How Attorneys Can Make a Great Living and Live a Great Life
There are two kinds of law firms in existence today:
FREE Law Firms and FAKE Law Firms
Your law practice or your professional service firm is either FREE or it’s FAKE.
A FREE Firm is:
Fun – You enjoy what you are doing and who you work with.
Rewarding – Your work helps fulfill your personal mission.
Easy – Your work comes naturally to you.
Engaging – Your firm magnetically attracts others.
You know your law firm is FAKE if it is:
Frustrating – You can’t seem to break through to the next level.
Annoying – Going to work bothers you.
Killer – Your business is literally taking years off of your life.
Exhausting - You’re tired all the time and you don’t know why.
My mission is to help FAKE firms become FREE firms.
If you feel like you have been stuck in a rut in your law practice…
If you have not eaten dinner with your family in months…
If you can’t believe that you have to see that difficult client AGAIN…
If you are just flat out tired of busting your butt today to pay yesterday’s bills…
Listening to this interview may be the most valuable time you have ever spent.
Press play on the audio player below to listen to a nationally syndicated interview that has the tips, strategy and tactics that successful attorneys use to move their firm from FAKE to FREE.
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EmailThe Lawyers Who Don’t Need Marketing and Business Strategy
If you work in a law firm – particularly a big law firm – you may not need to know how to originate new business. Someone may feed you business. And they may do so for years and years.
You will probably make a respectable salary and you will get to do meaningful work, some of which you’ll enjoy.
If you work for yourself, own your own law firm, you may not need to do much in the way of marketing. You may be able to go directly from a public position (Prosecutor’s Office or Public Defender’s Office) into a practice where your reputation delivers clients to your doorstep on a steady, regular basis.
Both of these options are true career paths that thousands of lawyers have worn over the years. Many of the lawyers that follow these paths make a good living.
There is one challenge with these two paths: They leave an awful lot to chance.
With the big firm path, you never have the opportunity to control your own destiny. You constantly wait for someone to deliver work to your office, you say thank you, and you kill yourself for no glory.
On the second path, you have every opportunity in the world at your feet. You can take whatever cases you’d like. You can charge whatever you’d like and you can work whenever you’d like …
…if you know how to attract and retain clients.
Note: Being a good lawyer is not a strategy. Being a good lawyer is a prerequisite for any attorney who owns his/her own firm. If you stink as a lawyer, your lousy reputation will overwhelm any marketing efforts you can possibly employ.
Being a good lawyer and promoting yourself minimally (putting up a website and attending a few local events) will help you expand your reputation and get you to a comfortable place financially.
If you want to make more money, mid six figures to seven figures and beyond, you will need to do some marketing and set a sound business strategy.
That means creating a message and targeting a specific market with that message. It’s not necessarily advertising…it is marketing and business strategy.
The bottom line: If you want to top out at $150,000 - $300,000 per year, that’s great. Continue to work for someone else or start your solo shop and rely solely on good fortune and your reputation.
Risky but possible.
If you want to make $500,000 and beyond (I have several clients who make multiple millions of dollars per year in law firms they own, with less than 10 employees) you need a sound strategy and you need marketing.
Need help with this? Think I’m wrong? Give me a call.
Dave Lorenzo 888.692.5531
How Will You Know When You Are Successful?
We spend a great deal of time on this website discussing strategy.
We look at the strategy that law firms use to help make them successful. We look at the strategy that successful attorneys employ in order to build a solid client base. And we talk about the successful strategy that transforms a lawyer into a Rainmaker.
One thing we have not addressed, one thing that many attorneys don’t address, is the actual definition of success.
Success is something that only you can define.
For most people, money is a big part of the success equation. Money may not be able to buy happiness but it can provide you with more options.
Here is an exercise that I do with my clients when we first begin working together. It helps them clarify their vision of success.
Click on continue reading for the exercise.
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