A great leader I know used to conclude his staff presentations by saying, “They say that showing up is half of life. I thank you for showing up today.”

There is a lot to be said by that statement. Showing up is important. It means you care enough to take time out of your day to consider, and maybe even engage, in important discussions. It gives your voice a chance to be heard. You can offer solutions. It beats doing nothing, but it is only half.

The other part requires you to roll up your sleeves and do the hard work. It takes time. It takes effort. It takes risk. It’s hard. But it is half of life. Too many people, lawyers, law firms only show up.

It’s a tough legal climate out there. The economy seems to be turning, albeit slowly, for the better. Opportunities appear to be on the horizon. For those that spent the downturn showing up to talk about what they needed to, it’s not going to be enough.

It’s time to put plans to action. It’s time to make the investment. It’s time to execute. Don’t let half your life go by.

One month ago today I was confined to a hotel room with severe back pain. It was the aftermath of Legal Tech New York and I was supposed to be on a plane back to San Diego. Instead, the hotel doctor was giving me a Cortizone shot and ordering me not to move. I’m 41. I run. I do yoga. I drink spinach smoothies for breakfast. This should not have happened.

Thanks to the miracle of modern medicine and a new active release therapist, I’m fully recovered and I went back to the gym for the first time this week. It’s hard. I feel slothy and out of shape. Because I am out of my routine, even the simplest activities seem to take a lot of effort. But I know the most important thing to do this first week back is be consistent. I don’t need to run a marathon, but I need 60 minutes a day doing something. When my alarm goes off at 5 a.m. and I want to roll over and go back to sleep, I say to myself, “If not now, when?”

This new mantra has a law firm application. Since the start of the year, I’ve been involved in a number of discussions about how to motivate attorneys to contribute to firm marketing and business development activities. The plans are in place. The heads are nodding. But the work isn’t getting done. For some reason the motivation isn’t there.

As partners, doesn’t the need to grow or at least maintain a thriving practice provide enough motivation to find ways to build business — both as an individual contributor and as an owner? It would seem that if the demand for legal services is down and more attorneys are competing for the same dollars that there would be a sense of urgency to raise your firm profile and create a more disciplined approach to growing business.

After all, if not now, when?

In the quest for the perfect law firm business model, I’m often asked about the best way to balance the practice of law with the time needed to develop new business.

While there is no silver bullet, here are three first steps to consider when developing a plan to grow your practice.

1) Start with the partnership.

If your firm has a strong business development culture, your equity partners are regularly out there marketing themselves and your firm. But do a gut check. Typically 20% of partners generate 80% of a firm’s business. That may mean that more attention should be focused on helping rainmakers generate more rain. However, it does not mean that they are the only ones who need to be marketing.

Every attorney in the firm has a responsibility to dedicate non-billable time on helping the firm grow. In my experience, not every attorney needs a personal business plan. Non-rainmaker attorney time may be better spent supporting specific marketing and business development initiatives at the firm or practice group level.

2) Evaluate your current workload.

Where does your work come from currently? If it’s another partner that is feeding you work, how can your support her business development goals? If you rely on referrals, what are you doing to stay in touch with those referral sources? If you are trying to develop a new area of practice, what speaking or writing opportunities are available to you to raise your visibility before prospective clients?

3) What is your current utilization?

To meet your professional goals (firm or personal), how much of your time are you willing to work?

What percentage of that time must be spent on billable matters to meet your minimum financial goals?

How much time is left?

If the answer is zero, you need to rethink your business plan. There are only 24 hours in every day. To maintain a steady pipeline of business, you need to make time to do it. That means spending less time on current clients or devoting more non-work time toward your business development efforts.

It’s all about balance.

I found an old email this morning that references a 2009 McKinsey Executive Insight report about challenges facing corporations coming out of the economic crisis. I no longer have a link to the year-old report, but the excerpt from the email reads:

“Companies need to integrate marketing and sales function into the day-to-day operations of the organization and apply the same rigor to defining commercial processes and systems that they have long applied to manufacturing and other operational processes and systems. This “commercial transformation” can take many forms and involves 1) a concerted, multi-year effort to substantially upgrade the effectiveness of a company’s marketing and sales processes, including aligning top management around a forceful transformation theme; 2) driving performance improvement programs around 2-3 carefully selected commercial levers and striving to lead the industry on these levers; and 3) embedding the change through a comprehensive commercial operating system, comprising not only processes and tools, but also IT systems and performance management.”

If you filter through the jargon and are not put off by words like “commercialization,” “operational processes”and “sales,” there are some salient points from which law firms could benefit, particularly those that have made a heavy investment in marketing but are not sure they are getting the results they want.

First, law firm management and their marketing departments need to be directly aligned. Many firms still fail to give marketing a seat at the executive committee and make the much needed connection between strategic growth and market position.

Second, the old adage, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” remains true. Law firm marketers need benchmarks around which they can measure their success. Real process needs to be put in place to evaluate return on investment.

Finally, IT and marketing can no longer work independently. Technology needs to be an integrated into law firm marketing strategies. There are far too many law firm marketing directors out treat technology like a “project” that can be checked off on a things to do list. Technology is a part of doing business. Combined with the right people and processes, it is a tactic for raising awareness, a tool for developing credibility and the centralized resource for tracking results.

This is not to suggests that law firms need to undergo a “commercial transformation” at the expense of professionalism. But the economy has changed and the drivers for legal services are different today. Firms need to take a disciplined approach to the way the do business in addition to the legal work they provide clients. They cannot afford reactive marketing where there is a constant state of motion and very little measurable progress.

If, as Cicero said, man is his own worst enemy, then partners are posing the biggest risk to the sustainability of large law firms. From my vantage point, individual attorney, practice group and other internal silos are preventing most firms from making needed change in the way they do business.

With the latest Hildebrant Baker Robbins Peer Monitor (Q2 2010) reporting that the outlook for the legal industry as flat, law firms can no longer expect economic improvement will solve their profitability challenges.

The report concludes:

“The challenge to firms will be in their willingess to innovate, experiment and change long-standing firm traditions in order to find new avenues of growth and profitability.”

The time is now for firms to address their proverbial enemy head on.

An article in the June issue of the Harvard Business Review suggests one of the best ways to force a change in thinking is to reorganize.

In “Change for Change’s Sake,” authors Freek Vermeulen, Phanish Puranam and Ranjay Gulati argue that by periodically reorienting organizations around different criterian, “the firm gets the best of both worlds.”

In one case, Cisco System changed its business unit structure (a.k.a. practice groups in the law firm world) into a centralized structure organized by function (e.g. marketing, sales, R&D).
The reorganization created new teams who were able to work together and exchange ideas with peers across the company. Because each member of the new team still maintained ties with their old networks, the knowledge base of each new team expanded as each team member had a set of trusted advisors they could call upon to validate ideas.

As a result, communication and collaboration increased across the company.

The authors argue:

“When a firm reorganizes in this way, the old networks and culture do not suddenly vanish; employees often maintain their old patterns of interaction for quite a while… so at least for the near term, employees cooperate along both informal and formal networks. As a consequence, the firm gets the best of both worlds.”

For law firms, new client development structures offer a way to reorganize attorneys to break existing silos and encourage the development of new relationships.

If attorneys are organized around practice groups, this may be the time to create industry or client teams. If a robust client team program is in place, consider creating new teams but comprised in a new way.

Law firms can no longer take a “wait and see” approach to profitability. Change is needed — if for no other reason that for the sake of it.

Relationship management touches every aspect of the business—from how you answer the phone to how you bill your clients. Create a client service policy for your firm and make sure every person on staff understands their role in relationship management.

Effective client service teams analyze their existing client relationships across every functional unit of the organization. Here are a few things to consider:

Staffing: Where ever possible, try to staff a team that mirrors that of the client and encourage everyone to develop relationships with their counterparts at the organization. Positive impressions don’t rest in the hands of a single person. Everyone on the team should be part of strengthening the client relationship.

Billing: Evaluate your billing process from the standpoint of your client. Do your bills go to the right internal contact? Are they formatted in a way that makes it easy for your client to process? Or do your bills frustrate your clients by providing too little or too much detail? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, ask.

Marketing: First impressions today are not always in person. They are online, often before any face-to-face interaction takes place. Today, a firm’s website is where a first impression is established. What does your website say about the firm? Is the content up to date? Does the look and feel of the site reflect the strongest attributes of the firm? For more on this topic, read, “When is a website more than a website?”

IT: Bring your IT professionals into the client team fold and evaluate what resources are available to support the goals of the team. Look at what internal resources you currently leverage to improve the overall efficiency in the way you work. Client extranets, simple project management software and experience databases can provide invaluable differentiators to support the development of the client relationship.

For more information about client relationship management, check out my article, “Lessons from the Trenches: Client Service Teams.”

Oscar Wilde once said, “You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.”

When it comes to law firm marketing, the same can be said about your clients. In some ways you do know more than you think you know, although you may not have harnessed that information to benefit your practice. In other ways, if you haven’t taken the time to understand what makes your client base tick, you may know a lot less.

The more you can understand your clients, the greater the impact you will have on them.

A key to building strong, long-term client relationships, is to understand the trends, drivers and needs that impact client behavior.

Trends: What trends impact your clients’ legal needs? Trends typically fall into four categories: competitive, regulatory, technological, economic.

Drivers: How do your clients measure success? Success for business is often based on key metrics such as financial performance or shareholder value.

Needs: What keeps your clients up at night? Consider the risks they face with their current legal needs, costs considerations, the source of the problem, competitive pressures.

By taking a disciplined approach to studying the trends, drivers and needs of your clients, you will provide value to your client that goes beyond the specific legal matter you handle. This will position you for a greater share of work and help turn your clients into great referral sources.

For more lessons about client service teams, read, “Lessons from the Trenches: Client Service Teams.”

My first job was at TJ’s Big Boy Restaurant in Rochester, New York. It was here, at the age of 16, that I received my first formal training in client feedback.

As a hostess, when customers came up to pay their bill, it was my responsibility to collect and track feedback by asking, “How was your service today?” I then recorded the response on a form that I handed to the manager at the end of my shift. Every month, we received a report card and with specific areas in which we needed to improve.

What always struck me about that first job was that was the discipline that went into managing customer relations. They not only created a systematic way to collect feedback, they used that data to improve their business.

Like the restaurant business, the ability to deliver an exceptional service experience is central to the legal profession. Client feedback is perhaps the single most valuable investment a law firm can make to strengthen and expand existing client relationships.

But the reality is that too often lawyers give client feedback lip service. For some reason, lawyers have a hard time asking for feedback and an even harder time listening to that feedback once they receive it.

That is why I am a proponent of using a third-party to collect the feedback. A third party has the advantage of serving as an objective ear for the client. Equally important, a third party can help turn the feedback into action.

As my friend Ramona Cyr Whitley of Luce Forward tells her attorneys, “The only thing worse than not asking for client feedback is not doing anything once you’ve received it.” Client feedback is only as valuable as what you do with it.

At a global level, client feedback is the foundation for better understanding clients, making needed process changes across the firms and positioning your firm more effectively in the market.

At the individual client level, the feedback should become the basis for written action plans to strengthen and improve service going forward.

To read more about lessons learned from client service teams, check out my article, “Lessons from the Trenches: Client Service Teams.”

Next Time: Understanding your client.

If it is true, as I believe, that value-driven legal services and profitability are not mutually exclusive, then law firm client teams offer a first step toward achieving both.

Client teams come in many shapes and sizes. When I use the term Client Team, I am referring to an organized, disciplined approach to strengthen and expand existing client relationships. It is cross-disciplinary in that a team includes attorneys from multiple practice areas within a firm. It is also cross-functional in that the team assesses its ability to support the client from multiple perspectives – as a business advisor, account manager, systems analyst and staffing manager to name just a few.

The overall goals of a Client Service Team are to:

• Solidify existing relationships to retain/expand existing work.
• Identify opportunities and expand the work across practice groups.
• Increase profitability.
• Secure the client as a referral source.

Through these efforts, however, law firms strengthen their knowledge of their clients business and can better understand how key decisions are made. They learn the trends, drivers and needs that keep their client up at night.

Armed with this information and a strong relationship, law firms can open the much needed dialogue around billing, knowledge management and key processes. Lawyers don’t necessarily need to have all the answers, but understanding the challenges clients face are the first step toward solving them.

As law firms consider ways to transform their business model to address market demand (read—better service, more efficiency, predictable pricing), strategic client teams offer an important step in this direction.