Getting More Clients
or 12 Ways of Optimizing Lawyers' Marketing Efforts

1. Remove the barriers, preventing prospective clients from buying your services.
Imagine the situation when some of your prospective clients want or are in need of your professional assistance and would become real clients of yours but due to various objective reasons they are incapable of using your services. This group of prospective clients is not small at all and you should not afford yourself ignoring it in your marketing efforts. So it is necessary that you take steps into REMOVING THE BARRIERS, PREVENTING SOME OF YOUR PROSPECTIVE CLIENTS from establishing a client-attorney relationship with you.

2. Attract as many business clients as possible.
Depending on the specificity of your practice area, of course, business clients have always been top priority for law firms’ marketing efforts (and law firms, serving exclusively corporate clients, have always been in pursuit of increasing their number). I do not mean only small and mid-sized business companies, but big corporative clients as well. Moreover, most of larger companies rely on a mix of inside and outside lawyers to satisfy their legal needs. That’s because there are certain circumstances that make outside counsel the more appropriate choice.

3. Exploit the informational potential and resources of foreign countries’ embassies.
Free of charge listings prove to be a good way of making you pay. Other websites would also offer such a free service but keep in mind that is often just for the sake of gaining speed, they are lacking financial resources and that makes them highly uncompetitive (hence practically unusable by most of legal services consumers). Last but not least – not only that signing up for certain referral lists does not really bring law firms any new business, but the few clients referred from the list often happen to have pretty bad cases as well.

4. Build a reputation of a professional expert.
While lawyers as a group have a negative image, individual lawyers are generally respected for their competence. Marketing Professional Services (Legal Services in particular) needs to take into consideration the particular attorney, needs to get specific in terms of the quality of his/her work. There is no need to say that ‘good name’ is definitely what makes people turn to you in search of legal help! The regular way of establishing good reputation is through quality work performance – something that is all up to you, I personally can’t help it (in that case you need to design your marketing efforts into increasing credibility)! On the other hand you could establish a ‘good name’ through achieving a presumptive level of competence, experience and professionalism.

5. Start cooperating actively with NGOs.
START COOPERATING ACTIVELY WITH NGOs (with those of strategic interest to you – read below) and results will not be late. By NGOs I do not mean here any of the big human rights nongovernmental organizations, which have considerable financial resources, have their projects centrally financed and use either big law firm’s services or those of highly paid legal professionals (and others work entirely on the basis of law firms’ pro bono contributions).

6. Establish a direct and specific approach to your prospective clients.
‘Stimulating marketing’ includes, besides some of the already mentioned characteristics, a ‘direct’ approach to prospective clients as well. You should not, however, associate it with a direct mail or telephone marketing – that is not what I mean by ‘direct’ approach here. I mean something else, something more general in its nature – happen to know as much as possible for your prospective clients in your approach to them.

7. Establish a system of multi-aspect preferential legal service.
Lawyers have traditionally considered themselves to be a profession rather than business. But nowadays they start realizing they also need to take into consideration the same market forces. Market economy affects everything around us nowadays. Various reasons prevent to a certain extent its entering into lawyers’ profession, but certainly do not limit the effectiveness of its ‘mechanisms’ there.

8. Involve all your employees into the marketing of your law firm.
Partners are those traditionally considered to be in charge of law firm’s management and especially in bringing new business in. Various surveys confirm that. And I do not mean simply the employees in charge of firm’s marketing but all of the staff members, because their efforts as a whole, is what would make marketing efforts’ successful. Where law firm’s employees (lawyers and non-lawyer employees) don't actively put efforts into marketing because it does not fall within their job description, the firm, as a whole, suffers and fails to gain greater profits.

9. Expand your law firm’s area of practice.
A great part of lawyers do not feel comfortable with the concept of marketing, simply associating it with advertising and/or sales. And if sales’ goal is to persuade prospective clients to buy something that has already been produced, the goal of marketing is to provide the market with those products, which are actually in demand and to sell them as profitably as possible. Hence one of the main reasons for some law firms’ poor business results is their pursuit of marketing ‘demand satisfied’ services. Demand needs to be constantly taken into consideration – its past and current behavior.

10. Find your ‘legal formula’.
As I have already mentioned, lawyers’ concept of marketing is traditionally associated with either sales or attracting new clients. This is a result of a poor contact with marketing tools. Marketing doesn’t just precede and help sales. It transforms people’s needs into real products for their satisfaction. Law firms have been trying to increase revenues in various ways, but they have not created any fundamentally new service or offering. It is hard to achieve that, but there is at least one thing you could do – present you services in another form, in a different way.

11. Adjust your practice to the ever changing business environment.
In the dynamic world that we live in, paying attention to the various ‘changes’ happening around us is of crucial importance not only for your business survival, but mostly for its prosperity. I do not mean here any of the so called adjustment of market positions as you may think so. It is not about market’s demand, but its dynamics, providing us with current opportunities of realizing additional business results.

12. New forms of ‘free legal advice’.
Stimulating demand is one of marketing’s basic goals. Providing prospective clients with a ‘free bonus’ has been traditionally considered a good form of achieving that. People in one-time need of legal assistance (the great part of people fall into that category) have always been trying to avoid paying lawyers’ fees. So they usually turn to using the various sources of ‘Free Legal Consultation/Advice’ (pretty fast and easily accessible). However, most of the attorneys do not really seem to be keen on the idea of providing any services free of charge (logically as it may seem to most of you)! But you’d better reconsider the situation!

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