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Message: Hi, I thought you might be interested in this article I found. What You Don’t Know About Law Firm Marketing Your clients come to you looking for advice. When they walk in your office they are usually facing a serious situation full of potentially adverse consequences. They sit in front of you and they complain. They moan and groan about how they got into this mess and about how unfair it is and about how they just need a little help working their way through this situation. Of course these clients are minimizing the potential exposure of their situation. They need help and they know it. But many of them will still shop around. They will still look for a bargain. (As a side note: These are the same people who would shop for a bargain from a brain surgeon or parachute manufacturer.) And this is partially due to their pathological condition that prevents them from naturally comprehending the concept of a price/value relationship. But part of the blame lies with you. You enable these dysfunctional psycho-clients. You do this every time you reduce your fee. You do this when you rationalize, during your own personal moments of delusional behavior, that taking a client at a reduced fee is better than letting them walk away. What you should be doing instead of reducing your fee is helping your clients understand the value of working with you. Clients have three basic choices when selecting a lawyer. Choice 1: Work with a cheap, crappy lawyer. This will generally produce crappy results. Clients know this but some of them legitimately have no money and they are forced to go this route. Choice 2: Work with a lawyer who does everything right but has only average knowledge and experience and charges exactly what everyone else charges. Choice 3: Work with the elite lawyer who does everything right, has invested in educating himself in several nuances of specific areas of the law, has taken on challenging cases and has developed relationships that allow him to achieve results not possible for about 97 percent of the legal population. Most clients will select Choice 2 because they do not understand the difference between the lawyers in Choice 2 and Choice 3. And when they select the lawyer in Choice 2 they will try and get him for the price they would pay the lawyer in Choice 1. Because in their mind, all lawyers are the same. And this is what YOU don’t know. This is not your fault. But it is your responsibility to help the client see the difference between making Choice 2 and Choice 3. It is your obligation to educate the client on the severity of the issue he faces. It is incumbent upon you to make it clear to the client that his situation will only get worse if he doesn’t act now. Help him realize what he doesn’t know and help him understand the VALUE in selecting you to resolve the issue. The challenge comes in learning how to do this. They don’t teach this in Law School. It is part art and part science. This is one of the foundational strategies my clients discover when they work with me. To the lawyers I work with, demonstrating value is as basic and as natural as breathing. When I work with these lawyers and they discover the technique for demonstrating value, it is like someone has turned on a light in a pitch black room. It is as if they were cave men in the Stone Age and I just gave them a book of matches. They need fewer clients to make the same money or they take on the same amount of clients and make more money. So this brings us to decision time. You can choose to remain in the dark and battle your clients on fee issues or you can give me a call and take care of this situation. You deserve to be paid appropriately. You are worth it. Isn’t it time you took your practice to the next level? Link: http://www.rainmakerlawyer.com/site/permalink/what_you_dont_know_about_law_firm_marketing/