Description
How Should You Go About Building a Book of Business
Speaker 1:[00:00:00] I'm a litigator with 12 years of experience. However, the first 8 years were in government, criminal prosecution. I have four years of civil litigation experience, two insurance defense, and two in construction. Last week you said someone with more than 10 years of experience should have a book. I want to advance to partner in a midsize to large law firm. I am currently in a small law firm. I try to market and network to build a book, but it's very slow. I'm interested to hear your advice would you offer to someone like me can be more desirable to firms and advance to partner.
Okay. I don't know what you're doing right now. If you're in construction, by the way, that's very much in demand. There are all sorts of firms that do construction. Insurance defense is also very marketable. But, in order for you to build a book of business, you need to start going out, meeting with potential clients. You need to meet with the clients and the people you are working with and develop relationships. And you need to network in the community, the insurance or the construction community.
I don't think it's that difficult to get business in construction, but the same thing in insurance. A lot of it is rate driven. But I do think in order to become more desirable to [00:01:00] firms and advanced to partner, my advice would be to just start pitching to people and watching the partners in your existing firm.
What are they doing to get business?
And so my biggest thing would be just modeling, watching what others are doing. And then also reading. You should read. I have all sorts of articles about getting business in this website, on BCG. Read articles about getting business, read books about it, buy books. Buy seminars, and all that sort of stuff. You need to become a student in it. No one can tell you students would go to seminars, et cetera. So no one can tell you how to get work. They can tell you what to do, but they can't tell you that. They can tell you all these things, but they certainly, you have to be very careful.
So that's what I would recommend is do whatever you can to become a student in things and learn about the stuff you're interested in. You need to become a student of marketing. Most young attorneys, they get a lot of business tend to make business their priority. It's funny.
I was talking to a very successful attorney not too long ago, and he said you can make it a practice. Lower your priority, [00:02:00] which means just where you can make any business.
And some people are more concerned about the quality of the business they get than practicing law, which is funny. But honestly, when you're younger and trying to build a brand and so forth you often do need to work on the business.
