How Do You Really Build Your Client Base?

• Author: Douglas H. McPherson
• Pages: 49-64

Published in Landslide® magazine, Volume 12, Number 5, a publication of the ABA Section of Intellectual Property Law (ABA-IPL), ©2020 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.

This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American Bar Association.

How Do You

Really

Build

Your Client Base?

By Douglas H. McPherson

Dmitrii Guzhanin via iStock/GettyImages

Published in Landslide® magazine, Volume 12, Number 5, a publication of the ABA Section of Intellectual Property Law (ABA-IPL), ©2020 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.

This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American Bar Association.

T

raditionally, business development hasn’t played

a huge part in intellectual property (IP). Clients found

their attorneys through recommendation, reputation,

or geography, and, as long as they were looked after,

the client would stay with that rm and the relation-

ship would be passed down to the next generation

when a partner retired.

Today, things are very different. Clients are more cost-sen-

sitive than ever (a trend that means many IP rms are now

having to tender just to keep their clients) and increasingly

aware they can demand more and more value from their attor-

neys. In addition, as the legal profession has now well and

truly woken up to business development, your competitors are

almost certainly actively targeting and courting your clients.

And the pressure is just as great internally. Most rms

have set themselves ambitious growth targets, and the

increased billing expectations being passed on to attorneys

to meet those objectives means it’s now vital you put more

structure around your marketing and business development.

Moreover, if that structure is going to yield the highest return,

every attorney needs to be comfortable with what they’ll have

to do to make the required contribution.

Admittedly this is where we tend to lose people. The vast

majority of the attorneys we’ve worked with over the last

15 years don’t want to market themselves; they didn’t enter

the profession to be salespeople, and even if they had, client

demands eat up the time they’d need to do it. However, expe-

rience has taught us that much of this resistance comes down

to attorneys’ perception—or rather misperception—of what

business development actually is. It is those misperceptions

I’d like to address here.

The rst—and, I’d argue, most important—myth to bust is

the view that business development is all about winning new

clients. It isn’t. It’s about winning new work. We are con-

stantly being told by both our clients and our contacts that

around 85 percent of the new work they (or in the case of our

contacts, their clients) are winning comes from people they

already know. With that in mind, there are two questions I’d

suggest attorneys looking to put together a more effective

personal business development plan ask themselves.

Who Are My Most Important Clients?

With regard to your clients, “most important” should be

looked at in three ways:

1. Those you bill the highest (i.e., if they were to walk or

even share their work with other rms, they’d leave a

tough hole to ll)

2. Those who you believe have high growth potential (i.e.,

they will generate more work as they grow, acquire, or

diversify)

3. Those who are strategically important to the future of

your practice (i.e., those who will allow you to build

marketable credentials in specic areas or make intro-

ductions to new market entrants and/or inuential

gures in your key sectors)

Once you have your shortlist of the clients you want to

really invest in (and there will probably only be three or

four), put together a very simple one-page plan identifying

how and why you plan to see them each quarter.

Again, this can be a suggestion we often get pushback

on. Your clients are too busy to see you, you’re already talk-

ing to them on a daily basis when you are working on a case,

etc., but are these quality conversations? How much time do

you get to talk about their plans and what else they need from

you? Do you have an opportunity to nd out who else they

could put you in touch with?

Your clients are by far the most likely source of new work

so, if you are serious about growing your book of business,

they must be your priority. If you’re nervous about ask-

ing for time with them, please don’t be. We are continually

interviewing our clients’ clients, and the one thing almost

everyone tells us is how much value they derive from just

having time to chew the fat at their ofces or over lunch a

few times a year and how they wish their attorney would nd

more time for those conversations.

When you are putting your plans together, we’ve found

there are two things that make plans easier to write, easier to

implement, and therefore more successful.

Simplicity

There is very little point investing huge amounts of time com-

pleting comprehensive due diligence or SWOT (strengths,

weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analyses of the clients

in question; after all, the purpose of the meeting is to nd out

what they’re up to and what they’ve planned for the future,

so just ask when you get there! Instead, just split a piece of

paper into four and use each quarter to represent one quarter

of the coming year. You can then jot down how you plan to

contact them during that quarter.

Variety

If you dissect the rationale for appointing any professional

adviser, it tends to split into two: you have the required tech-

nical skills, and you can get on with them—after all, you’ll

have to have difcult and challenging conversations down the

line, so you need to be comfortable in their company. This

means your interactions with your key clients need to rein-

force both the technical and the personal side during the year,

so our model is to alternate the “formal” with the “social.”

Your formal interactions could be inviting clients into your

ofces at the end of their nancial year to review their port-

folio to make sure it still meets the demands of their business

plan, or it could involve you visiting their plant or ofces to

see what they’re doing rsthand. It could be that you invite

them to a seminar you are running or as your guest to a con-

ference on their particular scientic area.

Your social interactions could be invitations to play or watch

the sport they like (two European patent attorneys we work

with organized a mountain bike trail with some of the overseas

attorneys they work with regularly, and it generated signicant

Douglas H. McPherson is one of the directors of Size 10½ Boots,

a specialist business development agency that works with law, IP,

and accountancy rms all over the world, helping them refresh the

way they take their practices to market and achieve their growth

objectives. He can be reached at douglas@tenandahalf.co.uk.