I played a lot of poker in college. I wasn’t necessarily a great player but I usually won because I got a few things right.
One thing I got good at was bluffing. Poker teaches you that you don’t have to have “the goods” (the best hand) to win the pot, as long as the other players think you do. In a law practice, we call that “faking it” until you make it.
You can get clients and win cases if you sound like you know what you’re doing, even when you don’t. But like poker, you can’t bluff all the time. If you do it too much, you’ll eventually get caught.
Do what you have to do as a new lawyer to get your practice started, but get some help when you’re in over your head. And whatever you do, make sure your clients don’t know how much you don’t know.
Poker also taught me that you don’t have to always win the big pots to win the game. You can do nicely by winning a preponderance of small to medium-size hands and letting the other players fight over the long shots. Some players in our game went hard after the biggest pots and while they sometimes won them, their net for the night was often a big loss.
By contrast, I almost always walked away from the table a winner. I did the same thing in my law career, focusing on small to medium-sized cases. They didn’t bring me many of the biggest pots, but I didn’t have any great losses, either.
The biggest thing poker taught me about marketing is that you don’t have to be a great player, you just have to be better than the other players at the table. Apparently, that’s how I was able to do so well.
In building a law practice, you may have a large number of competitors, but most of them aren’t very good at marketing. You can beat them by getting good at a few key marketing strategies. If you’re a little better at getting referrals, for example, you can become a “top player” in your market.
You can let others spend big on advertising and chase the big prizes while you consistently go home a winner.
The best way to get good at getting referrals
