Business Development aligned with a Customer Retention/Service Focus

Many lawyers look to establish longstanding profitable relationships with their clients. However, when economic conditions become tight, clients, especially corporate clients, often delay implementing new initiatives or investigating existing areas of exposure because their resources are dedicated to more immediate and necessary expenditures. As such the corporate counsel is often treated as a luxury instead of as a necessary component of corporate growth. Additionally, today's contracting budgets, shrinking bottom lines and an ever increasing atmosphere of pessimism has made it more difficult to take on and maintain new business. Therefore, law firms often find themselves in a position where they are over-servicing existing clients and taking the risk of being perceived as overbilling, causing friction and resentment amongst clients. Even the most conservative and frugal lawyer finds him/herself vulnerable if the client's financial position has them watching their bottom line with a microscope. In other words, we are in a period where our risk of client decay outweighs our opportunities for growth.

As lawyers many of us are unprepared to take on the transformation required to succeed as businesses. New Business Development for Professional Firms represents a transformation of the ways things are, a movement away from traditional methods of:

• developing business,
• thinking,
• dealing with potential clients, and
• traditional concepts of sales.

Our modern perspective recognizes change, it recognizes that we, as Lawyers, can take actions that counter the problems associated with the client being in control, that establishes Professional Equality, and that has a measurable increase on client retention and development. Key to these changes is attitude, a new way of thinking, and identifying new markets and new prospects to penetrate in order to provide them with your valuable expertise.