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The Effective Lawyer teaches ambitious trial lawyers how to grow their skills and create a prosperous law firm. Using lessons learned by accomplished attorneys from around the country, we discuss lessons learned through their trials and tribulations. Our discussions cover a vast range of topics sought out by attorneys looking for advice, from depositions to how to market your law firm.
The show is hosted by Jack Zinda, Founder and Senior Trial Lawyer at Zinda Law Group. In less than 15 years, Jack and his team have grown Zinda Law Group from 3 attorneys to over 30, spanning several states and handling a variety of personal injury cases from gas explosions to truck accidents.
Jack and his guests share their knowledge and skills that they’ve acquired through the process of building one of the most successful plaintiff’s law firms in the country.
In each show we cover a new topic that an ambitious attorney would want to better understand, while providing practical skills to improve their legal practice.
For more information, visit https://www.zdfirm.com/the-effective-lawyer
00:00
Speaker 1
Welcome to the Effective Lawyer, a podcast for ambitious attorneys who want to improve their practice. My name is Jack Zinda, and I'll be your host. Hey, everybody, Jack Zinda here. Today, I want to talk about seven tactics for generating clients for your law firm. So, you know, a lot of times when attorneys have started their own firm or they're trying to think about growth, the number one question they have is, where do I get clients? How much are those clients going to cost? What tactics do I need to use? So I wanted to give just a real simple breakdown of what I think are the most effective ways to generate clients and then some KPIs and some lead indicators and where to put in some of the effort to achieve those objectives.
00:57
Speaker 1
So the first tactic that can generate clients is the most obvious, which is generating referrals from other attorneys. This could be attorneys that practice in your area, but are in a different geographical location. So I'm in Austin and I get a referral from a personal injury lawyer in Miami. Or it could be attorneys that don't practice your specific area, such as family law, criminal law, probate law. Or it could be attorneys that handle different types of personal injury cases. So, for example, if a friend only handles products liability and you handle just trucking cases, you could get referrals from them. Now, the key part on this is to break out these different types of attorneys and see at current state, your current firm, which one are you best attracting cases from? Then you want to monitor.
01:45
Speaker 1
Okay, I need to focus on doing outreach, which means making a list of those attorneys that I want to get referrals from or the potential type of attorney. Then I want to create actions that I'm going to accomplish by getting to know those attorneys or making sure they know I exist. That could be in the form of sending mailers, doing an e newsletter, having lunches with people, going to bar events, or going to network events. And then you want to track those. Which ones are you doing? Who are you doing those networking events with? Have a great CRM to track it, and that'll give you a sense of, okay, what efforts do I need to take to generate referrals from these attorneys?
02:26
Speaker 1
The other thing that I see people that they make a mistake on is they don't spend enough time analyzing what steps do I need to take to achieve my objective. And they also don't do a good job of planning out when I'm going to accomplish this. You know, we all agree getting businesses or getting business or clients for your law firm is one of the most important things that you have to do as the CEO or the owner of the firm. If you don't have business, you're not going to be successful. And most lawyers starting off don't have the bankroll or the budget to generate cases using traditional media such as TV, radio, pay per click, billboards, etc. So, but you can still be successful.
03:14
Speaker 1
Some of the best attorneys I know in the country don't spend any money on their website or traditional marketing and have tons of business. A few other things that can help you achieve that objective we talked about one, identifying the types of attorneys you want referrals from. I would start close to home and I would start by making a list of those that don't practice personal injury law that think that you believe they could refer to for you cases. Number two, you want to make sure you have good materials that explains why you're a great lawyer to refer you cases to. And they could either refer them to you or you could do what's called a joint venture where you work as a team or some other variety of those practices.
03:57
Speaker 1
Now, in most jurisdictions you can share the fee with the attorney that referred you the case. That's going to be different state to state. So make sure you check your own state's laws and make sure you're following the right disclaimers when you're with the clients. If you're going to go that approach, but you want to make sure the attorney knows, hey, there's something in it for me if I work with this lawyer. I also want to know is this attorney very ethical and is going to make sure I'm reflected in a good light that's critical so they understand, yeah, this attorney is very ethical. They're going to get great results. They're going to keep me informed about what's going on and they want to know what sort of experience that you have.
04:36
Speaker 2
This podcast is presented by Zynda Law Group, a nationwide personal injury firm. For over 10 years, the experienced lawyers at ZLG have been partnering with outside counsel across the United States on all types of personal injury and wrongful death cases with over 30 attorneys. Zynda Law Group has paid out millions in referral and joint venture fees since 2015. To learn more about partnering with Zynda Law Group, please email us@re referralsindalaw.com we'll schedule a time for you to meet with Jack Zinda or one of our trial lawyers to discuss your case.
05:14
Speaker 1
So once you've figured out how you're going to Sell yourself to that lawyer. You've made a list of the lawyers you want to reach out to. Now you want to make the interaction of setting up networking events. Now, the easiest way is to message people on Facebook, message people on LinkedIn, send people emails after getting their business cards. You can also go to bar events like your local bar association. And when I first started practicing, I would do this. I would go to all of these different happy hours or lunch meetings. And I said, okay, the first 30 minutes, I'm going to get 10 business cards. And I made it a game. And so that first 30 minutes, I meet 10 people, get 10 business cards.
05:51
Speaker 1
And then I said, I can either leave or I can relax from there, but you want to go there with the mission. And I see a lot of people will just kind of sit in the corner and expect people to come up to them. But you've got to get over that idea of being shy or not reaching out or not being direct with folks. If you follow those steps, people are going to be receptive. People love meeting new folks and they're looking to network as well. So really take advantage of that situation. So now you've met people to network with. Now you want to batch asking for meetings with people. That can be done via a bulk email. So you send it out to five or six people at the same time.
06:28
Speaker 1
You could also just sit down and do it over, you know, a couple days or block off an hour. I always prefer to batch things. And to make it even easier on you could use an app such as Calendly to put open the days that you have for lunch. Say, hey, Steve, great seeing you at the bar event last week. I would love to get together for a lunch to talk, learn more about your practice. I'm sending a link to my Calendly app that has the days and times I'm available. Please feel free to book a date that works best for you. Best Jack. And then I'm going to make a note for when to follow back up with that person if they forget to respond. Don't assume it's intentional. People just get busy, they forget to reply. It's nothing personal.
07:13
Speaker 1
They're just as busy as you are. So don't be afraid to be noisy and reach back out to them again. Then once you're at the networking event with the person, make sure that you're intentional about learning about their practice and then asking if they would refer you cases that they get that are the type you practice, for example, personal injury law. And they make sure they know the positives of your firm for working with you. Whether it's financial, you're the best at an area. You always treat clients with respect and dignity, et cetera. So if you do that on a consistent basis, and I guarantee if you take a new person to lunch every week for an entire year, you will get enough business to make your firm successful.
07:57
Speaker 1
Whenever attorneys ask me why I'm not getting referrals or why they're not getting referrals, it usually comes down to execution. It's just they're not willing to put themselves out there and do the hard work that's necessary to get referrals. Hope this information was helpful. If you have any more questions or like to know more about how to get referrals from attorneys, please reach out. Always happy to talk shop and help young and also growing law firms. Until next time, thanks.
08:27
Speaker 2
Thanks for listening today's episode of the Effective Lawyer. You can learn more about our team and find other episodes of our podcast at zindalaw.com as always, we'd appreciate that you subscribe, rate and review the pod. Thanks.