By Elizabeth Jolliffe
Hate it or love it, NBA superstar LeBron James’ recent decision to leave the Cavaliers and join the Miami Heat appears to boil down to positioning himself to win NBA championships. He knows what he wants to achieve in his career and he knows he needs help to achieve it. He looked for teammates and an organization he thinks will provide the best opportunity to succeed. He made a tough and controversial decision about his own career.
Similarly, you can look closely at how you can best position yourself to get what you want in your legal career and decide what actions you will take to achieve your goals.
If you want to develop a specialty within your practice or firm, what do you have to do first and whose support do you need?
If you want to work with more than just a few lawyers in your firm, what can you do to change this and who can help you make it happen? If you have tried and failed, what can you do differently next time? How can you match your needs and interests with the firm’s needs and interests?
If you want more referrals, how can you expand your network into more meaningful relationships? How can you first provide value to people who are in the best position to give you referrals? How can you make it easier for people to think of you and remember what you do when they have an opportunity to refer business?
If you want more clients, what is your target market and how can you best position yourself in front of it? How can you let more potential clients know what legal services you offer? What can be your unique niche — your specialty — the issues you address for your clients? How can you differentiate your legal services from other lawyers’ services?
A word here about niches: by developing a niche you can maximize your marketing efforts and resources. You can aim at and organize your marketing around the clients you really want and the services you most want to offer. You will use your time, money and energy much more efficiently and effectively than a haphazard, generalized and exhausting approach that makes you blend in rather than stand out.
I know the idea of selecting and developing a niche scares some lawyers, especially newer ones. They think they will lose out on business that might otherwise come to them. But by targeting the specific market niche you want to serve, you are focusing yourself to develop business and you are building a name — a brand — for yourself. If clients outside your niche come to you, you can still decide whether to work with them.
As a client of mine said recently, you are not going to get a hit if you are not in the batter’s box. And you won’t get near the plate if you are not in the game. Or, as some say in golf, never up never in.
So take charge of your practice and career. Make decisions about what you want and start positioning yourself to get what you want. Get in the game. Step into the batter’s box. Or, circling back to basketball, be the point guard in your own career.
Elizabeth Jolliffe is a career management and business development coach for lawyers. She practiced for 19 years as a business litigator and partner at Clark Hill PLC. She can be reached at (734) 663-7905 or Elizabeth@YourBenchmarkCoach.com.
