Defining your ideal client « Lawyers USA Online

Defining your ideal client

By: Susan Cartier Liebel
Published: June 18, 2010

If you are a solo practitioner and have not defined your “ideal client,” you are setting yourself up for problems, including a misguided marketing plan and clients that compromise your bottom line.

The ideal client is not a luxury. It’s a mandate.

In the new days of a solo practice, business can actually grow too fast, even exponentially. Marketing efforts, even if not great, seem to be bearing fruit. What the lawyer loses sight of is the answer to an important question: “Am I getting the client I want to get?”

Before he knows it, the lawyer has stopped “selecting” clients that fit the definition of his “ideal client.” Instead, he starts taking every client that wants to retain him. His business model has been tossed and his livelihood is being determined by the clients who are choosing him – rather than him choosing clients who support his business model.

When this happens, inevitably there is no time for the lawyer to seek out and serve his “ideal client” any more. He has stopped devoting time to his marketing efforts, and he has lost sight of his marketing goal. The tail is now wagging the dog.

It’s important for solo practitioners to remember that being client-focused – which is critical – does not mean expending all energies on all clients, especially those that add no value to the business.

Lawyers often make one of two big mistakes when it comes to clients: They pay too little attention and risk losing clients, or they work too hard at trying to keep the wrong clients.

The key is learning about the clients that matter the most to your practice and taking action to make sure they are happy.

Cultivating your client base

Lawyers are notorious for failing to cultivate their existing client base.

They often do not engage in proper follow-up after a matter has concluded because no time has been allotted for this function. As a result, they let this “bird in the hand” relationship fly away.

This is a critical and costly mistake. It costs 11 times more money to get new clients than to keep current clients satisfied and profitable for you, according to research conducted by Ronald Baker, the founder of VeraSage Institute, a California-based think tank.

You can’t afford NOT to follow up. Current clients are highly profitable and at least 50 percent of your marketing energy needs to be devoted to this group.

In addition, to become client-focused, a solo needs to be able to deliver the right client experience. Growing client demand comes from a focus not just on services, but on the total experience.

While providing value to the client, lawyers also need to be able to measure the value they receive from their clients – client profitability – and utilize it in decision making. Lawyers thus need to master two sides of client value. The first is to provide value to their clients – which can be managed strategically through client experience management. The second is to get value from their clients – which can be measured strategically through client profitability.

One action solo practitioners should consider taking is categorizing their current clients in order to determine which ones should receive their full “customer-service” attention.

Do not confuse “full attention” in this context with a lawyer’s obligations under the Rules of Professional Conduct. Rather, this concept relates to which clients might bring extra value in terms of more legal work from themselves or from referrals of the same caliber.

Through this process, the key is a lawyer assessing who his ideal client is and how this ideal client adds value to the bottom line.

After a lawyer evaluates who his ideal client is, he or she must create marketing campaigns geared toward attracting more of these types of clients. This strategy is essential to an enjoyable and profitable business.

One lawyer who mentored me in my early years said, “There are a lot of barking dogs out there. You can’t feed them all. But the ones you feed, you should feed well.”

These are important words to live by in your solo law practice.

An attorney who started her own practice right out of law school, Susan Cartier Liebel authors the blog Build A Solo Practice, LLC and is the founder of Solo Practice University(TM), a web 2.0 based educational and professional networking community for lawyers and law students who wish to go solo.

Comments

Mike says:

This is a very broad gray area. The thing is, it is all up to you. You can define your ideal client but you also have to define a “range” since most wont be in your “ideal client”. The trick is to set the “range” and work from there. Do follow ups as it is more important than looking for new clients. You can get a lot of information on defining the ideal client in Google but it is you that needs to define the range. This will give you a better field and not too limiting.

Posted on 06/22/10 at 4:03 am

Most Recent Opinions

LEGAL BLOGS

DC Dicta Legal buzz from Washington

Blog Roll

FEATURED PODCAST

Baby Boomer lawyers and retirement

Nelson Schwartz from The New York Times recently wrote an article titled, "Easing Out the Gray-Haired. Or Not.," spotlighting the fate of the Baby Boomer generation within law firms. Attorney and co-host Bob Ambrogi welcomes Attorney Valerie C. Samuels, a partner in the firm Posternak Blankstein & Lund LLP and co-chair of the Employment Law Group, and Attorney Roy Ginsburg, to take a look at this generation of baby boomers within law firms, retirement, their fate within the firm, options upon retirement and what this means for law firms: big, small and solo.

Click here to listen to the podcast.

Click here to download the podcast.

Click here for the Podcast archive.

Lawyers USA Your Business Partner