Legal Marketing & PR

Expense reduction or investment advance

By Edward Poll, J.D., M.B.A., CMC

One of my law firm clients has a lawyer who is what I would call a "reluctant marketer."  This lawyer is a great lawyer, a "worker-bee," but not a great rainmaker. The managing partner considered engaging a coach to help the lawyer improve his skills within his comfort zone. Why is this important? Because the amount of work for this lawyer that is being internally generated is lessening. In other words, this lawyer has to begin helping himself a bit.

Parenthetically, I saw a recent survey that shows the amount of hours being worked by lawyers, generally, is coming down. But more on that later.

But, the management committee has come back and said that "costs" are frozen. No more spending. Is this a backward way to look at the situation?  What about looking at expenditures from the ROI perspective?  If you buy a new piece of equipment and it pays for itself in a couple of months, wouldn't you move forward? I think you should.  If a coach or marketing director can help the lawyer increase his/her revenue because of improved rainmaking efforts, shouldn't you invest in the process?

And what would this mean to the other lawyers?  A reduction in their take home pay? When you're already earning hundreds of thousands of dollars, a collective reduction by only a few dollars in sdthe short run for an ROI building expenditure may be worthwhile.

Full post as published by Law Biz Blog on January 28, 2009 (boomark / email).