As a lawyer, new business development is a critical part of your job. It takes a significant investment of time to effectively grow your existing client relationships, generate quality referrals, and identify new opportunities. The most successful attorneys make new business development, marketing, and, networking part of their daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly routine. Below are some easy-to-implement tips to keep your legal new business development efforts focused and productive:

• Schedule time each day for business development activities. If you don’t schedule time for legal new business development and marketing activities, they’ll never get done. Create a task list and build it into your daily routine. The tasks can be small (such as reading the business journal every Friday and sending notes of congratulations to your contacts that recently won awards or earned promotions). This process builds active legal new business development efforts into your routine.
• Stay in touch with your network of professional contacts monthly. Look at your list of professional contacts and schedule a coffee, lunch, or a drink with them every month or so. This will allow you to stay top-of-mind and continuously find ways to reciprocate introductions into your respective spheres of influence. Don’t be shy about asking your networking contacts to help you – and remember to offer your help in return.
• Entertain your clients socially each quarter. At the beginning of each quarter, list the clients you want to entertain and find out what kinds of social activities they enjoy.  Ask if they would like to join you for a meal at a new restaurant or a night out on the town at a sporting event, theatre production or music concert. Use this time together to build rapport and get to know your clients on a personal level. Schedule these social engagements in advance so you and your clients have something to talk about and look forward to.
• Find reasons to stay in touch with your clients regularly. It is important to stay in touch with your clients on an ongoing basis – especially when there are no high pressure legal matters in progress. Use a variety of methods to stay top-of-mind and remind them that you are an accessible, vested resource: friendly phone calls, handwritten notes, e-mails, and thoughtful messages through social media tools such as LinkedIn. Find professional reasons to contact your clients such as sending them relevant business articles or new court decisions. Also, reach out to your clients for personal reasons too such as birthdays, holidays, the New Year, and restaurant, book and, movie recommendations.

If you are a practicing lawyer who would like assistance with legal business development, marketing, and networking, please contact me to schedule a complimentary consultation. I look forward to getting to know you!