Winning Isn’t Everything - Reflection on the business of practicing law by coach Alec Borenstein
I was recently working with a client who won a
big case and he wasn’t very excited. I said to him, “This is an important
victory, you should be celebrating!”
He said to me, “Yeah, we won, but at what cost?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve spent months on this case, worked
tirelessly, for hours. And yeah, we won. But my clients don’t pay
me, I don’t even like them, and I’ve already lost $50,000 in time and expenses
that I’ll never get back. There is no reward coming for me, just endless
appeals. It feels good to win, but at what cost?”
As a person who is trying to grow your practice,
one of the hardest lessons to learn (and unlearn) is that winning isn’t
everything. Winning doesn’t pay your mortgage, your Westlaw expenses,
your payroll. It’s nice to win, but it’s better to be financially free,
secure in your firm and what you are doing.
It starts with how you choose your cases.
Selecting the right cases and clients is one crucial step toward creating
a “power practice.”
When I first work with clients, they often have
the “I’ll work with anyone” mentality. They think that by working with
anyone, they will get to pay their bills and that it will help them get through
the current months.
But when you think like that, you aren’t using
your foresight. Taking on cases that you’d rather not take on to pay the
bills now is going to drain you later – and the cost will often be much more
than what you receive in return.
To a certain extent, you are like a smoker.
The smoker is receiving temporary relief from life’s anxieties, but in
the end it’s going to hurt much more.
Right now, look at your current roster of cases.
Are there any cases that are draining you? Are there any cases you can
see taking on lives of their own that will only make life harder for you in the
future? Use your power of foresight (it is a power, especially since we
rarely use it) to see what is the cost of your current crop of cases and get
out of the ones that are red flags.
See the future you are currently shaping.
And then design it in a way so that when you win, you can celebrate and
know it was a job well done and a reward well deserved.
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Alec Borenstein's mission is
to help attorneys work less, earn more and grow their law firms to create Power
Practices. Alec was a successful litigation attorney for five years until
he realized his true passion is helping other attorneys, especially in the
current economy. To learn more about Alec's work, please to go
www.alecborenstein.com.
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