Most lawyers I speak with hate the concept of marketing. If they had their way, they’d just sit back and wait for referrals to flood in. They wouldn’t have to spend time prospecting. They wouldn’t have to pitch their services to people who don’t know who they are or why they are the lawyer for them. And they wouldn’t have to risk rejection. But most lawyers don’t get enough referrals to sustain their practice so they have to find other ways of drumming up new business.

Therein lies the problem. Lawyers want to sustain or grow their practice, but they don’t want to come off as the proverbial sleazy used car salesman.To make matters worse, there are all sorts of ethical rules in place on what lawyers can and can’t do. In some states, lawyers can’t do fundamental things like use client testimonials or promote their status as a “Super Lawyer”.

It seems that not a week goes by without law.com reporting that some ethical concern has been breached or an attorney was disbarred or suspended. In fact, there are 3414 results for success compared with 8155 results for fail (obviously, not all pertain to lawyers and law firms succeeding or failing, but the vocabulary choices are interesting).

It’s as if the profession of law looks down on self promotion – that lawyers should be so good that business just comes to them. They shouldn’t have to tell an uncaring world who they are, what they do, and why it matters. Prospects and clients should already know. But it’s even worse – yes there will always be a few bad apples, but it’s like the legal industry is more concerned with admonishing the wrongdoers than praising those who are doing a good job.

What’s Holding You Back?
Every entrepreneur, small business owner, or rainmaker eventually realizes that there are two forces working within them – their positive intentions and their negative intentions. When they focus on their positive intentions, they look at where they’d like to see their business in 5 years, how they’d like to grow their firm, what income level they want to sustain, and what kinds of work they want to attract. They see the potential for success and it energizes them.

But with every positive intention comes a negative “Yes, but.” I want to do this but I don’t have experience in that area of law. I don’t know how to get to that point. I don’t know where to find that kind of business.

If you aren’t where you want to be in life, perhaps it’s time to look at the negative beliefs you hold that are preventing you from achieving the level of success you’d like.

For instance, let’s say you want to attract a particular kind of work. What’s holding you back? Perhaps when you start to think about attracting those kind of clients, you think about past clients who were a pain to deal with, or unprofitable, or had difficult expectations to manage. Perhaps you had to fight with them over your bill or they second guessed you at some point. All those negative ideas about how you’ve handled past clients build up and you start to think things like “I can’t get it right” or “I’m just not good enough” or even “What if they find me out?”

In other words, for every positive belief that we hold, chances are that there are negative beliefs working against them. What is it that’s holding you back? What’s preventing you from being passionate about your work and helping others? What’s stopping you from getting the work you want from clients you want to work with?

In my next article, I’ll look at types of negative thinking that prevent lawyers from marketing themselves successfully.

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