You want your clients and contacts to see you as someone they can count on when they are in trouble, need help or information. Legal advice or anything else—business advice, referrals or introductions. Whatever they need, you want them to contact you first, so you can help them or help them find someone who can.
Why would you want to do something that seems so time consuming and may not lead to legal work?
Because it might indeed lead to legal work, but you won’t know that if they don’t contact you.
And while it might not lead directly to legal work, it might provide give you someone you can refer to another lawyer and that lawyer might then reciprocate and send you a referral.
Helping your clients and contacts this way might also lead to goodwill, which eventually leads to legal work, e.g., traffic to your site, growing your list, filling seats at your event, or other things that bring you more leads or business contacts.
And hey, what’s the alternative? People ask for something and you turn them away?
Bad karma. And bad business.
For starters, make sure you tell your clients, prospects, and business contacts to call you about any legal matter, because “I know a lot of lawyers in other practice areas.” (If you don’t, this is your chance to go meet some.)
If you have the ability to refer 5 or 10 clients a month to other attorneys, even if it’s just to get some questions answered, do you think that might bring you some referrals from those attorneys?
If it takes up too much of your time (it won’t), you can stop doing it. But you won’t want to. Because the more you help people, the more people will help you.
Prove me wrong. Try it for 60 days and see what happens.
Once you see good things happening, teach your clients and contacts to call you if they need anything else—an accountant, a real estate or insurance broker, a financial advisor, a vendor or business, or. . . anything.
You want people to call you first because it’s good karma and good for business.
