Recommendations in Building a Book of Business
[00:00:00] I'm a mid-level associate at an Am Law 100 law firm in Dallas. I work in a practice group where it is in theory, difficult to build a book of business without government legal experience.
Unlike a lot of people in Biglaw, I love my job. And that's true. A lot of people doing white-collar work do like their jobs. I work long hours to manage my time. I don't mind being busy. I'm not expecting to be on call all the time. I don't have to bill the kinds of hours one might at a Cravath firm. My professional feedback's been very positive and partners like staffing me on cases. However, I'm nervous that if I'm unable to build a book of business I will eventually be forced out of any law firm. I'm okay being "of counsel"...
So if you have a goal of being a partner in one of these firms, there are a couple of things you can do.
The first thing is most people, go to work in the US attorney's office. At some point, even just for a couple of years, I would apply to a bunch of us attorney law firms. I mean our us attorney positions all over the country. And you'll probably get one if you're doing that right now.
That's the first thing I would do because once you become a US attorney, it becomes much easier to get in. But the other thing is, how do you attract clients? You're only looking at one aspect of how do you bring in clients. Whatever, the types of white-collar cases that you work on after you [00:01:00] work on them, you can write articles about different things.
Like how does someone, respond? What happens if someone's, accused of this type of thing or a white-collar thing? How do you handle that? How does someone do this if they have that happen? Becoming an expert in writing about things related to your practice area that are relevant to things you work on could be very helpful.
One of the ways to look at business is just to pretend. You can always start at your blog or anything but pretend you are a client looking for someone.
Yesterday just happened to be looking for a certain type of attorney to help me with something and it was just something about someone that was an expert in a certain type of contract. I did a search and I only could find, a few people out there that did it.
And the way I found them is because those people wrote articles. So I hope that makes sense.
So that's how I found them. And I found them because they wrote articles. Sometimes I found people based on being quoted in a news article all that sort of thing. So you can bring it more business than even the partners in your firm, even without going to our attorney's office.
But you need to be seen by [00:02:00] people when they're searching for someone like you, and you need to build up your resume with all that sort of information. And that's it. Once you do that and you're seen as an expert then you're in good shape.
That's what I would recommend. I think anybody that wants to build a book of business, it's not difficult or impossible, you just need to be seen and you don't necessarily need government experience. But I think if you want to do white-collar and that's really what you want, I do think you're going to need an actual trial experience and I would recommend spending at least a few years as a US attorney. I just think it'd be crazy not to.
