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By Root 1223 0

in some humor. It showed that the lawyer growth per capita, according to the American Bar Association, has gone from 1 out of every 700 people being an attorney 30 years ago to 1 out of every 300 people being an attorney today.5 Then we showed how in San Francisco, one out of every 66 people is an attorney and in Washington, D.C., one out of every 23 people is an attorney. And then the next panel said, at this rate, by the year 2052, every other person in America will be an attorney. That got a good laugh, but the data revealed that while the number of lawyers was growing, the billings had leveled off for several years. What did this mean? More attorneys, less money per attorney. The orientation went on to show that lawyers weren’t the only ones suing. Corporate clients were now suing law firms at an alarming rate. Forty percent of all large law firms will face a major litigation from one of their massive clients.

All this information was available in hundreds of sources, but what we did was put it all together into one source—our orientation—and the results were an amazing educational experience and snapshot of the legal profession from a very high level. The last part of the education centered on the burgeoning research challenges for lawyers. There are over three million cases now in the databases from which lawyers can draw. That’s not good news. We organized the presentation so that the section on law firms being sued was followed immediately by the section on how easy it is today to miss an important precedent or case. This really amped up the importance of having great research aids. The results at the end of the “education” were that every lawyer in the room wanted to have these aids—if not for themselves, then surely for their staff. This illustrates how the learning curve in Chapter Four (“Becoming a Brilliant Strategist”), when combined with the learning curve in this chapter, makes for a formidable force for gaining access to dream clients.

I had another client come to me because his company wasn’t getting enough leads and appointments. It sold office equipment to businesses. Its current tactic was to send a letter to every single prospect in our area. It did a search and found that there were 20,000 businesses in its area. So it sent out 20,000 direct mail pieces and it didn’t get a single response. Not one. Today, because of the onslaught of direct mail businesses receive, direct mail effectiveness has fallen off dramatically. In our newspaper orientation (in Chapter Four) we showed that the quantity of direct mail has doubled over the past 10 years—meaning, the average household receives twice as much direct mail today as it did 10 years ago. In Canada, I recall (as the client had newspapers in Canada) they even put trash receptacles by all the mailboxes in apartment buildings so that folks could. That way they could throw away all the direct mail that came every day. So this client had spent what was a lot of money for them on a massive direct mail campaign, expecting to flood its salespeople with leads. (In Chapter Seven, “The Seven Musts of Marketing,” you’ll get some ideas on direct mail that might make it more effective.) But let’s get back to this client’s Dream 100 discovery.

I reviewed the sales from the previous year. The company had a number of sales ranging from $10,000 up to $28,000 for computer systems it had installed. But then I got to a sale of $160,000. “What’s this?” I was told that that was a big company. The way business-to-business computer system sales works is that if you have 100 employees at desks, you need 100 computers. Each computer can cost about $1,600 per workstation (fully installed with hardware, software, the system, and so on). The client had been focusing on small companies but occasionally got a big company. My natural reaction was “Why don’t we just go after big companies?”

I’ll state it again: while you’re doing every thing else, have a special effort dedicated to just the dream clients. We started a side effort to target massive sales. This company is not going to