New lawyers: Start building your client relationships now

The ability to initiate, grow, and maintain professional business relationships is absolutely critical to your future legal career. Here's why these skills matter and how to start developing them.

If you are:

(a) starting or continuing your law degree,

(b) preparing for bar exams or articling, or

(c) in your first few years as a lawyer,

then today’s post is for you (and anyone who’d like to help you), because you’re entering the legal profession at an extraordinary time and much of the standard guidance for new lawyers won’t be useful for you. I hope this post will be.

There used to be a fairly standard process to govern a new lawyer’s transition into the profession. Once you obtained your license, you found a job with a law firm where you could work as a junior lawyer. This was often a baptism by fire, because you had to bill at least a thousand hours (often a lot more) to clients over the course of the year, carrying out brand new tasks for which you also had to be trained on the job.

If you managed all that, then you came back and did it again your second year, only with more billed hours and more new tasks to learn. As early as your third year (although quite possibly later), you started developing higher-level skills and performing more valuable tasks, and if you were really lucky, you were eventually introduced to the clients to whom you’d been sending bills all these years.

Now, if you didn’t perform to the firm’s expectations, or if a recession occurred, the firm would drop you like a used Kleenex. Otherwise, though, you could stay at the firm as long as you liked — you might stick around for a dozen years to become a partner, or you might leave at some point to join another firm or go solo or in-house, or you might give it all up and do something else with your life.

But even 20 or 30 years after you first joined the profession, your working day as a lawyer would be eerily similar to Year 1: You’d perform tasks for clients, record and bill the time it took you to do them, and strive to hit your annual targets to ensure you turned a good profit. That’s the path virtually every veteran lawyer travelled to get where they are, and it’s the blueprint they’ll refer to when giving you advice.

Trouble is, that path and that blueprint very probably aren’t going to work for you in future.

Your career is going to follow a different course, in large part because technology generally, and AI in particular, are about to do three things to the legal sector:

1. Increase efficiency and productivity in legal services so much that it won’t make sense for law firms to price their work in hours, which will reduce the incentive to leverage the work of junior lawyers, and consequently, the need to keep so many junior lawyers around.

2. Take over most of the entry-level work that new lawyers have traditionally performed (the only work they were really qualified to do), reducing even further the economic case for hiring new lawyers while also eliminating those lawyers’ primary on-the-job training opportunities.

3. Elevate to the highest level of importance the one skill that law firms value above all, generating new business from clients — and since new lawyers do not possess this skill, many firms will largely abandon them and focus on adding veteran lawyers through merger or acquisition.

This is a sea change in the legal sector, and no one really knows where it will finally lead. But believe it or not, this change is actually good news for you. Because the old system wasn’t built with your interests in mind — it was built to sustain the profits of law firms and their equity-owning partners by harnessing new lawyers’ energy and efforts for as many years of leveraged work as possible.

New technology is sparking a crisis for law firms that threatens their business models. But for you and your generational cohort, it’s a crisis of liberation. Now that the old paths into the profession are closing down, you can forge new and better paths for yourselves and those who will follow you.

What that means is that you’ve just been appointed your own Director of Professional Development. You have to take charge of identifying and acquiring the skills and experiences that will allow you to thrive in this profession from Day One. You can’t count on your employer or your licensing authority to prepare you or train you anymore. This is your show.

Given all that, it seems to me there are three broad categories of skills where you should invest most of your professional development time. The first is “Human Skills,” the ability to relate, empathize, communicate, and collaborate with other people. The second is “Growth Skills,” which include entrepreneurialism, business acumen, and strategic legal thinking. The foregoing links will bring you to more detailed descriptions of these two categories.

But the third, for my money, is the most important category of skills for new lawyers. They’re the ones that will make you attractive to employers, valuable to clients, and maybe most importantly, professionally fulfilled: Client Relationship Skills. Even if you don’t intend to “practise law,” these are vital abilities that will benefit you throughout your career; but if that is your career plan, then it is absolutely essential to develop these competencies as early and as well as you can.

“Client relationship skills” are those that allow you to initiate, nurture, grow, and maintain professional business relationships with people you can help with your legal expertise. The key phrase there is “relationships with people.” That’s what good lawyering is really about — building positive, ongoing relationships with people because you value those people and want to help them achieve their goals.

You’ll often hear lawyers describe this sort of activity as “rainmaking,” “sales,” or “business development.” But these terms all focus on what the lawyer wants — to get work, to hit quotas, to make money. They regard clients purely as business targets, as a means to your own ends. Taking a “client relationship” approach, by contrast, makes these people the true focus of your interest, treating them as ends in themselves.

Exercising client relationship skills starts with positioning yourself as a sincerely inquisitive and reliable legal professional who could provide assistance in a particular area. It continues by offering people helpful information (not specific legal advice, obviously) if asked and pointing them towards useful resources at no charge. It understands the Rule of Seven Touches and why people need time to size you up.

If a person does decide to retain you professionally, then “client relationship” shifts into “client service” mode to address their issues, needs, and interests. But a relationship is ongoing and multi-faceted. Good lawyers not only stay in touch consistently throughout a retainer, but also maintain contact afterwards. They offer free subscriptions to relevant newsletters, check in by email every so often, and treat actual current clients better than they would treat a potential someday client.

The personal side of this is really important, but so is the legal and professional side. As you develop a focus on a particular practice or industry or client community, immerse yourself in it — reading, listening, learning, attending (and speaking at) events, meeting people, listening some more, and understanding this area until you start to see problems from the client’s perspective but solutions through a lawyer’s eyes.

Devote whatever time and effort you can to this process. Test out your nascent skills at conferences and community events. If you’re an introvert like me, this can feel incredibly daunting; but believe me, the hardest part is getting started. Take a deep breath and plunge into a few conversations, and remember that most people love to talk about themselves and their interests — so long as they feel you’re genuinely asking.

Client relationships are the single most valuable commodity on the legal talent market right now. Law firms are throwing ridiculous offers at experienced lawyers with “books of business.” You almost certainly don’t have such assets right now. But you can start building them right away, on your own time and at your own pace. And the sooner you’re able to create strong client relationships that lead clients to trust their problems to you, the sooner you’ll be able to write your ticket in this profession.

But remember that that’s not the point of building client relationships. Resist the temptation to make it all about you; instead, put your clients, and the ways in which you can help them, front and centre. That’s where true professionals and trusted advisors come from. That’s the kind of lawyer, I think, that you want to be. And this is how you’ll get there.