At Levity Partners, we solve most every lawyer's #1 client development problem: You have an amazing contact list, but you can't find a reason to call your contacts (clients included) that doesn't feel like a concealed sales pitch - because that's what it basically is. This problem has only been exacerbated by COVID-19 and the elimination of live networking.  We've historically coached the top lawyers, law firms, & other eminent professional service providers on the most effective client development tactics. None of them involve traditional selling and, for the sake of efficiency, they were all designed to be done virtually (from one's chair). 

My law firm has more business than it can handle. Could you please help us to be less effective at client development?"

​- said nobody ever

You need more business; we get it. And it's not like you haven't tried. You've read the articles. You've attended the seminars. Maybe you've hired a variety of consultants and coaches. Yet no one has acknowledged the elephant in the room: Calling your contacts for business just feels wrong to you and/or you're convinced it will be ineffective).  Why do you think that is? Perhaps you should ask yourself this question:

What if everyone's merely been looking at the problem incorrectly?"

Humor me for a moment, and assume that the vast majority of lawyers, consultants, and coaches have a fundamental misunderstanding of what "sales" really is. That what most lawyers call selling is, in fact, something else; something that's become increasingly counter-productive. Wouldn't that explain why so many lawyers and law firms can't cure their client development ills? How can you produce a viable solution if you're trying to solve the wrong problem?

In over two decades of working with lawyers, we've seen an astonishing amount of evidence supporting the assertion that lawyers have been pressured by others, or put pressure on themselves, to sublimate a perfectly good instinct: selling just feels wrong. Our founder, Craig Levinson, Esq. was a former practicing lawyer at an AmLaw 100 firm who could not sell in that manner. Out of necessity, he designed a process which eliminates all the traditional sales tactics that lawyers, and clients, find distasteful. If you would like to learn more, we invite you to book a fifteen-minute call with Craig (click the button below). 

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The last thing you need is another "sales pitch."
​We never pitch; we only help you gain clarity.

Book a free "clarity call" with our founder, Craig Levinson, Esq. Most problems that come across your desk end up being shelved, largely because the pain is abstract. You know there are consequences, but no one's ever helped you to transform those abstract notions into concrete impacts. Answer five key questions and you'll have one of two epiphanies: 1) You'll realize that the cost of not tackling your problem is even higher than you thought and that you must take action now, or 2) You'll come to grips with the fact that the cost of not fixing this problem is too low to move the needle and you'll likely never address it.  If the latter is the case, you'll often discover you've been trying to solve the wrong problem. At the least, you can stop wasting precious time feeling guilty about not doing anything to address it and start focusing on how to get what you want in a different manner.  Either way, you win.

Book a 15-min Call

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​Tom McMakin, author of How Clients Buy: A Practical Guide to Business Development for Consulting and Professional Services, recently sat down to interview Craig Levinson of Levity Partners. They discussed re-framing sales, the parallels in their approaches, and a handful of strategic mistakes lawyers make that:
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​- Undermine the vast majority of their client development efforts, 
- Squander most of the time, money, and effort that they invest, and
- Render their marketing efforts counter-productive.

​A number of excerpts are included below.

​LAWYERS' MISUNDERSTANDING OF SALES
TM: Let’s discuss your definition of professional selling.
CL: Professional selling is helping people and companies make sensible decisions that best serve their interests – even if one of those decisions is not hiring you. It’s you demonstrating your value, not convincing someone of it.  Imagine you keep seeing a lawyer named Adam at networking events. He’s conspicuous in that he never pitches you for your business. He merely questions you about a few novel issues, until you come to a realization that the financial, tactical, and personal impacts of one of them are greater than you imagined, and you must deal with it now. He helps you gain the clarity to transfer an issue from your “I'll handle someday” file into your “Must tackle today” pile. Now, might you consider hiring Adam?
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TM: I would. Without Adam, I wouldn't have seen the need to deal with the issue immediately. 
CL: And that's the essence of professional selling. You’re seriously considering hiring Adam and he still hasn't mentioned himself (the solution). It’s been all about you and your problem. There’s a MASSIVE opportunity for the first Big Law Chairperson who declares: “As of today, the pitching behavior is over. All we are going to do is help people make smart, self-interested decisions that are 100% independent of our interests.”

WHEN A PROSPECT YOU THOUGHT YOU "CLOSED" GOES DARK ON YOU
CL: People forget how rare it is these days to have only one decision maker in a company. There are often 4 or 5 executives who need to get aligned behind a decision can be made. You'll recognize “Cary Smith.” Cary returns from a networking event, sure that a prospective client will engage the firm. And then, nothing. The CEO goes completely dark on Cary. Cary is left confounded, wondering what went wrong. I tell Cary that, “After successfully using one of our professional processes to spark the CEO’s interest, you sent her back to the company to try and sell your services internally to the rest of the stakeholders. To paraphrase my former business partner, Mike O'Horo, 'You sent an amateur to do the job of a professional.'” Cary needs to employ a subtle method to maintain full control of the stakeholder alignment process.

HOW THE BEST RAINMAKERS ELIMINATE COMPETITION ENTIRELY
TM: One of the most thought-provoking things I’ve heard you say is that today's top rainmakers don't compete against other lawyers for business. You claim that they compete against inaction and that they preclude the need for competition. How is that?
CL: In terms of competing, think about what you said earlier. As a COO of a multi-million-dollar company, 90% of your new issues landed in your “someday” file. It's the same with every client. If you’re a lawyer and that’s the case, why in the world would you compete against hundreds of firms for the work stemming from the acknowledged 10%? When you focus on problems in prospects' considerable "someday" files, it's just you vs. inertia. Secondly, lawyers tend to write and speak almost exclusively about the law. Most businesspeople can’t focus on the intricacies of the law. I advise lawyers to, instead, write about future-looking business problems that mirror the conversations taking place within the C-Suite. I teach them how to procure conversations with executives at the front end of the problem management cycle, before business problems become legal problems. If you can engage executives on cutting edge business issues, before they recognize the need for legal assistance, you can often forestall the competitive tender process entirely.

LAWYERS SQUANDER NEARLY 95% OF THE VALUE OF WRITING AND SPEAKING
TM: You make a claim that most lawyers waste 95% of the true value of activities such as article writing and speaking. How so?
CL: The #1 client development obstacle for most lawyers is unusually simple. They have no real justification to call on contacts and everything else they attempt comes off as a disguised sales pitch (because it is) and they instinctively know how irritating prospects find that behavior. So a lot of them just stop trying. The lawyers who truly “get it,” by contrast, see an article or a speaking engagement as an opportunity to solve that problem. They focus on the contacts with whom they can connect or reconnect before the article is submitted. These lawyers leverage articles and speaking engagements by using the quest for background information, quotes, and feedback as a plausible reason to routinely call prospective clients and referral sources.

NETWORK IN AN EASIER, FASTER, AND MORE EFFICIENT MANNER
CL: Lawyers mistakenly associate networking only with live events. Networking is about maintaining ongoing conversations with existing contacts and meeting additional, targeted contacts in a “non-salesy” fashion – whether it’s done live or virtually. A shrewd rainmaker will use the same marketing vehicles, and the natural desire for other viewpoints, as an excuse to ask the contact to whom he or she is speaking, “Who else knows this stuff backwards and forwards, who might be able to inform my article? Might I use your name in contacting them?” This results in referrals for information to 2 or 3 new prospective clients and future referral sources. A lawyer who uses this process builds the most prospect-rich network possible, as every single contact he or she meets is, by design, an expert in the respective target vertical where the lawyer wants to become well-known.

​The Secret to Getting Customers Without Ever Selling Again

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​​Click here for a free report outlining our step-by-step method for developing an exponential network of targeted clients, customers, and referral sources without ever again having to sell, nor close, nor proclaim, "Here's why I'm great," or "Hire me."

TESTIMONIALS
"As the Managing Partner of Brown Raysman Millstein Felder & Steiner (then an AmLaw 200 national law firm), I needed to find a marketing professional to motivate and direct the efforts of our partners in offices across the United States. Craig and his team introduced his sales training process, designed specifically for professional services, to my somewhat skeptical partners. We started with a small pilot group of lawyers. After just one year, the handful of participating attorneys added $2 million in new revenues to the firm’s income. It was a significant return on investment which attracted attention within the partnership.
                          
This initial success was followed by another training group. After year two, the combined training classes were contributing over $6 million in new revenues, and a broad group of new clients, to our law firm. One of my partners had been pursuing work from a major big box retailer for over a decade without success. With Craig’s guidance, the lawyer succeeded in finally landing the client, and subsequently contributed $600,000 in annual revenues from that one client's real estate transactional work.
 
Even the most senior and experienced partners, including myself, benefited from the invaluable techniques and tactics we learned from Craig’s sales training process. He has the ability to help every lawyer gain self-confidence and become a marketing star."
 
- Peter Brown, Esq., Managing Partner, Brown Raysman

"In my experience, most lawyers really struggle with marketing their practices and bringing in clients. Craig was very helpful in substantially increasing my book of business in just over a year. And while his method was built for introverted attorneys who despise the idea of selling their services, it's also effective for someone in my position at the time: a relatively new partner with a book of business, but who wanted to increase that book in order to provide for my family and increase my job security.

I've worked with other sales and marketing directors at some of the largest firms in the country. The BIG difference between Craig and his peers is that he gave me actual, sensible processes which I liked doing (and continue doing today), which the clients liked receiving, that cost almost nothing, and that started paying dividends almost immediately. Using Craig's "Expanding Your Network From Your Desk" process, I quickly grew a heavy duty network of over 150 new prospective real estate/transactional clients (retailers, developers, private equity sources, etc.), and referral sources, while simultaneously increasing my knowledge of the trends impacting real estate.

​I would recommend Craig in a heartbeat -- and not just to lawyers. Any accountant, doctor, or salesperson, in general, would benefit greatly from his coaching."
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​- Barry Lapides, Esq., Real Estate Chair, Berger Singerman