How to make your success inevitable as a lawyer

Are you looking to expand your law practice? Are you looking to excel as a lawyer? Do you want more clients? Do you want to prepare yourself to be a great lawyer someday?

If you can answer the following questions well, you will get it right. Everything else becomes easy from there.

What are these questions?

Why will your clients recommend you to others in their network?

There are so many lawyers. What is special about your services? Is it remarkable enough that your clients proudly recommend you to their friends and relatives?

Many lawyers have this ego. They say: because I am a better lawyer.

Great. Maybe you are.

How will prospects and clients know that you are better than other lawyers? 

Can they see some testimonials? 

Is there a difference in how they are greeted when they first approach you? Do they experience greatness in every interaction with not only you but your staff?

Do they see your newsletter in their mailbox every week and they look forward to it because of the highly relevant content you send? 

Do you brief them or counsel in a way that they sense a great difference with other lawyers?

Also, is the experience of working with you easy and pleasant, and are your clients generally delighted? Do they say so when they are done with you?

Even if you lose a case, will your client remember you for fair treatment, transparency, reliability, and professionalism? 

Clients know that winning or losing a case is not always in the hands of the lawyer, but they want to know that the best possible work was done and they lost despite everything being done the way they should have been done.

A lot of lawyers say what differentiates them is that they get results. Truth be told, that is hard to predict or judge from the point of view of a client, and no lawyer knows if they themselves will actually deliver results. 

Especially, clients can rarely judge your quality of legal work. 

It is far more likely that they will judge you by how you treat them and what other people have to say about you.

Most lawyers have very little to differentiate themselves from other lawyers. 

A lot of lawyers behave like bureaucrats. Others are not very transparent about what work they do, how they price their services, and others do not come across as client-friendly. 

But a few that have a strategy for why the client will like and trust them enough to recommend to others, and those lawyers really stand out and succeed.

Do you ever think of how you can achieve that kind of goodwill from your existing clients? If there is no plan for this, how likely are you to stumble upon client delight and referrals all through good luck alone?

Are you actually taking into account demand and supply? Are you positioned to take advantage of new trends and emerging areas of work?

You may fancy an area of law, but if you are trying to build a practice, you will be better off if you try to find some problems that remain unsolved.

Are there any people or businesses who have a grave problem that they want it solved but lawyers do not have a good solution for it yet? Then that’s a great area to build a practice because the maths of demand and supply are in your favour.

Think of all the people who lose their money in a phishing scam. Or maybe startup founders who do not have a cost-effective solution for doing legal compliance. Maybe you can think of some suppliers and vendors who are not getting paid on time. Do you know most advertising agencies in India tend to go bankrupt due to unpaid dues from clients?

Can you find clients who have a painful problem that they have not been able to solve for a while? Problems that other lawyers do not want to solve, or perhaps find too trivial or not convenient enough or too esoteric to work on? This is the first thing you should start looking for.

Then comes the training that you need to get such work done. Do you have the knowledge and the skills you need to deliver a solution in this area or these areas that you will identify over time?

Taxation of cryptocurrency is an interesting area of work in India. There is and would be a lot of work. But do you know how to handle it?

Right now there is a lot of work around technology law, GDPR, tech contracts. Do you have the skills?

A few months down the line there will be plenty of IBC work. Do you know how to litigate in NCLT?

A lot of businesses are looking for contract drafting and renegotiating post-COVID. Are you good at it? Do you know how to find such work?

If not, you definitely need to start learning. Of course, only after you identify the right areas to focus on and apply yourself.

Where and how will new clients find you?

If you are a good lawyer then clients will come and find you.

Sure, when you are a white-haired famous senior counsel. 

What about now? 

You need to have a clear plan as to how your clients are going to find you.

Do they find you online? On your website? On blogs? On social media? Will their friends and colleagues recommend your name to them? On some Chambers and Partners or Legal 500 types guide? Will they walk into your chamber?

You need to have a coherent strategy for this. Surely advertising is not allowed, but business development is not. Find out how to do business development without falling foul of the law!

When I was looking for consulting clients, I focused on free talks for entrepreneurship events, writing blogs that startup founders will find useful, lots of one on one informational interviews, referrals from chartered accountants and coworking spaces and so on. 

Do you have a strategy? Are you working on it? Do you need some guidance and help? We could help! 

How will you convert a person just enquiring/ looking for some information into a paying customer?

First step is to get people to discover you, but that is just the start. Once they knock on your door with some curiosity at best, how do you evoke buying intent in them? How do they get to know why they should hire you and what is your USP? 

There has to be a way. 

Once a client comes a-knocking, you are allowed to pitch to them. How do you do it right?

One great way to do it is to ask them the right questions, identify their pain points beyond what is obvious to them, show them more than what they already know about their own problems, demonstrate that you understand what is at stake, explain to them a roadmap as to what you want to do and why it is the right course of action.

We even teach our students why and how they must give a written roadmap to the prospects, for free or even a small fee. You have to add value in a way that really stands out from all other lawyers they may speak with. This is a critical step.

If you have a strong and credible strategy that works, it will be a huge blessing for your practice. 

Most lawyers have no coherent strategy at this level. Do you have one?

What is going to be your USP? What will become your brand over time? I hope it is not just low pricing!

What is your USP? What will people say about you when they introduce you?

A lot of people start with “I will charge lower than everyone else.”

Sorry, but that is not a valid USP. It is only a recipe for disaster unless you are Mukesh Ambani and looking to create a business with tons of capital and massive scale.

Your USP can be that your turnaround time is really fast. Or that you have the best track record. Or that you are super specialised in some area of work. 

That you are very accessible and people get convinced to work with you when they speak with you. 

That you have a great team that can handle a huge amount of work.

If cheap is your USP, know that there will soon be another person willing to charge even less. And then another. 

In every market in every corner of the world, there are people running a pricing race to the bottom, trying to undercut the others, and they also attract the worst clients on earth.

You have to position yourself right. Cheap is fine if there has to be more to it. 

When we were operating ClikLawyer, it was about technology-driven highly efficient legal solutions that were transparent. The client could understand what we were doing and why. We made sure of that. It was focused on quick resolution, so we were deviating from all the standard things other lawyers did. 

Clients could clearly see that we were totally different. They had very good reasons to come to us. And we started to grow rapidly within a few months!

If you can establish a clear USP, and people hear that about you, again and again, that is how you build a brand.