What No One Can Teach Or Sell A Lawyer

It's hard for any lawyer who spends any time on the internet to think that to be successful they need anything else but a few toys with power switches and apps, and some tips from a non-practicing lawyer on how to run their office.

Sure, there's all kinds of "lawyering," just there's all kinds of clients. If every client needed to have a conversation with a person in order to have a Will written, LegalZoom wouldn't exist. Some people who get traffic tickets want to tell a real-live- human being what happened, others just want to fax in the ticket and a credit card number to a faceless lawyer who probably won't be the one in court handling the case.

But for the most part, clients go to lawyers because they have problems. That, or they are trying to avoid problems. The lawyers they hire will be required to do something that cannot be done by a machine, or anything on that machine.

The lawyer will need to understand the problem.

This is often not too difficult for the average lawyer.

But what separates the average lawyer from the great ones, is not how much technology they own, how advanced their filing system is, or how well their marketing plan is put together.

What great lawyers do, is establish a connection with their clients.

Connections are established in ways that the snake oil salesmen can't understand or explain.

A connection is established when a client feels that you as the lawyer understand not only the problem at hand, but the relevance it has to the client.

Don't ever think it's less important to understand not only what the problem is, but who the client is.

When a client knows that you understand the total package, that's when you become not only a lawyer, but their lawyer.

Now back to your toys, apps, and race to the front page of Google.

Located in Miami, Florida, Brian Tannebaum practices Bar Admission and Discipline and Criminal Defense. He is the author of I Got A Bar Complaint.