In our Precision Pitching course, the students learn to effectively pitch themselves in meetings with clients. Although our students are enthusiastic with our consultative approach to pitching, they frequently raise questions about how to actually get meetings with clients. Or, to be more blunt, they say the following:

Why would clients want to meet with lawyers? We tend to be boring and have little interesting to say.

If you find yourself facing the same problem, you can find below some tips on how to be interesting for clients.

Tom felt like his law firm was driving him crazy. Despite his attempts to make everyone happy, nobody was, including him.

His supervisor kept tearing up Tom’s contracts with a red pen to highlight all his stupid mistakes.  So, Tom tried to please his supervisor by slowing down and being more thorough.

But, his practice head kept warning him that he was spending too much time on his drafting and that this was causing the firm to lose money from write-offs. So, Tom tried to please his practice head by speeding things up.

But then, he got the red pen again. And then, he got the lectures about write-offs again. And now … you got the picture.

How can lawyers make their writing more sophisticated by taking advantage of the Apple Effect?

What can lawyers learn about selling their services from Alec Baldwin’s famous “brass balls” speech?

It’s bad enough that most lawyers hate the concept of networking. But, even worse, when we drag ourselves to sit through a networking event, we oftentimes fail to capture the value of such events by not following up effectively with our new contacts. (And, NO, sending a lazy Linkedin request to connect is not effective networking.)

In this post, you can read about how to use Chat Gpt to help you capture the value of your networking.

On November 16, we held our Profitable Pricing course. In this course, we encouraged lawyers to embrace Alternative Fee Arrangements (AFAs) not only to escape the downward pressure against billable rates but also to uncover cool projects with clients (e.g. becoming an outsourced legal department).

For your convenience, we’ve summarized some key takeaways - both from us as well as from our students.

Unless you have been living under a rock, you’ve probably figured out that Chat Gpt might be an awesome solution for the complex and time-consuming process of drafting contracts. I use the word “might” because some serious contract drafting experts are warning to stay away from Chat Gpt.

As law firms face shrinking profitability due to their focus on billable hours in a world where AI makes hours disappear, maybe it’s finally time to seriously embrace alternative fee arrangements (AFAs). Although you may have concerns that AFAs are just a scam driven by clients to push down on law firm income, in reality, you will discover that AFAs are a major tool for driving law firm profitability due to their ability to enhance efficiency, boost client satisfaction, and promote revenue predictability.

You can find below 10 reasons why AFAs can help you with your profitability challenges:

If you’ve spent time on Chat GPT, you’ve figured out that it’s important to provide AI with the right kinds of instruction prompts. Otherwise, you just end up with a bunch of nonsense that looks good, but is worthless in practice.

Why is it that we haven’t learned the same lessons when working with flesh AI (a.k.a. associates)? I am frequently amazed by the supervisor instructions given to associates that simply don’t work. As a result, the supervisors end up doing the writing tasks of the associates, and later bitch about it to us.

In the first part of this series, I explained how to identify problematic run-on-sentences as well as two tech tools for identifying them (Microsoft Word’s Style Checker and Expresso).

In this second part, I will explain how to quickly fix these sentences as well as a tech tool to help you speed up the process.

When I set up a legal writing course for associates, I am frequently asked by US or UK partners to make sure that the course addresses “run-on sentences”. These are the types of sentences that exhaust readers by running on, and on …. and on.

When I tell my students about this request, they sometimes get a confused look on their faces because:

• the concept of run-on sentences does not exist in their native language; and/or

• their culture’s legal tradition embraces long sentences.

In this article, you will learn about (i) how to identify run-on sentences in your writing and (ii) some tech tools to help you identify them more easily and quickly. (In Part Two, I will explain (i) how to fix these sentences and (ii) some tech tools to help you with the process.)

In Part 1, I talked about the dilemma facing most lawyers when asked to involve themselves with business development. If you want to be good at BD, it helps a lot to be an optimist. But, since most lawyers are uber-pessimists, we struggle with BD and find ourselves with practically zero persistence.

Lawyers know that business development requires a handful of sales skills, a pinch of luck, and a boatload of persistence. Freaking BD persistence… it’s a serious problem for all of us. We didn’t go to law school to do sales.

When you get up to present at a conference, what is your goal? Since lawyers are addicted to billable hours, you are probably gambling some non-billable time with the hope of landing some legal work. To accomplish this, you want to sell yourself to potential clients as a competent, trustworthy, and mildly entertaining lawyer.

In December of 2021, I had the pleasure of attending the CEELM Winter Ball, a festive event filled with good food and great discussions. Although I truly enjoyed this opportunity to catch up with old friends, I also found it fascinating to observe lawyers operating outside of their office comfort zone by partaking in the mysterious ritual of networking.

Why do so many of us struggle in networking conversations? And, what are the basics for making these conversations enjoyable? Read on to find out.

Frequently, I hear students apologize for their English. For example, they will hand me writing samples with an embarrassed look on their face and try to lower my expectations with some strange excuse like “my English teacher was previously my parent’s Russian teacher.”

Such apologies drive me crazy because they are completely unnecessary. In 99% of the cases, after I review their sample, I discover that their English is more than adequate for their job.