for attorneys

Given today’s economy, it is essential for most law firms to maximize the number of referrals they receive from other attorneys. In this article, I will provide you with the most effective strategy you can employ to dominate your market for attorney referrals.

Attorneys should consider their marketing efforts to other law firms as a marketing campaign. Thus, you need to consider both TACTICS and STRATEGY. The means by which you go about reaching out to other attorneys are your tactics. These include advertising, direct mail, websites, talks to groups, networking, publicity, and blogs and other social media.

Due to the Slow Economy, You Need a Better Strategy

You certainly can contact potential referring attorneys and get to know them. If you are personable enough and can convince others that you know your field, a few may send you cases. This is rarely any longer effective enough, however, to attract enough new business. Why? The economy. Recently, I spoke with a Family Law attorney who chairs the Family Law section of her local Bar, which serves a community with a population of around 500,000. Her comment to me was that most everyone in her Bar section is complaining how slow business is. When Family Law attorneys are slow (and this goes for attorneys focusing on most every other area of law), they usually contact their referral sources and ask for business. If nearly all of your competitors are contacting their referral sources, this tactic, in itself, is probably not going to produce much.

Rather, in a slow market, it is essential to consider your strategy. Why? Should it be that the size of the market for your services has dwindled since the beginning of the recession, and the number of competitors fighting for business in your service area is about the same, you must increase your market share to regain the level of profitability you enjoyed a few years ago.

Marketing strategy simply consists of defining your target market(s) and determining what you need to say and how to communicate your message to attract business. The goal of your strategy should be, To convince potential referring attorneys they would be making a huge mistake to refer to anyone else but you or your firm for the type of services your provide. The question then becomes how do you achieve this.

Apply These Steps Correctly and You Win Big

The first step to becoming the dominate referral source in your legal community is BE SUPERIOR. You need to be better in regards to the issues that are most important to your professional referral sources. We call these concerns emotional hot buttons. More specifically, emotional hot buttons include the frustrations, hopes, aggravations and fears potential referring attorneys have when referring a client to a firm within your area of law. These may include being attentive and timely with those they refer, providing realistic expectations, expediently responding to phone calls, keeping your clients up to date with their cases’ progress, communicating with clients warmly and professionally (not placing yourself on a pedestal), achieving the best possible outcome based on your clients’ desires and expectations, and charging reasonable, predictable fees.

What you need to do is determine the order of importance of potential referring attorney’s emotional hot buttons for those in your legal community. We call this the emotional hot button hierarchy.

Next, you need to observe your practice from an unbiased, exterior viewpoint to determine how effectively you are at responding to each emotional hot button, especially to the two or three most impactful ones. What you need to aim for is managing these issues better than any of your competitors.

If you are not clearly superior to other attorneys in these regards, you need to innovate your practice so you are. We developed and apply an eight-step Innovation Formula that enables a firm to implement improvements that will allow them to develop a convincing argument of superiority. (We will gladly send you a copy of our Innovation Formula upon request).

Let us say you meet the needs of referring attorneys (and their referrals) unquestionably better than your competitors. Then what? Develop your message and employ it everywhere (i.e., in advertising, direct mail, websites, blogs, social media, etc.). When you attend a networking event or meet an attorney for lunch, for example, you should have promotional material to present to them. You also need to be prepared to deliver a 30 to 60 second oral presentation that will captivate your listeners. The term for this is an elevator pitch.

The content of your promotion, including your verbal presentation, should follow the steps of The Marketing Formula. This will enable you to substantially increase your market share and have the best possible chance of thriving despite the economy.

Article written by Marc Aronson. Copyright © 2011, Business Builders. All rights reserved. No portion of this report may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means (including e-mail or fax), without written permission from Business Builders.