What makes a successful lawyer?

This past Saturday I presented at the Law Society’s Annual Conference. Before beginning my talk, I asked the group of 150 plus lawyers, what skills or attributes they thought would make a successful lawyer. Here’s their list (in order of importance):

• Intellect

• Communication skills

• Organisation

• Interpersonal skills

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What networking ISN’T

After writing about the importance of workplace conversational skills in my last blog, I recently found myself attending an event hosted by a prominent law firm. Of course, I can’t kid myself that I was the intended audience for this festivity—in my current capacity, I am neither a client nor a potential client, and this “event” was put on solely with the intent of attracting work. But the friend I was with is a potential client, and one whom they would love to get work from….

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I’m a lawyer, I don’t do small talk…

Recently I attended an event where I found myself seated with two other lawyers, who, for all their conversational abilities, might as well have been absent. Had I not been carrying the entire weight of the conversation, we would have sat in near-total silence for nearly a half-hour. (No surprise then that the two lawyers in question have recently left private practice and gone into academic research.)

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Books to inspire your marketing efforts

There are a lot of good books out there for learning how to network, build client relationships, and market one's self. And I’ve read most of them. But very very few of these books are specific to us lawyers—which is one of the reasons I wrote Juggling the Big 3.

As a lawyer, we tend to feel as though we work within an idiosyncratic profession—we are valued and rewarded for our intellect—and not cut from the same cloth as, for example, management consultants and sales people. (Did I actually use that four-letter word “sell” in the same sentence as “lawyer”?) Further, lawyers (at least in private practice) work on the basis of billable hours, which means time spent on “other” endeavors can feel like time wasted… and only fellow lawyers (who understand this difficulty) can advise on how to “juggle” networking and marketing with the unique demands of a legal career.

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Visualize your goal

Okay, so you know what your goals are…but do you know what they look like? i.e. can you visualize yourself having achieved them? If not, I urge you to think about it, and answer these questions:

How do you see yourself in the “picture of your success”?

Where are you?

What are you doing?

Who are you with? How do you look?

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