Calling Young Women Professionals!! How to Build Your Book of Business NOW!!!

(pictured: legal marketing consultant Renee Barrett)

The real guru on social networking is right here in Los Angeles and one of the most active members of the Professional Women's Network of Southern California, Renee Barrett. You couldn't make a better investment in your career -- as well as, but not necessarily for your law firm's well being -- by hiring Renee to give you marketing advice now. If you work for an AmLaw100 firm, Renee has been advising your law firms for many years. Let her put your firm's rainmaker's knowledge into your own hands! If you're not, however, quite ready to devote a couple of hours and a few hundred dollars to yourself, here's a little advice from The Complete Lawyer's Young Attorney Marketing Guru, Dawn Wagenaar.

Choose Strategy Over Volume

You probably realize that networking is not a race to pass out the most business cards. To meet the right people, you need to understand where and how your firm gets clients. Depending on your area of practice, you may get leads from clients, other attorneys, or related advisors such as CPAs and financial professionals.

These days, professionals in their 20s and early 30s post profiles on social networking sites. You can leverage this trend—just as employers do—in two ways:

Search for young professionals who are in your target industries and your local market. Connect virtually or set up a meeting.

Design your profile like an online résumé. In addition to personal interests, include relevant career and educational facts. Post a tasteful photo. Avoid any information or graphics that may embarrass you later.

Remember, employers and recruiters are screening these sites. Many bar associations and civic organizations offer new lawyer sections and young professionals groups. These are great places to meet other associates like yourself — but don’t limit yourself. Find out where young accountants, bankers and entrepreneurs network. Choose organizations that invite a mix of professionals who match your firm’s referral base.

We Add the Mediation Channel to Our Blog Roll with Negotiation Advice for Women

Attorney, mediator, trainer and consultant Diane Levin -- my blog mentor and the quintessential reasonable "woman" -- has been Queen of the ADR Bloggers (yes, it's a small kingdom but an important one -- Monaco leaps to mind) for a very very long time in Blog-years.

Recently, Diane redecorated and renamed her site from the Online Guide to Mediation to the Mediation Channel, which we add to our blogroll today.

Here's the kind of career-changing advice Diane can give you. From her post the Art of Persuasion: Negotiation Advice for Women. Excerpt below. Click on the link for the complete must-read post.

Leadership communication expert Donna Goodhand and attorney and negotiation coach Delee Fromm had advice tailored for women who want to become more persuasive and effective negotiators:

“People respond more to the person representing the cause than they do to the cause itself,” Goodhand said, emphasizing the importance of image. “If we want to be seen as leaders in our realm, if we want our ideas to be credited and our voices to be heard, then it’s essential that we take a persuasive presence into our encounters.”

Emphasized were the importance of:

• developing a vocal presence - women are socialized to speak quietly and
  use their “indoor voice”


• avoiding “undermining openers” like “It’s probably
  just me” or “I guess what I’m trying to say”


• in a competitive negotiation strategic, context-specific use of different negotiating styles
  

Don't Wait for Happiness: The "Rules" for Women Change

I'm old enough to tell young women lawyers that I am the ghost of Christmas Future -- I show you how things will be if you don't change your ways.

What does that mean when a middle-aged (yes I do intend to live to 110) woman who's happy with her second career says it.

Here's what it means.

First, by the time I had practiced law long enough to consider myself "entitled" to start a family, I was between husbands. Then I was starting practice at a new law firm. Then I was . . . well . . . too old to conceive. It overtakes you very quickly when you're billing 60 hours a week.

Second, I didn't want to develop my own book of business. I was working hard enough as it was. I couldn't develop, you know, Burlington Industries or BIC, the lighter people, or Hoffman-LaRoche or Lloyds of London, or the Foundation Health Care Plan or California Satellite Systems. You get the picture. And I wasn't going to find clients at Bar Association events and I was too tired to write articles for legal journals and had too little to say to give presentations to industry groups. (none of this was accurate)

My Unsolicited Advice from This End of a Legal Career?

1. Don't delay happiness


2. Don't leave your sweat equity in someone else's brick and mortar


3. If you don't start your own firm, start building your own book of business now.

What inpsired this post? Law.com's recent article Younger Female Lawyers Play by Their Own Rules, which tends to make my advice a day late and a dollar short. Women lawyers are doing it for themselves.

Even 20 years ago, few women managed to combine family and success at a big firm. But these middle-aged lawyers pushed to make it happen. They worked nonstop; they stayed up half the night with a brief in one hand and a crying baby in the other; and they succeeded, damn it.

Carol Honigberg, 52, a partner at Reed Smith, is a good example. She made partner at her previous firm 22 years ago while she was home on maternity leave. The firm, Thomas & Fiske, had no maternity leave policy at the time, so she persuaded the firm to write one and then took six months off. She says she suspects that making her a partner was the firm's way of ensuring she would come back.

That kind of reasoning made sense to her. "Once you've established your value to the firm," she says, you can create some flexibility in your work arrangement.
Thanks for all that forging, say the younger women. But we intend to do it a different way.

Take Leatham, who started her own firm after nearly eight years in the Bethesda, Md., office of Holland & Knight. She was miserable there, she says, because of the way big law firms are set up. She felt she was being forced to buy into a set of rules about succeeding that had been created by a generation that had no other choice.

The older women's thinking, she says, is that you pay some heavy dues first, and they buy you the leverage to do other things, to have a life. But Leatham -- with some prodding from her husband, who saw how unhappy she was -- realized she didn't want to follow that path. "I thought we need to be shifting the paradigm. You don't need to work, work, work and then have a family."

So Leatham, a zoning and land use attorney, left Holland & Knight and, with some colleagues and friends, formed her own firm, Stark, Meyers, Eisler & Leatham, based in Rockville, Md. Ironically, she says, she puts in more hours now than she did at Holland & Knight. "But I can control it in a way I didn't before. It's just empowering," she says.

Sub-Prime Mortgage Mess Disproportionately Affects Women

For each of the last four years, more than half of the foreclosures in the [Baltimore neighborhood subject of this New York Times article] have been homes owned primarily by women, according to an analysis of public records by the Reinvestment Fund, a nonprofit community development organization.

The foreclosures threaten the neighborhood’s fragile stability. And they highlight a broader dimension of the housing meltdown: subprime mortgages, which are driving the foreclosure rate, have gone disproportionately to women.

Single women have been among the fastest-growing groups of homeowners in recent years, and in Baltimore they accounted for 40 percent of home sales in 2006, twice the national average, according to the National Association of Realtors. Nearly half of these mortgages were subprime, National Community Reinvestment Coalition found. For the remainder of the article click here.

O Sister Attorney; We Not Only MAKE Less, We CHARGE Less

Oy! as my beloved would say. This just in from ALM Research on 2007 National Billing Rates and Practices (.pdf executive summary here).

Is this because Women Don't Negotiate?

By neglecting to negotiate her starting salary for her first job, a woman may sacrifice over half a million dollars in lost earnings by the end of her career.

It appears not to be a result of any pink legal ghetto. Here's the news:

As for billing rates, perhaps the most significant trend uncovered by the ALM Research Survey of Billing Rates and Practices was that female attorneys, on average, tend to bill at lower hourly rates than male attorneys, regardless of firm size, years in practice, geography, and—with a few exceptions—practice area.