Podcast Ep. 8: Sustainable Business Development for Women Lawyers
I want to tell you a quick story about two young solicitors who joined the same firm at the same time - let’s call them Sue and Simon. In the early years, Sue concentrated on developing relationships within the firm; Simon, on the other hand, concentrated on developing relationships with clients. Fast forward ten years, Sue had double the work and double the success that Simon did.
Welcome to The Pathway to Partnership Podcast, a podcast specifically for women lawyers.
My name is Cecilia Poullain. I used to be a finance lawyer and now I coach women lawyers who want to make partner without losing themselves in the process.
Each week, we explore the three pillars of my Pathway to Partnership programme which is all about giving women lawyers the skills they need to become great partners.
As a partner or a sole practitioner, one of the most important parts of your role is to bring in clients. But that’s really tough when no one has ever shown you how.
In this episode, we’ll focus on how to create a reliable system for business development — one that works for you without you having to do everything or rely on luck.
OK, let’s dive in.
If your marketing strategy looks a bit like “write an article, go to a lunch, post something on LinkedIn, speak at a conference, start a podcast, hope for the best” — don’t worry, you’re in very good company. But there’s a much easier, more effective way to do it.
But first, if you haven’t yet listened to Episode 7 on Positioning and Niching, go back and do that now — because you can’t market effectively until you know what your niche is. This episode builds on the ideas and concepts in Episode 7.
In this episode, we’re going to look at:
Why women lawyers hate marketing
Identifying where your work is coming from and building the relevant relationships
The marketing funnel - how to get people to know, like and trust you so much that they want to work with you.
So, why do many women lawyers hate “marketing”? There are all sorts of reasons:
Perhaps the main reason is that we’re expected to know how to market but nobody teaches us how. A partner in a major UK law firm told me that they were always telling their younger lawyers to market themselves but the younger lawyers never did and she couldn’t understand why. I suggested maybe it was because they didn’t know where to start.
Women lawyers in particular can feel excluded from the “men’s club” - playing golf, watching rugby or drinking with the boys.
Perhaps you’ve found that your marketing efforts so far aren’t very efficient - that you’ve been to lunches that go nowhere, or spent hours preparing training sessions that bring in no work.
Or maybe you don’t feel legitimate — I hear comments like: “Why would a senior partner of a private equity firm want to talk to me?”
And some firms or partners make it even harder by being very protective of their client relationships.
No wonder it feels uncomfortable or awkward. And then there is the issue of what you are actually allowed to do under the rules of your particular jurisdiction.
But the biggest mistake I see women lawyers make is trying to do it all - write the book, write the articles, start the podcast, have the lunches and afterwork drinks, run events and run conferences, be on boards, post regularly on LinkedIn. It exhausts me just to think about it.
In the same way as in Episode 7 we talked about finding your niche in order to make your life easier, in this episode we will talk about how to work out which marketing activities to do and which ones to forget about.
But before we do that, could I suggest that you take a moment to have a good hard look at the data. If you think back over the clients you worked for over the last six months or the last year, where did those come from? How did they end up on your desk?
And you might be surprised.
One of the lawyers at a Firm Women breakfast did this exercise and was amazed to discover almost all her clients came from other departments within her own firm. That’s incredibly common — and a huge opportunity. Because that’s the easiest marketing of all.
If the majority of your clients aren’t coming from other lawyers in your firm or if you’re a sole practitioner or in a very small firm, then they are probably coming from:
Lawyers outside your firm, or “referral lawyers”
Other professionals
Direct client relationships
Let’s look at each of those in turn.
As I said a second ago, if the data shows that most of your clients are coming from inside your firm, that’s brilliant news, because these are the easiest relationships to build.
But despite that, I see many women lawyers, especially in the bigger firms or offices, either sticking with their team or with their friends - because it feels safe - and not making enough effort to get to know other people in the firm. Why do they do that? Because when you start to reach out to other people, you run the risk of being rejected, and that fear can stop us from taking action.
I want to tell you a quick story about two young solicitors who joined the same firm at the same time - let’s call them Sue and Simon. In the early years, Sue concentrated on developing relationships within the firm; Simon, on the other hand, concentrated on developing relationships with clients. Fast forward ten years, Sue had double the work and double the success that Simon did.
Why? Because most of their work was coming from inside the firm.
And it makes sense, doesn’t it? The people inside your firm have a vested interest in making sure the firm works well, so the more you know them, make friends with them, understand their practice area and speciality and vice versa, the more likely they will think of you at the relevant time. A lot of firms recognise how powerful this is and do all they can to encourage cross-selling.
Who should you start to build relationships with in your firm? Think about which teams might have common interests. I had a client who was doing arbitration with a particular focus on M&A disputes - it made sense for her to build relationships with the M&A team and that team could have benefitted from her expertise in understanding what made a merger or acquisition fall apart and therefore reinforce their drafting on those points.
With all marketing, the key is to think about what others need and work out how you can give to them, without expecting anything in return. The more you give, the more you’ll receive. Why? Because reciprocation is an automatic human response. If you are looking to build up relationships with the people inside your firm, find out about their business, see if you can make introductions, perhaps suggest you write an article together or speak at an event together, perhaps they need something for their kids or in their personal life. Whatever it is, look to help them first, without expecting anything in return.
And here’s another way to help. Law can be a surprisingly lonely profession. Even if it seems like you’re surrounded by people all day every day, your reality can be sitting alone in your office, or in these post-Covid times, at home, drafting or responding to emails all by yourself. It can feel as though everyone else is having coffees and lunches and after dinner drinks and you’re the one being left out. You would be surprised just how many lawyers feel that way.
Which means that there is a massive need in law firms to bring people together, either formally or informally. That’s a fabulous opportunity to start to create those relationships. By being the one who brings people together. That can look like starting a regular breakfast meeting or regularly inviting a couple of people to lunch or thinking about what different people have in common and bringing them together. It doesn’t have to be hard.
Another problem in almost all organisations including law firms is that people work in silos. They don’t know people in other teams or departments and they don’t know what they do. Again, this is a brilliant opportunity for you to bring people together. Today, I had lunch with a friend who is an in-house lawyer in a bank. She realised this was happening in her bank, so she ran a training session and invited 800 people to talk about the basics of structured EMTNs, a particular capital markets product. It was a huge success, as people started to realise what their role was in the bigger picture. And what incredible marketing for her. That’s just an example.
Now let’s look at referral lawyers. As I have already said multiple times on this podcast, much of our work comes from other lawyers. If you’re a transactional lawyer, a tax lawyer or a corporate lawyer, for example, you’re lucky because you can build on-going relationships with clients and work on repeat deals, but for many other types of lawyers, especially litigators or arbitrators, it’s a lot more difficult because clients don’t have that sort of repeat deal. For this second group of lawyers, having a group of other lawyers who refer work your way is critical. And if you’re a sole practitioner, these relationships are especially important.
And for that reason, relationships with referral lawyers should be treated with as much care as client relationships. Take people out to lunch when they send you a client, see if there are opportunities to work together, make sure you recommend them (if you’re sure they’re good lawyers!), send them interesting articles etc.
How do you meet these referral lawyers? That’s pretty easy - attend conferences or, even better, speak at conferences, join working groups, join professional associations. You went to law school so that’s another source of referrals.
Other non-legal professionals can also be fantastic sources of work. For example, I worked with a personal injury lawyer and she receives regular referrals from hospital staff. Ask yourself: who else interacts with your ideal clients? How can you build trust with them? One of the issues she was finding in personal injury work is that, for the professionals, it can be pretty traumatic. My client came up with the idea of her firm running a regular group for other professionals in the area to talk through those traumas - and this was a brilliant way to put her law firm front and centre in that community.
And finally, if you work for, or would like to work for, a very specific group of clients, then target those clients. Forget LinkedIn - you know who those people are, so reach out to them directly. It might be, for example, the Greek community in Paris. It might be Italian corporates seeking to establish themselves in the UK. It might be the automotive industry. If you know who they are, that’s a fantastic opportunity because you can go deep in becoming a leader in and serving that community. All you have to do is to be where that community is.
Once you know where your clients come from, whether it’s from other lawyers inside or outside the firm, from other professionals or directly from clients, you can focus your efforts there. Instead of trying to do it all, focus. That’s how your life gets to be so much easier.
A quick word on feeling that you’re not at the right level, that the CEO of the private equity firm isn’t going to be reaching out to you. If you’re in that situation, you need to realise that relationship building takes time, sometimes a long time. As I have said before, you need to start early. Instead of reaching out directly to the CEO or the general counsel of a potential client, reach out to people at your level, at your age, and grow alongside them. This makes your marketing so much easier, because you will have so much more in common with those people. If you have young children, they might have young children. You are getting your career established - so are they. A word of warning: if you are getting 100% of your work from the firm, it can be easy to sit back and relax and not worry too much about marketing - but if you start early, it means that when you do become partner or equity partner, you already have those deep relationships and possibly even friendships with people who are now General Counsel. Those people definitely know, like and trust you.
So - you now know which relationships you should be concentrating on, and you can forget about the others..
Let’s now talk about the marketing funnel, one of the fundamental building blocks of finding clients.
The first, widest part of the marketing funnel is making sure that people know you exist. If they don’t even know you exist, there is no way they will ever work with you. Again, this depends where your work is coming from. If you want to contact clients directly, this could be through writing a book, writing articles, writing LinkedIn posts, running a podcast, whatever it is. On a side note, the best marketing is the kind you actually enjoy. I had lunch with two lawyers recently and one of them said: “I love writing articles, getting into the nitty-gritty, I just love it!” and the other one said “it was such a relief to learn that I never needed to write another article in my life!”. If you don’t like doing it, don’t do it, because you won’t!
But back to the marketing funnel. Having potential clients know you exist isn’t enough - the next step is making sure they know you. “Knowing you exist” and “knowing you” are obviously very different things. People will start to know you personally if you engage with them on a personal level, whether it’s meeting at conferences, through referral lawyers or professional groups or simply reaching out to them. Or perhaps it’s because you start a conversation when they leave a comment on a LinkedIn post.
Once somebody knows you, the next step is to think about how to deepen the relationship - or, in marketing speak, get them to “like” you. I think in terms of “where do I put them?” I run regular Firm Women breakfasts in Paris because it is a way for me to deepen the relationship with many of the women lawyers I meet - and I know there is a huge need for women lawyers to have safe spaces to share the challenges they are facing at work. But it’s also somewhere I can “put them” to make sure that the relationship stays current and can deepen. I am also currently writing a book for women lawyers, which means I invite many women lawyers to lunch to hear about their experiences. It means I get to have lunch with some amazing women, hear their stories and create a deep relationship with each and every one of them. I certainly like them - and I hope they like me, at least a little bit!
You might want to think about the shared interests some of your clients might have - and these can be professional or personal. When she was a young mother, Sharon Lewis, who is a partner at Hogan Lovells in Paris, would book cheap tickets for Roland Garros, the French tennis championship and invite clients who were themselves young mothers. They would all take their children and have lunch at the canteen. It didn’t cost very much and it solved problems for everyone - the kids got to be with their mothers and to play with other kids, it created a strong community of women in the same situation and, best of all, she didn’t need to do any marketing because all the clients were doing her marketing for her. But it can be anything - think about what you like doing and ask other people to do that with you. Get creative with it - your potential clients will love you for it!
So, we’ve gone from “know of you” to “know you” to “like you”. The next step in the funnel is getting them to trust you. This is where more intimate, one-on-one lunches or drinks might come in, to really build the relationship.
We started this conversation talking about data - researching where your clients are coming from - and I’d like to finish with data. Here are two things that you should be tracking:
You should know where people are in your funnel — who knows you, who likes you, who trusts you — and focus on moving them further and further down the funnel. It’s fine if some stay at a particular stage for a long time. Just keep track. By doing that, you can then focus more on the people who are the most likely to work with you - those who already trust you, and think even more about what their problems are and how you can serve them.
measure what’s working. Measure:
Which activities have brought you the most clients and what’s been the most effective?
If your firm has a marketing department, use them. It’s very likely they will have some great tools to help you.
In the same way that if you refine your niche, you will attract more clients, so the more you refine your marketing, the more clients you’ll attract — and the more natural, enjoyable and sustainable your marketing will feel.
I feel as though this has been a mega-episode so let’s summarise what we’ve covered. We’ve looked at three main things:
first, focus on what actually works by looking at the data — identify where your clients come from and concentrate your energy there instead of trying to do it all.
second, start building relationships long before you need them, both inside and outside your firm, by helping others and creating genuine connections.
And third, create a simple system based on the “know, like, trust” funnel — make sure people know you exist, get to know you, and ultimately trust you. When you do that, marketing becomes natural, sustainable and far more effective.
That’s it for today’s episode of The Pathway to Partnership Podcast.
Marketing is a profession in itself, so we clearly won’t cover it all in one episode, but I hope that you are feeling a little less as though you need to do it all and a little more confidence in your own pathway to partnership.
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You can also visit ceciliapoullain.com to explore my coaching programmes, upcoming events and free tools to support your growth.
Thanks for listening.