Tips for Rebuilding Your Business When Your Referral Base Retires
02/16/2022 | The New York Law Journalby Murray Schwartz
Nothing can stop the clock and keep us from getting older. But nothing so stated should force us into retirement. We older folks can rebuild, we can grow, we can flourish and most important, we can continue to make contributions to an improving world.
Two major events informed me what I was going to do in my senior years, and what pivots I needed to make to survive them happily. It helped me to have a strong business background, a vibrant contact list, the energy and work ethic to be available to clients 24/7 and a law firm flexible and creative enough to give me the time and space to put some unconventional ideas into place.
Considering conventional retirement. The first critical event happened in my 50s when I visited my in-laws in their 55-and-over Florida community. My sentence was one week, and it was a brutal week for the natives.
Suffice to say the experience was less than what I was hoping for on many levels. I knew, then, that anything resembling a conventional retirement was not in my future.
From then into my early 60s, I maintained a successful middle-market practice, but in my mid-60s, I hit the “drop.” I never had “overnight” success, but failure was sudden and precipitous. What happened?
Law practice does not occur in a vacuum—it takes a village. And my village became a ghost town. My investment bankers, insurance folks, friendly referring lawyers, accountants, angels, clients, serial entrepreneurs and bankers all seemed at once to grow old, some died, some cashed in, some lost interest and many retired.
At any rate, my thriving practice died with it. So, I had to figure out how to build it back up.
So here are some ideas based on how I did it:
Distinguish yourself (again). Since there are 50,000 lawyers on the block who can practice law, I needed to distinguish myself in the services I could provide the client. In my case, my bio of many years serving in a variety of business and business-building operational roles was the key, not only to contrast myself from the others, but also to proactively tell a story of how I can help clients grow—not just keep them out of legal travail.
I think back too to my 3L days when I asked a big law partner what he did. He told me he was a “Sub Part F” man. I knew then that I could never define my practice, to say nothing of my life, by a sub part of the Internal Revenue Code. After all, we still had Shakespeare and Mozart.
Network, network, network. Since retirement was not in the cards (or in the mah-jongg tiles) I had to re-energize in my late 60s. I did this through my contacts past, my networking for new contacts and my proactive efforts to bring others business (reciprocity is not a widespread concept to many lawyers). I recreated my network of younger and more active and energetic investment bankers, financial planning executives, contacts at venture capital and private equity firms.
I would talk to them every day to learn more about their businesses and how I could help with their efforts, and slowly but surely deal flow would happen.
Remember, most lawyers are in sales. Remember lawyers, we are salespeople looking how we can satisfy our client’s needs, not just how a client can help us. The latter will come if we are effective with the former.
I did not just appear on panels. I helped create panels for various organizations—a turnkey operation that no one can refuse.
Be a connector, and then be nicer than you have to be. Be nicer than you have to be. You never know what will follow. For example, I used my contacts on the advisory board of a medical school pain center to find the doctor who knew about an investment banker’s daughter’s rare pain disorder. She went from a wheelchair to her high school volleyball team in just a few months. I trace four good deals to that experience.
Find a firm that is entrepreneurial. As things improved, I started to tinker with what I was offering to help clients and how I was to be paid. At this stage, if I were at a prior firm of mine, I would have been deemed to come from Pluto and sent to a convalescent home until I recovered my senses. What makes my firm unusual in my experience is the level of business acumen among my partners, especially those who manage the firm, a conspicuous lack of ego, devotion to clients’ interests—even over self-interest, and an open-mindedness and creative flair both in methodology of practice and in subject matter.
And then … change billing methods; not all billable hours are equal. I realized I needed to change billing methods, something I had to prove to my firm and then to clients that made sense. I charge a modest flat fee which in the aggregate with other flat fees exceeds my draw. My deals provide that we do the rest of the legal work at regular billing rates, and my fee, and the others are collected in less than 30 days. When I have helped clients grow and prosper, they have never begrudged my ultimate payment, which is higher than what billing hours and rates would have provided. Conclusion: not all billable hours are equal, and clients prefer to get what they pay for.
Overall: Be opportunistic. Finally, if this pandemic taught still-successful lawyers anything, it is how to navigate uncharted waters. Do not get stuck in the rut of “how we always did things.” When you do that, a world of opportunity will pass you by.
Murray Schwartz is a partner at Warshaw Burstein.
Reprinted with permission from the “February 16, 2022 edition of the “NEW YORK LAW JOURNAL”© 2022 ALM Media Properties, LLC. All rights reserved. Further duplication without permission is prohibited, contact 877-257-3382 or reprints@alm.com.
