Build Your Collaborative Law Practice

I found a website this morning that focuses on training Collaborative professionals, run by Rita Pollack and Cathy Heenan.  They have a series of training videos, and the first one is on “How to Talk to a Prospective Client About Collaborative Law”.  This would be useful to anyone trying to build a Collaborative practice.

I got to know Rita a few months ago at the IACP Forum in San Antonio, where she helped lead a workshop on facilitation skills.  Rita has been a leading trainer in Collaborative practice for many years, so check out the whole training series on the website, not just the parts on practice building!

This past week I attended the IACP Forum in San Antonio, where I was able to attend a workshop put on by two Canadian attorneys, Beryl McNeill and Stephanie Dobson.  In their workshop they outlined a detailed client intake process for introducing clients to Collaborative concepts.

In the workshop I put on at the Forum I talked about the benefits of writing a script or outline for your consults that you could review prior to meeting with the potential client, to remind yourself of the key points and questions you want to bring up.  Beryl and Stephanie’s presentation added a whole new layer to that idea by providing more detail about what might go into your consultation script.

One element that I liked in particular is using the consultation time to get the potential client thinking in terms of interests right away, emphasizing positive objectives the client hopes to accomplish.  Rather than getting into a discussion of the law, they advise starting to refocus the client by asking questions about what is important to the client.  Specific suggestions for discussion points included:

• What are your hopes?  What are your fears?
• If I had a magic wand and we were a year into the future looking back at this, what would make you say “I did that well”
• As the client tells their story, elicit their interest with a follow up question to their statement
  • “So it is important to your that…”
  • “So you’re afraid that…”
  • “So your hope for the future is that…”
  • “So it is important to you that your children…”
• As an example, if the client says “I want 50/50 parenting”, you might get at the underlying interest by asking “So, if you had this, what would that give you that’s deeper and more important?”

To take this idea another step, you might also ask some questions about what the client thinks is most important to their spouse, i.e. what is the spouse going to need in order to get to yes.  Reframing the issues in this way helps to lay the groundwork for the type of thinking the client is going to need to be doing in the Collaborative process.

A second point that I liked was the suggestion that you wrap up your consultation by creating an action plan with the client.  This leaves the client with specific steps to take to move their matter forward.  I would imagine this might include steps for getting the attorney hired, steps both of you agree on to present the Collaborative option to the other party, for getting the other party connected with a Collaborative attorney, etc.  Clients at this point in their lives are facing a lot of uncertainty, and it is very helpful if you can show them exactly what they need to do to start feeling better.

I have seen many new lawyers open practices featuring a wide variety of services.  They offer help with bankruptcy cases, divorces, criminal matters, estate planing – you name it, they do it.  The reasoning seems to be that the more services they offer, the more clients they can attract.

Think about it though – a big part of the message that conveys to potential clients is the the attorney is not an expert at anything, since they spend their time doing so many different things.  If you had been injured in an airplane crash, which attorney would you hire: 1) the attorney who advertises that they do all kinds of personal injuries, dog bites, car crashes, product liability cases, slip and falls, etc., or 2) the attorney who says they do nothing but plane crash personal injury cases?  Chances are you would pick #2, because you would assume they know more about how to settle YOUR case.

Therefore, narrowing your practice can actually help you get more work.  The attorney who does everything is generally only going to get the clients who will settle for any live body – because the client lives close by, they liked the lawyer’s picture, or they perceive the lawyer as inexpensive or easy to push around.  Are those really the clients you want?  On the other hand, the lawyer who says they do nothing but dog bite cases is perceived as the dog bit expert.  They may not get any bankruptcies, but they are likely to get everyone who has been bitten by a dog.  If that is a big enough market, it should keep them quite busy.

Moreover, the client who SETTLES for you is likely to not be a very good client.  They don’t respect you, they don’t listen to your advice, and they don’t pay your bill.  On the other hand, the client who hires you because they perceive you as an expert in your particular field comes in with a totally different attitude.  They are HOPING you will agree to represent them (rather than feeling like they are doing YOU a favor), and will value your opinions if you do them the favor of accepting their case.

You can also apply this to other aspects of the message you put our about yourself and your practice.  The more you can focus on a particular target audience, the more likely you are to appeal to them.  A generic message doesn’t target anyone, and is not likely to be all that appealing to anyone.  Generic messages also ring hollow – they just sound like more advertising, and we have become very adept at screening out advertising.  A very targeted message is much more likely to resonate with the audience it is targeted at.  Think of it this way, if you want to fish for salmon, are you going to get better results with a marshmallow on your hook, or specially developed salmon bait?

Of course, to ring true, your message needs to reflect you, not just be some slogan you think people want to hear.  If you can communicate a message that reflects who you are, that targets the clients you really want to work with, and addresses their deepest fears and concerns, the clients you get will be the ones who are the best fit for you.  You will be happier and so will they.

Many, if not most, Collaborative Law professionals have never built a website.  Of course not — we are lawyers, therapists, and financial professionals, not IT experts!

However, having a website you can manage yourself is a big advantage.  It allows you to keep it fresh, to make changes easily as ideas occur to you, and even to add new content (blog anyone?) when you have the time or inclination to do some writing.

Many of us still subscribe to an outdated model (assuming we HAVE a website).  We hire a website designer to create a website for us, and when we want to change anything, even a few words, we contact the designer to make the changes for us, paying through the nose to have it done.  Besides the expense itself, the problem with this model is that it discourages us from making changes.  When it takes that much process, and comes with a bill, we tend to just let the website sit until change becomes critical.  A website that just sits become stale, it doesn’t reflect us as well as one we continue to put energy into, and it is going to get less attention from search engines, meaning the website is not working as hard for us as we would like it to.

While not the only solution, WordPress has been a great answer to this problem for many non-technical professionals and businesses.  If you can type, you can manage, and even build, a WordPress based website.  Basically it allows you to pick a pre-designed look or have one customized for you (called a “theme”).  You then click on a button to create a page.  For the page, you type a title and you type content for the body – it is basically just creating a document, like you probably do every day in some form or other.

There are tools to do more complex things, like determine the order of the tabs for your pages, create indexes, tweak the look, etc.  These are not hard to learn, but you may still want to have a designer help you with the elements you can’t figure out.  The key is that you don’t need to go back to your designer for every little content change you want to make.  You can always open an existing page and make changes just like any other document you work with, and you can create new pages just as easily.

I should point out that this website is a WordPress website.

For more information about how to set up a WordPress site, go to pjcoaching.com.

One thing we always need to keep in mind is that as a general rule people make decisions with their guts more than with their heads, i.e. how they FEEL about something makes a huge difference. As humans, our tendency is to use logic to justify the decision that feels right.

As a lawyer I have learned that even judges and juries make decisions as much based on how they feel about a case as on cold legal logic.  When I was in law school, we had to read many, many court decisions on all kinds of issues.  One of the things I noticed in those decisions was that it seemed to make a big difference how sympathetic the parties where.  If the case involved little old lady versus big corporation, little old lady would tend to win.  If the parties were reversed, the legal principle might well be decided the other way around.

Therefore effective marketing needs to appeal to people’s emotions. If we made our car buying decisions on a purely rational basis, there would be about 5 choices out there.  Maybe a one person vehicle, a basic sedan, a van for larger families, a small truck, and a large truck.  The fact is, when we go car shopping, we are evaluating a number of emotionally based factors – color, image, sportiness, etc.  Many SUV’s are purchased by people that never intend to go off road, high performance cars by people who always drive the speed limit, and pickups by people who have very little need to haul anything.

If you want to grow your Collaborative practice, your message about it has to RESONATE with your potential clients.  Dry facts about how the process operates is not going to do that. You need to think about what the biggest fears of your potential clients are.  Are they afraid of the pain of divorce, of uncertainly about their future, of losing connection with their children? Your message should help them understand how your services and the Collaborative process are going to HELP THEM FEEL BETTER. If a potential client understands how you can lessen their pain and help them find a solution that meet their needs, then they will want to get in to see you as soon as possible.

A big factor in how many of your clients choose Collaboration is how much passion you have for Collaborating, and how well you communicate that passion.

The message you put out to the public about your practice influences who calls you in the first place.  If the message that gets out is “I’m the meanest, dirtiest attorney out there”, then you’ll get calls from people looking for the meanest, dirtiest attorney.  If the message is “I’m a new age crystal wearing attorney”, then you’ll get more calls from people looking for a new age crystal wearing attorney.  And of course, if your message is about Collaboration, you’ll get more calls from people who want to Collaborate.

If you want more of your clients to be potential Collaborative clients, then you need to connect with people who share your values about non-adversarial dispute resolution.  Before you do that, ask yourself, is this an option you believe in strongly, or do you just see it as another option?

If you really have a passion for Collaboration – if you believe that Collaboration is the best tool in your toolkit, if you really believe that Collaboration is the best option for most of your clients, if you really believe that Collaboration helps families move forward in their lives in a healthier way, that passion and those beliefs are going to come across to your potential clients.

On the other hand, if you don’t have that passion and those beliefs, that ambivalence is what is going to come across to your potential clients.  If you don’t have great faith in the process, very few potential clients will choose to make a leap of faith on their own to choose something that is unfamiliar to them and which they don’t see their attorney having faith in either.

To stand out from the crowd, you need to define what it is that makes you different, and incorporate that into your message.  I am not suggesting you remake yourself, I am suggesting you discover yourself.  You cannot tell others what makes you special until you know what makes you special, and what makes you special is whatever is different about you and how you do what you do. One thing that makes you different, that sets you apart, is your personal set of passions.

To be able to communicate what makes you special in a way that will have the most impact, your message needs to communicate YOU.  If your message is not something you believe in strongly, you will have a hard time communicating it effectively to others.  On the other hand, if it is something you care about, are passionate about, that passion will carry through to the listener.  When you can make your passion part of your message, it will help you stand out, it will resonate better with potential clients, and it will attract clients who are a good fit for you.

The first thing we have to do, then, is to identify what your personal passions are.  Ask yourself:

• What do I really care about – what are my values?
• What attracted me to Collaboration?
• How does Collaboration fit in with my personal values?
• What part of my work gets me excited, gets me so fired up I have a hard time stopping?