Barrister seeks long-term relationship

When you find a great client, don’t let her go. The opportunity cost of finding a new one is too pricey for your practice.

To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.  Audrey Hepburn.

Great clients make work seem like play. The rest make your life miserable. Here’s the commercial reason why you should nurture client relationships for the long term.

1. The lead time for winning premium clients in the legal sector is long. Really long.

About five years ago I planted a climbing hydrangea outside the back door. It sees direct sunshine for several hours during the summer but very little during the winter. For the first few years I thought about pulling it out and planting a rose, but on good advice, I decided to persevere. This year, I had an abundance of white flowers all summer long and a mass of bright green leaves which weaved their way the length of the garden.

Growing a relationship with a premium client in the legal sector is like growing a climbing hydrangea. For either to flourish, you need to know when to pay attention and when to leave well alone. Neither bloom overnight and both require time for the roots to embed. Regular watering, sunshine and gentle pruning pays dividends in the long term but try to speed things along and you’ll bring both to a swift demise.

In some sectors you can rely on a one-off or short-term transactional relationships to build a business. Think sofa.com. But if you want to develop the type of practice where you work with a small number of high-value premium clients, you can’t rely on the one-off sale. You need long-term relationships which yield plentiful lace-capped flowers every year. This requires a regular investment of time so that when one withers on the vine, others are already coming into bloom.

2. No-one pays you to win new clients

You get paid for giving legal advice and the time you spend on your feet in court.

You don’t get paid for maintaining your client list, re-drafting your marketing strategy, monitoring Google Alerts, engaging with clients on LinkedIn, running targeted social media campaigns, writing seminar presentations, updating book chapters, entertaining over lunch or indeed any other business activity aimed at promoting, marketing or selling your skills and expertise.

Your objective is to spend more time delivering your service than promoting it. Long-term relationships built on trust take less time to maintain than the time and effort required to build them anew. This is the commercial underpinning of growing an Inner Circle of loyal clients.

3. How to increase the number of long-term client relationships in your practice

The most-straightforward way to increase the number of long-term relationships in your practice is to get clarity on who your practice is best placed to serve and seek out those clients, exclusively.

If you are the analytical academic type, you won’t be the barrister of choice for the client who wants a rottweiler advocate. It’s a waste of a good lunch to try to persuade her otherwise. Knowing exactly who your practice serves takes you 90% of the way towards the premium clients who can instruct you.

In Junior Entrepreneur, The Business of Barristering and the QC Practice Booster, we teach a process to help you identify your ideal client. You work through the steps to identify who they are and where they spend their time. You can’t be every premium client’s barrister of choice and you shouldn’t try to be. Just focus on those who need the nurturing you can provide.

Grow for the future

You don’t need many clients to run a successful practice but you do need a few of the climbing hydrangea variety to maintain your position at the top of the vine.

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By Heidi Smith
Creator of Jurilogical.com