"Does anyone know an attorney who handles …?" — Lawyers Everywhere

We all have sent or received this email at one time or another at our firms. Perhaps it's your neighbor, a tech executive, fighting for a patent, or a colleague from another firm looking for local counsel to handle a complex zoning issue. We scan our mental Rolodex and, not coming up with a familiar name, we cast a net for referrals to help our friend. However, that knowledge and experience often exist right in your mid-sized firm but some of your attorneys don't know it. You can fix that.

The Challenge to Cross-Selling

The most significant obstacle to developing a strong cross-selling program is a lack of inter-departmental awareness and education. Or more precisely, a lack of time devoted to awareness and education. This reality is often the product of busy law firms. Many of us are focused on our own matters and are hard pressed to find the time to get to know other departments. While on the surface that may not seem like the worst thing—busy attorneys focused on their clients—the long-term consequence is that their clients are not getting to know the whole firm. As the adage goes, we lose the forest for the trees. This results in missed opportunities to bring increased value to your clients, credence to your internal referral program and growth to your associates and counsel in developing their books of business.

Turning Obstacles Into Opportunities

Education, education, education. Intra-department education provides attorneys with the basic knowledge necessary to identify client needs in complex areas. By expanding the areas in which a client is serviced, you begin to develop true internal collaboration. A client team can now assess a client's business more holistically and provide counsel that considers more than the immediate legal issue at hand.

Moreover, when attorneys know the firm's abilities, they can add value for their clients by helping them centralize their work with one law firm as a partner in business, simplifying their lives. Further, attorneys can bolster their professional network standing by becoming a more well-versed resource, which can lead to enhanced relationships and additional business.

These are just a few reasons that attorneys should invest the time necessary to get to know the firm's base of experience, but they will need a manageable and reliable firm-managed education program.

The Way Forward

Developing practical and sustainable methods of inter-departmental education is central to a successful internal referral program. Offer a variety of settings for your attorneys to get to know each other and their respective practices that reflect how your people like to engage. Monthly luncheons "hosted" by a practice group who can speak to hot topics in their area is a tried and true approach to secure a focused audience. Internal CLEs with a meaningful Q&A portion at the end is a highly effective manner of advancing inter-department knowledge. A monthly pipeline meeting, where attorneys come together in a structured way to discuss potential opportunities for new business, allows attorneys to identify clients their group is looking for and provides them a platform to highlight successes that can encourage collaboration across departments. Regular pipeline meetings pay an additional dividend by facilitating and reinforcing mutual education of their respective practices.

With a foundation of understanding and inter-departmental knowledge established, introduce regular small group dinners with up to eight attorneys across departments to deepen one-on-one relationships throughout the firm. This type of intimate and unstructured atmosphere allows for more nuanced conversations on their respective practices and client base. Further, a more relaxed setting provides the attendees a way to genuinely get to know each other outside the formality of the office.

Encourage your management team to attend these events as well. Management can often identify inter-department service needs early on and help guide connections between departments. Further, they can implement more passive ways of sharing experience and information throughout the firm, such as detailed conflict digests that provide short narratives from new matter forms submitted by the attorneys. These narratives should speak to the type of matter and how they seek to help the client, e.g., defense of code enforcement proceedings involving outdoor signage. Also, internal newsletters or a dedicated section of an intranet are useful ways of sharing client success stories in a transparent and real-time manner.

Overcoming Resistance

It is no secret how protective we are conditioned to be over our clients. After all, we have poured years into developing our client relationships. It is perfectly reasonable to be hesitant about letting an unknown quantity into our client universe. Nevertheless, pushing past these anxieties to bring added value to your client is critical. As in any strong relationship, the first step is to let your guard down a bit. Spending time with a smaller group of your colleagues and talking about their wins and losses, how they have navigated sophisticated legal issues, and sharing your own, will help establish the first building blocks of a trusting referral relationship.

Collaborating on a group pitch is another approach to learning and sharing the nuances of your practices, client-service philosophies and billing strategies to help build trusting relationships. A member of the management team, such as the CFO or Director of Marketing/Business Development can serve as a team leader in preparing pitches or responses to RFPs and can work to identify key areas of expertise in the firm and bring those people together.

Share the Win

Few things can go such a long way in improving firm culture and morale as sharing a win. Implement ways to celebrate and highlight successful pitches or new business that recognize all the players on the team. From the administrative person typing up the pitch materials to the attorneys who shared their experience and contacts, reveal to the firm the process in which a client team came together to assemble a winning pitch. This can take the form of an email, a periodic firm newsletter, or a shoutout during a firm event.

Even if a strong pitch or RFP response does not result in the targeted business, the collaborative process helps to limit silos, educate attorneys on the firm's collective experience, and develop a healthy reciprocal referral program.

The Takeaway

Developing a strong cross-selling and servicing program requires a commitment to shifting the firm's culture from reactive to proactive. A variety of manageable inter-departmental educational opportunities and partner/management committee-level support are the primary elements you will need to form and grow your program.

Alan Tarter is the managing partner of Tarter Krinsky & Drogin, a full-service law firm. Tanya Duprey is the firm administrator and past president of the New York City Chapter of the Association of Legal Administrators. For more information about the firm, please visit www.tarterkrinsky.com.