When the topic of business development arises, a common question concerns how often someone should reach out to a contact. Interestingly, when I worked in corporations, sales and marketing staff rarely posed such a query, as they tended to be aggressive. Lawyers, on the other hand, do raise it, as many fear that they may hurt a relationship by making contact too often.

Is there a hard and fast rule that applies in this context? Some proclaim there is and advocate a systematic approach—such as making contact every quarter. There is a lot to be said for such an approach, but it doesn't work in all situations. For example, that frequency of contact may be excessive for those who are in the embryonic stage of a relationship. If there is one thing I do know, it is that you do need to follow up to some extent and cannot sit idly by. Let me recount a story that underscores this point.

I was wrapping up a productive first meeting with a general counsel of a large corporation. I complimented him at the start of our session on how clean his desk was and he did his best to suppress a big smile. Just before he bid adieu, the general counsel remarked that his desk was so clean because he had been in over the weekend and reduced mounds of papers to just a few documents that he filed away.

The general counsel then asked that I keep in touch with him and explained why. He related that his company had recently been sued in a highly specialized, niche type of litigation. He wracked his brain as to whom he should retain, and had a nagging feeling that there was one firm, in particular, that had won such a case, but he couldn't remember who it was.

The GC remarked that he ultimately hired a good firm, but it was one that would be handling this specific type of case de novo, which made him a bit nervous. While he was cleaning off his desk over the weekend, he found a law firm newsletter, which described a victory in the niche type of litigation in which his company was now embroiled. The partner who won the case included a hand-written note with the newsletter and added a few extra details about the case.

That note had been sent to the GC more than a year ago (so you know the desk had to be a mess!), but there was no follow-up. If there had been, it would have been almost assured that the firm would have been hired. The GC looked me in the eye and said that I shouldn't make the same mistake.

There are many ways you can keep in touch, which include calling, entertaining, meeting for meals, introducing your contact to someone who may benefit him, and sending letters/emails/texts, to name just a few methods. In this column, I'll focus on sending information, as that is an important method and is one that many lawyers are comfortable with, as it puts little pressure on your contact.

Preliminarily, though, it is important that you approach this with the right mindset. If your true goal is to get something from the other person, you will not have long-term success, even if you try masking that ambition. People can smoke out that motive and that type of off-putting behavior can end a relationship.

Personally, I think you are much better off building a relationship in which you try to help the other person. It is the right thing to do and it frequently follows that your contacts will try to reciprocate for the help you have given them.

As to the tools you should use, and as elementary as this may sound, it is vital that you have a consolidated and updated contact list. I am often quite surprised to learn that many lawyers do not have a central contact list; rather, they have partial lists that are located in various locations (in contact management software, Outlook, firm databases, paper Rolodexes, and in stacks of business cards that have never been inputted). Spend the time (or have support staff help you) to pull this disparate information together and input it into one source. Once this is done, the master list can then be segregated into subgroups (such as in-house lawyers, private practice attorneys, business contacts, etc.).

Newsletters, alerts and similar materials can be very helpful types of information to send. The more tailored it is to your contact, the better. To accomplish that objective, you can track developments relating to that person, his company (or firm, if it's a referral source), or the industry he works in. If you come across a specific development that may be of interest, such as an article or blog post, it is a wonderful thing to send to your contact. This demonstrates that you have been thinking of the contact and are trying to help with this information.

Of course, no one has the time, especially on a daily basis, to comb through websites, newspapers and other sources to find information that may be of interest to your contacts. That is certainly the case if you want to forward timely information, right?

Actually, you can pull this off almost effortlessly and can let technology, such as Google Alerts, http://bit.ly/1s13K1q, automatically do it for you. All you need to do is to spend a few minutes inputting the names of people, companies, firms, topics and other categories of interest. After you complete that relatively painless exercise, Google goes to work for you and scours the internet for relevant stories. You then receive a daily email with a consolidated list of digested stories, which you can quickly review. If one or more are of interest to a contact, you can then forward that information. It's really that simple and you look great without having to do very much.

As we all know, there also is quite a bit of action on social media, and that, too, can be a fertile source of information on the same type of topics discussed, above. Even if you don't have a presence on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram, and don't really spend time on LinkedIn, there are services that will pull information from those sites, and others like them, for you. Some of these are free, while others operate on a subscription basis. If the latter is applicable, it is possible that your firm or company already has an account to which you can be added.

There are quite a few such services—here are several you may want to consider:

No matter how you do it, stay in touch with others. There is a chance that an important piece of business or a compelling opportunity may miraculously land on your desk from the heavens above. If that happens, that is great and you should thank the gods of serendipity. If you would prefer upping the odds considerably, and don't want to rely on luck, make it a habit to stay connected—it will benefit the contacts you help and very likely will pay dividends for you, too.

Frank Michael D'Amore is the founder of Attorney Career Catalysts, http://www.attycareers.com, a Pennsylvania-based legal recruiting and consulting firm that focuses on law firm mergers and partner placements. He is a former partner in an AmLaw 200 firm, general counsel in privately held and publicly traded companies, and vice president of business development. He can be reached at [email protected].