Tips from Law Sikho to enhance your skills
ENHANCE YOUR SKILLS
| People settle on the legal profession for a variety of reasons: To bring forth equity and justice in this big, bad world. To carry on the legacy of their lawyer parents and grandparents. To earn a boatload of money, in the form of retainers and bonuses. To gain access to power and create safety for themselves and family membersOr, maybe something else for that matter. If you are in it for the third reason though, this email is for you. A lot of people can’t admit to themselves that they want to make a lot of money. They want to look good and claim that they do not care about it. If you genuinely do not care about money it is fine, but if you do, there is no point in pretending. You are unlikely to stumble onto riches. It can only happen by design. And you can do so absolutely ethically. We will get to how shortly. If you secretly despise money, you are most likely not doing the things that lead to riches. If all you can think of is “how to become rich as a lawyer”, I will share a secret that I learnt a long time ago. It was before I joined LawSikho and before I started my short stint as a litigation lawyer. Yet, I understood the true meaning of it when I entered my work life. It so happens that I came across a particular saying by Socrates one day, “The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms.” Ok I know. Too complicated. Let me make that easier to understand. Socrates is saying that when you seek knowledge, start from looking up definitions. It is a very helpful habit. Let’s start with the basics. What is money? We need to define this term first. As per Merriam Webster, money is defined as: “something generally accepted as a medium of exchange, a measure of value, or a means of payment.” In other words, money can be anything that someone grants you with in exchange for the VALUE you provide him or her with. To gain money, you need to provide VALUE in return. Cool. What the heck is ‘value’ now? Let’s hit the dictionary again. Value is defined as: “something of worth, utility or importance.” If we fuse these two definitions, we get at the following: To gain money, you need to provide something of worth, utility or importance in return. Ponder on that thought for a few minutes. If you want to make a lot of money, you need to be able to give others a lot of value in return. Does that answer your initial question—“how would you become rich as a lawyer?” To get rich as a lawyer, you need to focus on providing lots and lots of value to your clients. How can you do that? Here’s a 3-step method that I recommend: Find out how your clients define value Value can be in terms of expertise, pricing, customer support, package offers or anything for that matter. You need to determine that beforehand. However, clients actually do not pay for any of that. Clients only pay lawyers when their problems are solved. Sometimes, they pay in anticipation that their problems will get solved. This means if you want to generate a lot of value, you need to start by discovering the problems of clients first. Clients value their problems getting resolved. And if you can reduce the number of hoops they have to jump through in order to get to the solution, they will choose you over other lawyers. How can you solve more problems for your clients? If you provide contract drafting services to the existing clients you have, who may be used to getting some other service altogether from you, will that be beneficial for them? Can you apprehend the labour and employment law issues your clients will face in the months to come and begin to warn them about those issues? Will that be valuable for them? Will that solve some kind of problem for them? Should you lower the price of your services during COVID-19? Less cost solves some kind of a problem too. Should you make it easier to access your products and services online? Will that make life easier and more comfortable for your clients? That may make them choose you over those who do not make their lives easier. But most importantly, we can’t solve inconsequential problems. That would lead to inconsequential value. We need to target the big, hairy, scary problems. Problems where a lot is at stake. That is where you can generate enormous value for your clients. You need to understand your target market like the back of your hand because you need to know their problems better than any other lawyer does. This is often a weak area for most lawyers who struggle a lot to make money. They do not spend enough time discovering the big problems of their clients. In the business world, this is called market research. Launching a product or service without doing market research in the world of business will be considered suicidal. Market research does not mean you ask your uncles and seniors from college or other lawyers for advice. Market research requires you to interact with potential clients with potential problems, and discover what they think about the current solutions available to them. Your success will start from you identifying and defining a target market – a market where there is a problem that remains unaddressed and clients dissatisfied. You begin to make serious money when you figure out how to solve this problem, at a price your market can afford, and do so at scale. Let me give you an example from LawSikho. We spend a lot of time understanding the challenges faced by our learners, which could be practising lawyers, law students, in-house counsels or large companies or law firms in need of legal training of their staff. Every category of our clients has a different problem. Some need to land their dream job and they are not making progress for various reasons. Others may be struggling to grow in their career and not making progress as fast as they wanted to. Others are trying to get into new practice areas or trying to refine the management of their law practice. And to get their attention, we have to establish that we understand their problems. We have to show all the people for whom we have solved similar problems in the past. We have to explain to them step by step how we will help them to solve their problems. And that is when they come to us. But it all started from a deep dive into market research. We have to talk to hundreds and hundreds of potential learners from different categories and learn about their dreams, nightmares, and every day challenges so that we can define our products and services right. We have to understand where other courses fall short in addressing these problems. And then we were able to design very different kinds of online courses than anything else that existed. Even now, competitors cannot keep up with us because we are always evolving, based on feedback from our students. When we begin to understand the problem our target market is facing, we begin to get everything else right. And that is how we have grown as an education company by leaps and bounds. It is not all that different if you are trying to build a thriving legal practice. Start by gaining a deep understanding of the problems your potential clients face today, and figure out how you are going to solve those problems in a manner better than what everyone else is currently doing. Build up capacity to deliver value.Do you have the skills that are in short supply in the market? People have problems and you need skills to solve those problems. Are you ready with the skills part? When you are ready, you also have to worry about training your juniors in the same skill. Building a team is hard. You may have to get technology tools and other resources as you grow so that you have the machinery you need to deliver massive value to clients at scale. With capacity like that, we are able to produce results that are unheard of. If you already know that the next best step for you is to up-skill yourself in a specific legal niche with a specific LawSikho course, you can sign up for any of the courses here that are open for enrollment right now: DIPLOMA Diploma in Advanced Contract Drafting, Negotiation and Dispute Resolution | Fee: INR 30,000 | Last date of enrolment: July 14, 2020 | Course Duration: 1 Year | Seats: 20 | To enroll: click here. Diploma in Cyber Law, FinTech Regulations and Technology Contracts | Fee: INR 30,000 | Last date of enrolment: July 14, 2020 | Course Duration: 1 Year | Seats: 20 | To enroll: click here. Diploma in M&A, Institutional Finance and Investment Laws (PE and VC transactions) | Fee: INR 30,000 | Last date of enrolment: July 31, 2020 | Course Duration: 1 Year | Seats: 20 | To enroll: click here. EXECUTIVE CERTIFICATE COURSES Certificate Course in Capital Markets, Securities Laws, Insider Trading and SEBI Litigation | Fee: INR 25000 | Last date of enrolment: July 14, 2020 | Course Duration: 6 months | Seats: 20 | To enroll: click here. Certificate Course in Labour, Employment and Industrial Laws for HR Managers | Fee: INR 18000 | Last date of enrolment: July 14, 2020 | Course Duration: 6 months | Seats: 20 | To enroll: click here. That’s it for today. To your success,Suman Chatterjee, Email ChiefTeam LawSikho |