfortable, which has significant psychological benefits. In addition to hard workouts, you can do a cold shower or extended plank hold until muscle failure. The key is scoring a “win” by overcoming adversity early in the morning before your day starts.
Read 5-10 minutes of educational content. I usually have a theme for a quarter and read material around that theme. I string four quarters into a “personal PhD” for the year. Podcasts and emails subscriptions like the Daily Stoic are other great learning resources. Podcasts are particularly good because I can listen to them while working out.
“Future Me” visualization - pick a future time frame and visualize success real time. Takes less than 2 minutes. Visualizing completion of quarterly goals is a common application.
10 minutes of Box Breathing. Boxing breathing is a focus exercise developed by Mark Divine and taught in his Unbeatable Mind Academy. Put simply, you inhale for 5 seconds, hold it for five seconds, exhale for five seconds, hold for five seconds, then repeat the cycle. The goal is to keep your attention on the breathing. When thoughts intrude, you let them go and bring your attention back to the breathing cycle. This exercise develops awareness and focus simultaneously.
Review top three targets for the day, determined in my night routine. Takes less than 2 minutes. If I miss my night routine, I write the targets down at this step. See my posts Power Habits - Evening Routine and Power Habits - Daily Action Plan for more detail on this.
“Mental Workout” - centering breath, state a positive mantra, visualize success on your top three targets from the previous day and success on your targets for today, positive mantra, and centering breath. Takes less than 2 minutes. This was developed by Dr. Jason Selk and discussed in his book Executive Toughness.
“Daily Hooyah” is a practice a group of us from the Unbeatable Mind Inner Circle developed that involves sending a positive text message or email to someone expressing our gratitude, sharing appreciation or honor. Takes less than a minute and is significantly impactful to relationships. See my post on Building Relationships Through Emotional Bank Account Deposits for more information on why this is a powerful relationship-building tool. If you can only do a few things each morning, this is one of the best and will produce noticeable results within a week.

Morning routines like night routines are flexible and there clearly is no right way to do one. See additional resources for ideas on other activities.

Final Thoughts on Morning Routines as a Power Habit

Don’t get too wound up on all the possible actions you can include in your morning routine or if you miss the routine or a few steps. I am not always able to do all of these activities each day. As with any power habit, if you miss more than twice in a row, that should raise a red flag.

Here is a short list of things I have found to be unhelpful in your morning routine:

Checking email first thing,
Surfing the web, reading social media, or other “electronic” activities,
Watching/reading the news,
Thinking about work,
Telling yourself you don’t have time for a morning routine, and
Failing to set an intention the night before.

A missed evening routine the night before heightens your need to nail the morning routine. As observed by the team at the One Thing, it takes on average 66 days to form a power habit before you start nailing it without thinking.

Putting the Power Habit into Action

What: Dedicate a set amount of time before your day starts to activities that provide a compounding effect on your personal development. Even 5-10 minutes per morning will work. The key is consistency over time to get the benefits of compounding.

Why: A commitment to an effective morning routine, consistently practiced, is one of the most impactful changes you can make to increase productivity, reduce stress, and develop self mastery. Additionally, a consistently practiced morning routine provides you with a “win” before the day starts creating momentum throughout your day — all while the rest of the world is sleeping.

Apply: Commit to perform a morning routine Monday through Friday for at least 10 minutes per day for the next 30 days. Knock out your routine before checking your electronics and thinking about work.

Additional Morning Routine Resources

Unbeatable Mind and Way of The Seal by Mark Divine.

The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod and Miracle Morning Millionaires by Hal Elrod and David Osborn.

Executive Toughness by Dr. Jason Selk. The “Mental Workout” is provided in Chapter 8.

The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. Note - this is one of just a few books I have read over 10 times. It is well worth the investment.

Warrior Book - “Balance” element of the “Core Four.”

I hope you have found this blog post helpful and welcome comments from readers.

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Darin M. Klemchuk 9/23/18 Darin M. Klemchuk 9/23/18

10 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started Practicing Law

This post summarizes 10 lessons I wish I knew before I started practicing law and building a law firm. Based on over 20 years experience, the lessons include law firm staffing, leadership development, marketing and business development, law firm business models, and self mastery.

One of the challenges in drafting a "X things...." blog post is condensing your experience into a set number of X. What follows is my best attempt to distill down 10 valuable lessons learned over 20+ years of practicing law. My criteria was what strategies would have had the most impact on my career had I known and put them to use when I started practicing law in 1997.

1. Law Practice Business Model

The first is a painfully simple strategy. There are only three essential elements to the business of a law practice:

Leads - This refers to a constant stream of potential clients. Without new clients, a business will eventually die, so it is vital that a law business attract a stream of new clients to replace the ones that are lost.
Relationships - Repeat business from quality clients is the foundation of a profitable law business. If your model does not attract repeat business clients, then you must focus your efforts on generating more and more new clients. Because attracting new clients is often more expensive and time consuming, many successful law business models focus on keeping existing clients happy and obtaining a stream of new matters from the existing client base.
Leverage (Leadership) - At some point in the development of a law business, the amount of work exceeds a lawyer's capacity or desire to do it. Leverage is your ability to create systems and processes to manage tasks, acquire tools, delegate tasks to employees, and scale your business by focusing on higher value work. This requires leadership skills development. Put another way, your ability to develop your leadership capacity acts as a ceiling on your law business.

It's easy to over complicate a law practice. However, if you keep your focus on these three essential elements, you will have a significant step ahead of your competitors. It's also true that your weakest element is the limiting factor on your business. See Lesson #3: Law Firm Staffing, Part I and Lesson #7: Law Firm Staffing, Part III for a discussion of how collaboration can solve this problem.

For more reading on this topic, I suggest Gary Keller's The Millionaire Real Estate Agent. While not directly on point for attorneys, this book walks the reader step-by-step on how to create and scale a different type of professional service business. Mr. Keller also built the largest real estate firm in the world, so he has quite a bit of credibility in this area.

2. Lead Generation for Lawyers

For this lesson, I have a couple scribbles. The first is the lead generation funnel:

Here’s how I define the lead generation funnel:

“Targets” are companies that could be clients, but you have no contact information for a decision maker at the company. To convert a target to a lead, you need a contact. The best way to get a contact is through an introduction from a third party that knows both of you.
“Leads” are potential clients where you have contact information. Leads are either qualified or unqualified. Once a lead has been determined to be “unqualified,” it falls out of the funnel.
“Prospects” are leads that are qualified. I recommend making that decision early and using defined criteria of ideal clients and the type of prospects you are willing to entertain to become clients later. I further categorize prospects as either short-term prospect that you can close within 2 weeks or long-term prospects that require significantly more effort.
“Clients” are prospects that have completed your engagement process — conflicts check, signed an engagement letter, and paid a retainer.

At this point, you are likely wondering why I made this so complicated. The primary reason is you can waste a ton of money on marketing/advertising and generate endless unqualified leads. Measuring your success rate and ROI at each of these steps is essential to success in business development. For example, you may have done an advertising campaign that created 100 leads, 2 prospects, and 1 client. These numbers suggest that the message was aimed at the wrong audience, but your conversion rate was excellent (50%). Without measuring these KPIs you would have no idea where the campaign broke down other than you invested quite a bit of money to generate one client. However, if the amount you invested is less than the amount you would pay to get an ideal client, the campaign was a success. See Lesson #8.

The second scribble summarizes the three types of lead generation:

“Referrals” are leads provided to you by other professionals (Referral Partners) or through contact with your clients (Client Contact). I have heard others refer to this lead generation channel as “seeds” or “word of mouth.” Regardless of what you call it, this is one of the most effective, but time consuming lead generation activities. In fact, a good referral partner can be more valuable than a good client over time.

“Inbound Marketing” is where you take an action that gets the attention of a potential lead and causes them to take an action. For example, if billboard advertising is your lead generation strategy, the billboard gains attention of passersby and calling a 1-800 number to provide contact information is the action. This is referred to as “interruption” marketing since your goal is to interrupt the attention of a lead. The Internet has disrupted this strategy. Now, you can write an educational blog post that focuses on certain keywords. Potential leads that are looking for insight on that topic will conduct Internet searches to find suitable content. With this approach, you are not interrupting a lead’s attention; you are simply answering their question.

“Outbound Marketing” is intentional effort directed at meeting and converting known targets that you have predetermined to meet your ideal client criteria. This requires you to have an “ideal client” profile in mind. See Lesson #8. I find many lawyers haven’t done this exercise. Outbound marketing is the most time consuming of the three activities, but it also provides the greatest opportunity to grow your law business since you are targeting only ideal clients.

3. Law Firm Staffing, Part I

For this lesson, I include my third scribble that identifies the four different roles in a law business:

This model divides the four roles into two focuses — business development and service delivery. For service delivery, service professionals provide much of the technical work and act as subject matter experts (SMEs). A project manager leads a team of service professionals to deliver service on time and within budget, and otherwise meet client expectations. A “relationship manager” is responsible for the overall client experience, selecting the appropriate project manager for a matter, receiving feedback from the client, and if the project was successful, selling the client on additional, new projects. A “hunter” or “new client developer” is responsible for attracting new clients to the firm.

While this may seem complicated, it is straightforward. Knowing which hat you are wearing at a particular time is helpful. A dialog between lawyers regarding who is the relationship manager versus the project manager on a particular matter and where those roles overlap can lead to better client service.

Controversial Observation — In 20+ years of practicing law, I have never seen a lawyer simultaneously great at all four roles. The truly great ones focus on one or two roles and collaborate with others, who are naturally great at the other roles.

4. Understanding People Have Different Communication Styles

As discussed in Lesson #3, lawyers face pressure to be good at all things. Being an effective communicator can lead to significant increases in leadership capacity. In my experience, people fall into one of three dominant communication styles. Understanding yourself and your audience is essential to success:

“Rule Followers” like details in writing and time to absorb them. A best practice in working with a rule follower personality is to provide them with all the necessary details in writing (be certain it is accurate) in advance and schedule a time to go over the conversation. If you are one of the two personalities below and ignore this suggestion, you will likely lose the person in the beginning of the conversation.
“Bottom Line Oriented” communicators want bullet points. They don’t want to wade through a long, meandering memo that has no specific point. One of the best ways to communicate with this personality is to provide an “executive summary” toward the top of the email or memo with details to follow. Think in terms of a 140-character Tweet. If you are a rule follower or verbal processor and don’t observe these recommendations, you run the risk of annoying the bottom line oriented communicator with over detail or not enough organization to the conversation.
“Verbal Processors” make decisions through “talking it out.” If this doesn’t make sense to you, you are likely a verbal processor. One of the worst things you can do with a verbal processor is to problem solve or interrupt them during the processing phase. Best practice is to have agreement that you are “going to verbally process” before you “problem solve.” If you are naturally bottom line oriented, I recommend resisting your urge to get to the bottom line and focus on making time for the verbal processing.

So which style are you? What are the styles of your team members? As a leader, can you adjust your style to meet people where they are at? What are the styles of your clients? Opposing counsel?

Being able to recognize how others prefer to communicate and make decisions can lead to significant relationship improvements. For more on relationships, see my post Building Relationships Through Emotional Bank Account Deposits.

5. Law Firm Staffing, Part II

Warning — Another Controversial Statement.

As a group, lawyers:

Don’t want to be told what to do; and
Simultaneously, are bad micromanagers.

If you can break this frame in your law business, you will have a huge competitive advantage.

6. Trust Your Gut

Just about every time I have not followed a gut feeling, I have regretted it. This has been the experience with clients I wasn't sure were the right fit, engaging with potential clients, employees and making hiring decisions with new employees, and workplace collaborations.

The best way I have found to open up more intuition and less thinking is to turn off your analytical brain. Whether it is "sleeping on it," meditation, or shifting gears to a physical activity, opening up space allows your intuition to send you these important messages. Listen to them.

7. Law Firm Staffing, Part III

In the military, sports, and high performance business teams, a leader is only as good as his/her team. Put another way, there are no low performing teams, just weak leaders. Jeb Blount provides in People Follow You five “levers” of effective leadership:

Put People First
Connect
Position People to Win
Build Trust
Create Positive Emotional Experiences

If you want to increase the "Leverage" element of your law business, you must increase your leadership capacity.

Final point — remember as a leader, you are always on stage. Put another way, you aren’t allowed the luxury of having a bad day because people are watching you and will make assumptions based on your actions and attitude.

Listen to my podcast for more information on law firm leadership: Leadership in Action Podcast Series: How to Rebuild Your Law Firm From Scratch

8. Law Firm Marketing Fundamentals

Here are some basic points for an effective marketing and sales strategy for a law business.

First, be clear about what you sell and who is your ideal client. Entering your time, tacking on expenses, and sending a client an invoice is not good enough in today's competitive market. Lawyers that deliver high value are always in demand. To maximize value to a client, you need to focus on ideal clients for your business. Trying to satisfy all potential clients (e.g., being everything to everyone) is a losing strategy.

Second, what would you pay to engage with an ideal client? Answering this question tells you how much to spend on marketing and advertising to attract leads that ultimately could become your definition of an ideal client. Without knowing this number, you are at risk of wasting money on marketing or spreading it too broadly.

Third, service businesses typically compete on either quality, service, or price. Competing on all three pretty much guarantees failure. I recommend picking one of the three and designing your law business around that quality. This affects the business structure, pricing strategy, staffing, and marketing messaging. Random acts of marketing can be very expensive.

9. Be You -- Do It for You

One of life's greatest tragedies is to be loved for someone you are pretending to be, not who you really are. Private practice can be a competitive, full contact sport where success is measured in terms of trial wins, client origination, billable hours, etc. as a replacement for grades, LSAT scores, and university prominence for law school competition. With all this pressure, it is easy for lawyers to lose who they are as they strive to be great at everything.

As I wrote in Lesson #3: Law Firm Staffing, Part I, I have never seen anyone great at all aspects of the law business -- at least not without paying a heavy personal price. In my opinion, the most successful lawyers are clear as to what they are great at it, who they are, and what they are not great at. In other words, they check their egos, develop self awareness, and focus on their unique ability. They also collaborate with others that have complimentary unique abilities to achieve a greater collective success than each could do on their own.

Happiness is found in being you as opposed to pretending you are someone else. See my post on What I Learned about Living from Nearly Dying for more on this topic.

10. Most Important Leadership Lesson

We live in a left-brain dominated profession. Think, analyze, discuss, analyze some more. We also are driven to collect skills like writing, deposition taking, oral advocacy. But as I have learned over many years of observing strong leaders, "being" is often more important than "doing" when it comes to leadership. There are many axioms in this area like "strong leaders stand for something" and "a leader gets the organization that he/she deserves" to name a few. My view is that if you want to grow your business, you have to start with developing your leadership capacity (being) because your being is a limiting factor on the organization. I realize this is not as sexy as measuring billable hours, originations, and profits per partner. But I also believe it to be a natural law similar to the law of the farm (you have to plant in the spring to harvest in the fall).

From my experience, if you want to develop your leadership skills, I would start with developing your "being" or as some call it your "ethos." As you intentionally develop your "being," you can develop a parallel path of skills development. Chapter 1 "Establish Your Set Point" in Mark Divine's The Way of the SEAL provides an excellent discussion and set of exercises on developing your why, principals, passion, and purpose. Commander Divine describes developing your being as "vertical skills" and doing as "horizontal skills" development. I highly recommend his companion book Unbeatable Mind for a comprehensive plan for integrated personal development that is a foundation to leadership capacity. Note Unbeatable Mind is internal development; The Way of the SEAL is about external deployment of the Unbeatable Mind skills.

Below is my final scribble on vertical skills (being) versus horizontal skills (doing) for lawyer leaders:

I hope you have found this blog post helpful and welcome comments from readers.

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