How To Get Clients as a New Lawyer
If you are a new lawyer and have just opened a new law firm, I hope you have read my post How To Start a Law Firm.
In that post, I gave a few tips on starting a firm. One tip was that a surprising amount of your first clients will come from referrals from other lawyers.
Yes, other lawyers will be your biggest source of clients. Not only in the beginning but likely throughout your career a surprising amount of clients will be referred by other lawyers.
If you think the other lawyers in your city are the competition and not your friends, you will not last operating your own firm.
Type of Work You Will Recieve
Other Areas of Expertise
Lawyers have been specializing for at least the last 20 years. Most lawyers have expertise in one or two areas of law.
Unfortunately our friends and family don’t know this. They think if you’re a lawyer you can handle a Bankruptcy, a Divorce, and a freight forwarder import/export case all in the same week. Therefore, they call you for everything.
When I get calls for areas of law I don’t know, I refer them to other lawyers in that area of specialty. Most lawyers in your city will do the same.
Small Cases
Some lawyers get to a point where they can pick and chose what type of cases they want to take. Sometimes they don’t like the clients, type of case, or it’s just too small for them to take.
Whatever reason, if they don’t want the case, even if they practice the same area of law as you, they will refer the case to you.
Court Coverage
If you’ve been practicing law for a year or two before opening your law firm, other lawyers will ask you to appear in court for them.
Before opening my practice, I spent two years at the Maricopa County Public Defender’s Office. I was in Court literally every day for those two years.
So when I opened my firm, other lawyers would ask me to appear in Court for them when they couldn’t be there. Often this happened when a criminal defense lawyer must be in two different Courts at the same time.
I’m not sure if this is still around, but before it was called “Appearance Court” or “A Coverage Attorney.”
Years ago, they would pay me $200 per hour. It was a great way to pick up a few extra bucks.
Summary
In my post How to Start a Law Firm, I recommended that if you are just starting, you should lease office space with other lawyers. I made that recommendation for the reasons above.
You have just learned what it took me 18 years of running a solo law firm to learn. But, I learned this 18 years ago in these two books:
Here are my worn and tattered copies:
