Referrals are a key element to the attorney revenue equation. Could you imagine missing out on these referrals as an executive suite NYC attorney?
There are a plethora of office arrangements one can have. Some may choose a standard commercial lease, a sublet office, a co-working space, and so forth. All of these types of arrangements can work for the right person; however, it can also be easy for the said firm to not see the value in referrals from other legal disciplines.
Referrals are necessary for any attorney to succeed in his or her law practice. Shared office providers like Law Firm Suites understand this concept in full. They provide personnel to help clients find the right recipients to attain particular referrals within the office space.
After years of successful matching referrals with appropriate practice areas, we started to notice something strange. On a consistent basis, referrals were flowing between practice areas that you normally wouldn’t expect.
Not all referral matches are obvious.
Some referrals are quite easy to suggest. For example, a divorce attorney could easily refer a case dealing with child custody to someone specializing in it because it falls under the umbrella of family law.
Although a divorce attorney can easily refer a child custody case, they may even be warranted to refer a case to a corporate transactional attorney, especially if a successful entrepreneur plans to protect his or her business from the perils of a dissolving marriage.
It occurred to us that if we were overlooking potential referral synergies, even with us being in the middle of thousands of referrals each year, then our clients may be too.
Networking circles differ and so do the attorneys.
Networking has a very social aspect to its entirety. It can sometimes feel the New York City social scene where there are different archetypes of social groups like the fashion crowd, the artsy crowd, old money, new money, and so forth. These types of social groups rarely overlap and are essentially cliques like in a high school quad. Law works very similarly and attorneys typically network with those they can get the most potential in a referral.
The relative ease in obtaining a referral from a familiar place also dominates the reasoning behind working particular networking circles. However, unexpected occurrences happen where an attorney can find a referral from a place they may not have realized.
We believe this is the primary reason why attorneys tend to overlook these other practitioners as potential networking targets.
Eliminate the competition by developing unfamiliar referral relationships.
It takes a strategic mind to network efficiently. If one were to analyze the different avenues for client referrals, chances are that your referral network could be expanded quite significantly, thus meaning more potential for revenue.
Unfamiliar territory should certainly not be your go to source for referrals, but it does give you an edge when you have other practice areas outside your own to common network. This unfamiliar network helps to promote business for the future because it gives you time to learn these other networks and make yourself relevant for those referrals. You essentially minimize your competition.
Eventually, you will find yourself reaping the benefits as many other attorneys may not be actively pursuing referrals from other attorney networks.
