Lawyers Lack Marketing Skills (Article in the WSJ)

This article is about 2 weeks old but warranted mentioning.  It’s a clear indication that law school does NOT prepare us for running our own practices.  In fact, law school teaches us a way to think, not particularly even how to practice law.  But that’s a digression.

The focus is that lawyer marketing training is growing exponentially.  The article focuses on attire, first impressions, etc. which are all salient points.  But the sad part comes in the last line of the article where it states that a large corporate firm has “shifted resources toward one-on-one relationship building.”

I’m wondering what they were working on before?  Even when you have mid to large-sized corporations as your clients ultimately you are still dealing with an INDIVIDUAL (hence the one-on-one relationship).  Luckily as solos we don’t have that confusion of whether we are dealing with an entity or a person (hint: I do believe in both scenarios we are still working with humans).

So if you’re going to take anything from this article it’s to not deviate your marketing focus from what it is, and should be, from the onset, personal relationships.

Here’s the article link from the WSJ (it was still active as of this writing).

Lawyers Often Lack the Skills Needed to Draw, Keep Clients (May 20, 2009)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124277203983936555.html