How to attract high-quality clients

Most barristers want to attract high-quality clients. The first step is understanding who they are.

“Do not compromise on the quality and your customers will not negotiate on the price.” Amit Kalantri (attributed)

A strategy for attracting great clients

Being clear on the clients you can help is the first step towards attracting the clients you want.  Identify your ideal client, position your practice in front of them and charge a fee which reflects your skills, experience and expertise.

Identify your ideal client

If you’d like to work with high-quality clients the first step is to work out exactly who they are. 

Think about the client with whom you’ve had the best experience to date.  Identify the things which made it easy to work on their matter. 

Create a profile (or avatar) of that client and write the names of six more people who match that profile, and who work in six different organisations.

If they didn’t pay you on time, discount them as an ideal client. 

The remainder are your target high-quality clients.   Now you’re going to position your practice with them, exclusively.

Position your practice with those clients

The more specific you can be about your service, the more likely you are to attract better clients. The way to do this is by filtering out difficult clients with your marketing messaging.

For example, let’s say you know something about Intellectual Property and you want to work with high-quality clients in that sector.

For example, medium-size European venture capital companies, who invest in long-term life sciences projects,

When a medium-size, European life sciences VC needs a barrister, and you have been writing weekly on this specific subject, who are they going to call? You or someone who does a bit of everything in IP?

The worst thing you can do for your practice is to claim that you can provide a service for everyone.  If you do, you’ll attract ‘everyone’ when you really want to attract a subsection of the best.

Charge more

If you’ve scrolled through Jurilogical.com you will eventually land on a page entitled “Are you ‘Good Value’ or ‘Expensive-&-Worth-It?’”

On the whole, clients of the legal profession would prefer an expensive-and-worth-it barrister. The issues at stake usually impact their lives in some way, after all.   

Charge for the clients you want to attract. It’s the quickest way to filter out those you don’t.

I appreciate that the subject of fees is highly emotive. Not all barristers have control over the amount they can charge for their advice.

If you’re not earning enough to support your lifestyle from ‘barristering’ and your motivation to work is to earn more, you may need to consider generating a second, supporting income over which you do have control over pricing.

The filtering out process in action

If you’d like to see an example of filtering out the wrong kind of clients, take a look here, specifically at the question “For whom is The Business of Barristering programme?”

By saying clearly who I can help, I will filter out those I can’t.  It’s much better for everyone to know this at the start.

Working with ideal clients

In The Business of Barristering programme, we work through a step-by-step system to identify exactly who your client is best placed to serve and then design a marketing plan to position your practice squarely in front of them.

If you’d like to find out whether you should filter Jurilogical out of your practice growth strategy, schedule a call today.

By Heidi Smith
Creator of Jurilogical.com