Welcoming the incredible Jennifer Gillman. Jennifer is an attorney who is finding a great fit for partners of firms looking to relocate. She is also a master relationship builder, networker and rainmaker - and she shares her top strategies!

We unpacked the secrets to successful network building and explored how Jennifer started her recruiting firm and grew it over the past 6 years. Jennifer, a seasoned pro in legal recruitment, shares her unique insights on creating the perfect firm-attorney match and the art of becoming a happy rainmaker. From self-care and continuous learning to intentional planning and legacy building, we cover it all. Stay tuned for our next episode, and don't forget to connect with us at TGR Live in Boca Raton to keep pushing the boundaries of your law firm's potential.

Key Topics

• 09:05 Found success by seeking business coaching early.
• 15:03 Overcoming fear, taking risks, and finding success.
• 19:19 Efficient networking is critical for business success.
• 21:43 Lessons from networking and the power of 1-on-1 meetings.
• 31:53 Prioritize personal growth within the firm.
• 39:37 Business development coaching for succession planning opportunities.
• 43:02 Creating video content, and landing page for expertise.

About Jennifer Gillman:

Jennifer Gillman is President of Gillman Strategic Group, a legal recruiting company focused solely on law firm partner placement. Her goal is to help dissatisfied law firm partners and solo practitioners find the perfect fit at another firm, which can make a dramatic difference in their career and personal satisfaction. Her superpower is being able to tell in 15 minutes whether a law firm partner would be happier changing firms or if their current firm is the best fit.

A recovering lawyer herself, Jen knows how busy law firm partners are, and how Jen received her J.D. from New York University School of Law and her undergraduate degree from Brandeis University, magna cum laude. After practicing law for 12 years, she realized that legal recruiting combined her two passions of law and matchmaking. She worked with a full-service New Jersey legal recruiting firm for 10 years, before following her dream and launching Gillman Strategic Group in 2018. 

Outside of work she enjoys spending time with her lawyer husband and two children.

About Jay Berkowitz:

Jay Berkowitz is a digital marketing strategist with decades of experience in the industry. As the CEO of Ten Golden Rules, he has helped countless law firms and businesses harness the power of the internet to achieve remarkable growth and visibility. Jay is also a renowned keynote speaker and author, sharing his expertise at various industry events and publications worldwide.

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Make sure that you keep reinventing yourself over your career so that you stay interested so that it's something that really grabs you but so that you can be the most useful possible and then think about your legacy.

Welcome to the 10 Golden Rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast, featuring the latest strategies and techniques to drive traffic to your website and convert that traffic into clients. Now, here's the founder and CEO of 10 golden rules, Jay Berkowitz.

Well, good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Whatever time this podcast finds you welcome to the 10 Golden Rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast. This is Jay Berkowitz. We've got a great guest today Jennifer Gilman. Before we get right into that, I want to tell you a little bit about a couple things going on. Number one, if you haven't already checked out the our live event called tgr live growth strategies for law firms that's coming up April 25 and 26th in Boca Raton, hopefully you're not listening to this sometime in May, and you missed it. Really, really awesome panel of speakers. I've personally recruited the best speakers I've seen at any conferences for the last three or four years. We haven't done a conference since before COVID. So we've got the best of the best. Some new speakers added Joe Rotolo from intake, or they're launching a brand new product that's actually chatbots for things like Google screened local service ads. So that's going to be really revolutionary. Brian glass has a great presentation. He's from great legal marketers. And he's got a great presentation on referrals. We've got Dr. Kane Elliot talking about AI. Justin lovely is an attorney from South Carolina, he's going to show you how he actually uses like 14 Different AI products in his law firm. We've got some cutting edge marketing stuff, some technology stuff. It's all over two days, April 25, and 26th. And please join us for our 20th anniversary party of 10. Golden Rules my company on the night of the 25th. So Thursday, is the first day of the conference Thursday night, the party Friday, the second day of the conference. So I'm super pumped about that, as you can tell. One other quick favor. If you're listening to this, watching us on iTunes, please give us a subscribe. Our videos are absolutely blowing up our top videos over 80,000 views. But we don't have quite as many subscribers. So let's it's the metric that YouTube's looking for. I love you if you click Subscribe if you like these videos, if you don't, you know, take a bath. And if you're listening on iTunes or Spotify, of course, the five star reviews really help us. Anyways, without further ado, I'd like to introduce my friend and net networking buddy, we're we're in about three or four we've met at three or four different places and three or four different people have introduced us over the last three or four years. Her name is Jennifer Gilman, her company's Gilman strategic group, she is like we seems like we have a series of recovering attorneys who have gone on to do really incredible things. And her specialty is recruiting. So today we're going to talk about a lot about Jennifer's experience and expertise, but also about how to firms find great candidates and how to candidates find the great fit because she represents the candidate. So I'm going to stop talking, Jennifer, welcome to the 10 Golden Rules podcast.

Well, thank you so much for having me. Tell,

you know, tell us quickly about your background and, you know, law school and, and working as an attorney and then how it evolved.

Sure. So um, I actually really enjoyed practicing law, a lot of legal recruiters I run into, never liked it or did it for a very short period of time. I practice law for about 12 years. And I just didn't see my older child for a couple of years while she was awake. And I was trying to fix that. And I was actually interviewing for some in house opportunities that would have more predictable hours. And were closer to home because we had moved out to the suburbs, but I was commuting into the city. And that took a long time. And with my city, right. I'm sorry, New York City. Yeah, we

moved to New Jersey area did you work in,

I started as a general litigator, and then when I met my husband, he had the best story that the end of the day about his employment practice. And I started ticking on a couple of employment cases. And then I moved my practice to specialize in Labor Employment Law on the management side. And it was fascinating. I really, really liked it. And actually, what I do now has some overlap and some similarities. I was trying to find an in house job in the labor and employment realm. And I got down to being one of three finalists, candidates for a Japanese pharmaceutical company in New Jersey. And then another recruiter called me to see if I wanted to apply for that job. And I said, Well, I'm meeting with the GC next week. I already applied for that job. Do you have any other ones? And he said, Oh yeah, let's have lunch. I'll tell you about all the other ones. And, and we had lunch and all he did was try and convince me to be a recruiter. And it finally said, Give me two weeks. I know this is what you're gonna like, I promise you. And he was right. It just never felt like a job. It felt like just getting to know people. In my personal life. I've made two marriages, I have a knack for knowing who might like to spend time together.

That's fantastic. It's a call to shidduch. Right? Yes,

I have to make one more straight to heaven when I die. So if any of your listeners need to find themselves their significant other, I need that one more marriage. And I've gotten beautiful baskets of pairs. That's supposed to be one of the things you do when somebody makes you a match. Oh, that's fantastic.

Congratulations. Well, well, I'll send you I actually I know a great guy. So we got to find, oh,

maybe you're worked on it.

He's a mortgage guy, one of the the Nathan's and brothers. So they're two partners. So went from being an attorney to being a recruiter, and you worked for a company at first, right?

I did. I was an English major in college. And I went straight to working for big law firms. And I thought that starting my own business was not going to give me the time with my then toddler and baby that I wanted. So I thought working with somebody else would give me some flexibility. And it did, it was perfect. I got to be you know, the class mom and do all the volunteer stuff and be at the playdates and the music classes, but not give up on still having a career because I could work from the office or from home. And I had quite a flexible schedule. So for a while, it worked very well. And I really liked the guy who ran the company I worked for, we're still friends. But after some time went by, we realized that we looked at recruiting a little bit differently. And it was getting a little frustrating for both of us. I wanted to find every candidate, what I called the exact right perfect fit. And he was law firm facing. So he was trying to fill positions that were open at a law firm. So if I talked to a firm that needed a fourth year real estate associate, and I got you on the phone, and you were a fourth year real estate associate, my one job was to get you to go to the firm who had called us. And that's just not how I work. I just couldn't I like to sleep at night and be able to

look at matches.

And I would try and convince him like if I if I touch Jay into going to that firm, and it's the wrong place, he's not going to want to stay in the firm's gonna hate us and he's gonna hate us. It's much better if I talked to him about what he really wants. And we wait for it. And he didn't see it that way. And finally he said, Well, the only people you could do that for our partners who have their own clients, like, Okay, I'll do that, since you're gonna call partners. Are you kidding? Like, what, they can't really kill me over the phone, they'll just hang up if they don't want to talk to me. So I started doing that. And I had some success. And then he was on board. And he said, Oh, you know, I'll get you that database you were talking about I know, we have to brand and advertise and this and that. And he said, Oh, no, we have to keep it very quiet. Because we're law firm facing, our clients are going to be very uncomfortable with this, because they're going to think that we're still all their rainmakers. So you have to keep it very quiet. We can't talk about it with our clients. And I finally decided that I really wanted to focus on what I do. And there was no way to do it there. So I started my own company in the fall of 2018. Congratulations.

So what was that like? Like? You know, a lot of people ask me, What's it like to start a firm? And how do you do it? What do you have to do? So if you can go, you know, it wasn't that long ago. So go back and tell us a little bit about, you know, what you what the steps you went through to create the firm and start the initial branding. And

well, in some ways, it was a lot easier than I thought it was gonna be. And I kind of wish I had done it a little bit earlier, I had been very hesitant because I didn't have any business background. And I just, you know, I didn't want to run it into the ground or whatever. But I did join a business coaching group right at first. So I was like 12 days into starting the company. And I joined a coaching group that met quarterly in person for a couple days at a time, and had weekly q&a is and you know, that kind of thing. And it gave me a good community of people and a lot of good advice about, you know, hiring websites, branding and things like that. I knew from the beginning, that I was good at some things and not good at others. And I didn't want to spend a lot of time learning things that I wasn't interested in and knew I would not be as good at as other people, I guess I'd read some books about, you know, trying to stay in your zone of genius as much as possible. And I knew that, you know, Facebook ads weren't something I was ever going to do full time or the back end of a website, or, you know, some of the thing. So I did hire people from the beginning, I, you know, the people I could afford at first, so, they weren't like you. There are people who were, you know, in school and wanted some practice or, you know, that kind of thing. And we've graduated to using

a term first website wasn't a masterpiece than

my first website with I think it Wix

worked, right, it got you got, you got the door open and got the and obviously, you started with, you know, a great Rolodex, to use the old fashioned word and kids, kids who are listening, just Google that. But it's where you used to store your contacts.

And at first, I did a LinkedIn post every day myself. And so we noticed how time consuming it was, and how there was a bit of stress sometimes when I didn't have something prepared, and I was very busy. And I wrote the blog posts myself all the time, and they weren't optimized. And, you know, as as we got further into it, and I got busier doing the recruiting side, I was lucky enough to be able to find some help. On the marketing side. No, I remember

your content was great. As a matter of fact, one time I reached out to you and I said, Hey, your your writing is great, like your emails, I'm opening those emails, do you remember was that some of your own stuff or was that a copywriter?

I remember when it was I have somebody who's gotten my voice down really well. We haven't been eating once a week for an hour. And he takes me on Zoom. And he uses that to write the blog posts and the LinkedIn. But sometimes, like my husband can tell that I didn't write it myself, because we've been working together for a while. And he's got it pretty good.

There's really a magic there. And I was lucky very early on, I found someone who could write in my voice. And he wrote my second book off of a presentation. So I gave him the presentation, the slides the recording, and then he was able to write it up as a book. And then he did that for like three of my friends and clients. And he was fantastic. This guy like he could do it for anyone and unfortunately, took a massive heart attack and died in a casino in Vegas. Oh, no, it's gonna ask you for me. Like, I haven't found that exact right person. You know, obviously, I've found people who can do some copywriting for the firm. But I haven't found someone who can, you know, everybody tries to change it so much. Like I remember once I wrote a book about low cost marketing strategies, and my whole presentation was green. And they changed all the icons to pink. And I said, Why? Why would you, you know, it's like green, it's about money. It's about low cost, and like the whole graphics were green. Why did you change it? They said, well, because this piggy bank is pink. And we use the piggy bank for the cover the presentation. I'm like, Yeah, but it's not I'm not pink in the concepts, not pink anyways. But so that's a great lesson, and find someone who can write in your voice. And try 10 People till you find someone who you're like,

that sounds like maybe five. No,

I mean, but if you have to, if you're lucky, you'll find him in the first two or three. But what I do a lot of times is you know, just say, hey, write a couple blogs, and people don't realize you can even just go on Fiverr or Elance, I think they call it Upwork now, and give a writer, you know, for a couple 100 bucks, you can get a couple blog posts written, you know, give them give them a sketch outline and give them some bullet points. Okay, we're gonna, we're gonna write a blog post about the new Google Local Service ads and how they come up right at the top of Google. And they're great because you only get phone calls. And if that's enough direction, they can find your boy like, oh, and go watch these three videos of me. If they can find your voice, then there's probably a good chance, you've got your writing partner, you know, going going forward, and you can pay, you know, three people $300 Each, to write a blog post and maybe maybe find someone so I love

that idea. We've been through a few writers maybe more like four or five. And, and this guy had the exact so I'm very happy but not not that the others weren't good. I mean, we did get good content from them. And it was a good experience. But you're right, if you find somebody who gets your voice,

and it just makes it easier, because you're not like sometimes we all we all get copied back. And this is one thing we try to avoid with our clients. And I sometimes get stuff back and I feel like I have to rewrite it so much that I would have been better off to do it myself. Like it's gonna take me half an hour an hour to rewrite it. If I sat down and wrote it correctly in the first time. I could do it in half an hour. So whether a couple of The other good business wins in the early years for the company.

Well, I was lucky that I was fearless. And I just figured, like, if I called someone and they were rude, like, that was the worst thing that was gonna happen, I wasn't gonna get arrested for calling them, I might be embarrassed for a minute, or I might feel like, Wow, that guy was not nice. But so I did have a couple of when, you know, just reaching out to people cold. And having a conversation, like the thing I'm reaching out to you about doesn't make sense to you, but what you know, oh, you know, I have a friend or you should meet this person or something like that. And so it gave us a couple of wins. And you know, we could keep going and and we had more money to invest in the business, and I could get some more coaching and some more help with the marketing and hire some people for the company. And we're trying very hard to get to a point where we're using attraction based marketing and referrals. Primarily, I mean, sometimes we still need to reach out to people still, but you are getting a lot more based on my speaking and networking and LinkedIn. And some of the emails we the newsletter we send around sometimes people respond to and and we've been doing a program to try and cultivate our referral sources a little bit better. Yeah,

and I mentioned off the top, I know you're through networking, and we've been introduced by two or three people and met at two or three different networking groups, and most sophisticated business, learn networking groups, like not the local meet and greet at the Chamber of Commerce. So Jennifer's really professional, she's really out there. But you know, talk about, you know, what is the landscape look like? What are some of the groups you've tried? And then what are some of the ones that have really worked for you over the longer term?

Sure, well, my best advice to anyone who wants to get into networking is just try it, because you have to find a group that you want to go back to the idea of networking is to meet people so that they can know like and trust you. And they can't know like and trust you if you just go once, you really should get to know them over time. So, you know, some of the the groups that I tried that weren't right for me still helped the business coaching group that I joined right away, the woman who runs it as an eight figure business owner, and she kept saying, oh, you should join BNI. That's how I got to where I am today. I was pregnant on my and I grew up. So I, you know, it actually was good for a lot of reasons that got me to consider getting up early for a 7am meeting. Because before that I wasn't really an early meeting person, it got me to stand up and give my elevator pitch. It got me to think about networking groups. And I actually was president during COVID When I had to make a slideshow every week. And whenever it wasn't the right room for me. I wasn't ever going to get this. But I did hire a bunch of the people there. So my accountant, the guy who does my payroll, the guy who does the health insurance for our group for our company, they all came from there. And it was all people I knew, you know, cared about me and would be honest, and would give me great. So I tried to find the silver lining from everything. So it was a lot of times then and a lot of effort. And I wasn't going to get a lot of the Rainmaker candidates that I work with out of it. But I did, you know, get a lot of practice networking, and I got to hire these people without doing much research at all. So that was good. And

they're trusted partners, right? Like, yeah, you don't get into the BNI group without the committee vetting them. And, you know, somebody recommending them. And everybody in the BNI room has the same goals. You know, I agree with you like it's a great networking bootcamp. So if you're starting your business, you're in the first 2345 years, I wish I had joined much earlier, I ended up joining, you know, seven, eight years ago when you're trying to get our sales guy into the group. And then I went to this group, and it was so much fun. I stayed BNI if you don't know what it is the largest business networking, it's a large business, networking International, largest networking organization in the world. There's a BNI chapter near you, wherever you are all around

anywhere, internationally. And it's based on the theory of givers gain. Yeah, though, everybody is trying to help everyone else. It's a very nice idea. Most of the meetings are first thing in the morning, but if you're not a morning person, there are actually some BNI chapters that meet at different times of day. And when it was a really nice experience. It just wasn't the right room for me. So then, and actually anybody who is a little bit nervous about networking, it's nice because it's a contained group. If you join a chapter that's, you know, 20 people standing up the first time you have to give you a little elevator pitch isn't as scary as going to a roomful of 5000 people or some of the BNI groups over really big, they could be up to 100 bootcamp, right. It's the training and you know, the first time you probably, you want to be a little more comfortable, you don't want to be so scared. But um, you know, it did give me an idea of okay, well, I liked that. But what I didn't like was I wasn't meeting, you know, the types of lawyers and people who work with lawyers. That made sense for me. So I explored a lot of other things. And the COVID shutdown actually worked very well, for me, I got my first Zoom account, I had never used zoom, before, we host our own networking, it's been going on for four years now, I joined a lot of other networking. And it gave me a chance to try a lot of things without having a lot of travel time. So for a while, I think I spent 12 hours a day networking, because there are so many fun things to go to. And then I was just too busy.

COVID was definitely a time when, you know, you could do those half an hour meetings in the one on one meetings back to back to back and get a lot of competence and build your network where, you know, we a lot of us used to rely on, you know, going to conferences and going traveling and meeting people. And that was obviously off the table for a couple of years. So you said something interesting earlier, when we were just chatting, you said that you made ROI based decisions on networking cut back. And I've had to do the same thing recently, where, you know, somehow there was a lot more time during COVID. Now we're all doing business again. And there just isn't those 12, half an hours available in the day for networking meetings. So how have you skill? How did you make the decision? Like which groups? What is the right room for Jennifer, and what's the guidance, you can give folks listening to this.

So it's a little bit of trial and error. And it's also I mean, you can only assess ROI after you try something no one knows the ROI of something before they try it. So I did a lot of networking. And I was doing my actual work late at night and on the weekends. And it was getting to be very busy and very stressful. And my family wasn't really excited about it. So I figured I had to carve out some time during the day to actually do work and not just to network all the time, even though it was fun for me. We looked at the ROI of we follow Eos, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. And we look every quarter and every year at our marketing with our outside marketing company. And we looked at you know, all the things I was doing not just the networking we looked at, we sponsored some conferences and some different things, we gave out gifts, we did a lot of expensive things. And then I had joined a networking group that 65% lawyers and accounting professionals. And we noticed for like the $1,700 a cost to join that we got to place to candidates. And our placements are pretty significant because it's partners moving with their books of business. So that was really good ROI. So we decided that, you know, we assessed Well, what is different about that room instead of other rooms? It's lawyers, because lawyers are the lawyers travel in packs, I knew that I knew that, you know, I married a lawyer because I had to cancel dates on everyone else. I mean, lawyers are always getting some last minute thing or they're working late, happy hours, not at five, it's at nine, you know, it's, it's a whole different lifestyle. So lawyers tend to know each other. And sometimes when they're out for a drink commiserating about work, they'll hear their buddies not too happy, or you know, they'll have a referral to me. So I started trying to do that. And then so that group worked really well. And when you join, you have the possibility of going to as many meetings as you want. So I I looked at, we look at the calendar for the year for the quarter and for the month, and then I look every Sunday and make sure I've got enough networking in there for the week. And so I go to extra meetings, I try to go to the same one a few times in a row. So I get to know like and trust the people and they can get to know like, and trust me, I don't think if you visit something one time, it's it's really enough to develop any kind of relationship. But it's been fun. And I've been able to do that. And sometimes, you know, I'll go to I almost joined BNI again, because somebody invited me to a visitor day, and it was so nice and everyone was so sweet. And I was like I can't I did. I did almost four years of it in another direction. But um, you know, and I've been doing some speaking engagements because that helps. I mean, a lot of the legal recruiters that maybe even some of the people listening today run into and I ran into when I was still practicing are kind of sleeping and getting a chair As to talk for a while or hear me speak or, you know, be in a meeting together, I think people can tell that I'm a little bit different. So that's been helpful to us. Yeah,

I mean, one of the things that I really learned when I went back, I mentioned went back to BNI, seven or eight years ago, is that one on one meeting, and you forget, like, I had forgotten the value of that. So I was so busy and like you, I was on a lot of stages. And that's, by the way, that's the best way to do networking conferencing, if you're the speaker, you know, the great people in the room are gonna come to you and the connectors, they know the game, you know, go meet the speaker and introduce him or her to some other people. But the power of that one on one, and you and I did it, you know, I remember we met at a Starbucks in Boca Raton. And then we met another time. And then here we are, then I started a networking group for people who work in the legal industry. And Jennifer comes to that group, and she has her own networking group. So the event, you know, the first thing is get to know like, and trust someone that one on one meeting, and then some advanced strategies, or have your own networking group where you become the hub, and the spoken wheel, and everybody else knows you're at the center of it. And everybody thinks of you, and connects you to people. And it's been great for for my business as well.

Yeah, that actually worked for me with the group that I'm part of it was virtual during COVID. So I joined a New York City Chapter, I live in the suburbs of New Jersey, and it starts at 7am. And when they were going to go back to making it an in person meeting, I volunteered to open a chapter for them in New Jersey. And it was a lot of work. But it gave me a good excuse to reach out to a bunch of law firm partners and ask them if they wanted to join. And now people vote for me in order to get into the group because there's a vetting process. Yeah, so everybody's pretty nice to me.

I love it. Yeah. So tell us a little bit more about Gilman strategic group. And who's a great introduction for you, who do you want to meet?

Sure. So we are candidate facing, which I think to non recruiters doesn't mean much. It kind of means like, we're a talent agent for rainmakers, kind of like if you're an actor or sports figure, except that you don't have to pay for our services like you would if you're an actor paying your agent, we represent, we've come up with a wish list. Often there's a lot happening at the current firm, that's good that we want to replicate, we just want to change a few things. I want to go to a firm that has this practice area or an office in that geographic area, or a different compensation system, or more associated support, or whatever it is, something needs to be changed, but usually not everything. It's not horrible. It's just not working for a particular reason. We put together a wish list, we have somebody on our team now, who we outsource business plans to so he helps, he's a marketing guy. And he helps our candidates write a business plan that's appealing to firms. So they understand the opportunity of having this lawyer or this practice group join. And then we work with them to prep them for interviews, because some even you know, partners get nervous sometimes if they went to a firm straight out of law school, and they haven't changed jobs and a long time.

They weren't for 510 15 years. Yeah, yeah. So

we do some mock interviews with people who need it. We don't force it for people who don't, we put together a list of firms that, okay, you're looking for these eight things, and we think these firms made it. And you know, these are very experienced lawyers. So they know people at every firm, and you know, I don't like the way they do business over there, or Oh, I didn't think in that firm, I liked those people, they're nice, or Oh, my law school roommate works there, or my ex girlfriend works there, I don't want to go there. So they'll have, you know, their own response. And that's perfectly fine. Because it's their job, not mine. So I want them to go to a firm where they have a good impression of the firm, that we will ask them to be open minded, if it's a firm they're not familiar with. And then we go through the interview process, and we help them to make sure all the firms kind of stay on the same schedule. Because if you get an offer from one firm and the firm that you really are dreaming about hasn't decided whether or not to interview yet it could throw off the schedule. And so we we keep up with that. And then we negotiate the offers for people who want help with that some of our m&a partners like to do their own negotiation. I like the

Strategic Coach and strategic partner that advisor for for partners and law firms.

Law firms that want to merge into a larger firm we do that a fair amount to and and really it helps to have a third party representative. So I could go to a firm and say, you know OJ would be so good at your firm. He's doing so well where he is I don't he's not looking. But I wonder if I could convince him to have a cup of coffee. You know, I think there's so much synergy. You know, one plus one equals three meat like it was your idea, set it up. But if you go to a firm and apply for a job, Hey, are you looking, then when it comes time to give you an offer? And I say, Thanks for I can't even tell him that he's doing really well where he is. You better come up with something else. Of course, he has to be the head of the department. Of course, he needs a difference. What are you talking about? You do better. But if you say that they're like, Hey, Jay, you came to us you want it? We weren't even looking for somebody you wanted a job? This is what it is. You create the leverage? Yeah, yeah. And it's a little bit easier. And it's a little bit easier to leverage firms against each other and to, to have some of the harder conversations, when you get somebody else to do that. They're expecting me to be annoying, and follow up with them on a periodic basis. I don't look like you're desperate for a job. I look like I'm doing my job. As a recruiter, if you had to keep following up with the friend who you know, put you up for something, it will get a little uncomfortable after a while. So

if you're a younger, mid mid career successful partner, and you're looking to make a move, what are some of the maybe two or three tips? Obviously, they should call Jennifer, but what are several things they should they should do? As matter of fact, I had great advice. Very early in my career, they said, Think of yourself. Like you're the you're the brand manager, the product manager and think of your resume like your product, and what have you done to spruce up your resume, or enhance your hire ability? What are some of those tips for the partner who's looking to make a move?

Well, I think you always need to think of yourself as a firm within the firm. Even you know whether you're a small firm or a large firm, you the firm isn't trying to make you unhappy, there. That's not what they're there after. It's a collection of people that want to work together. But they're not going to look out for maximizing your opportunity is and your client base and your personal compensation, and personal work life balance and happiness, you have to kind of look out for some of those things yourself. And I would always recommend from the first day of practice, that you should be focusing on making some time for business development. I wish somebody had told that to me, when I was a young associate, they said, Keep your head down, do excellent work, and it'll just come to you. So like magic, these clients were gonna come from the ceiling, I wasn't leaving my office, I was sitting there, you know, at the computer all the time. So I think that the best advice is to make time for your own business development, whether you're an associate or a partner, you shouldn't rely on being the go to for someone else's clients, we find that it's a way to have a lot of opportunities, it's to be able to bring clients with you. But also at your own firm, even if you want to stay for your entire career. If you're working on a project with your client, you set the deadlines, you choose the team, you schedule the conference call. So you can schedule it around little league practice. If you're the coach, you can schedule a deadline around you know, your kids school break, or whatever it is, you can have the team that you want. But if you're the go to service partner, you're at somebody's beck and call all the time. And your contribution to the firm's bottom line is in how many hours you can work instead of in revenue that's coming in a different way. So I think, you know, even we talked about how point one can make a difference. A lot of lawyers bill in six minute increments, and even point one instead of scrolling on your phone. You could do one small thing for business development, put together a LinkedIn post, reach out to a client reach out to somebody you know from law school, follow up with somebody you met networking, sign up for a conference, you can do a lot in six minutes. And it's kind of like compound interest. If you do a little bit every week over time it builds up. That's

such great advice. That's awesome. Thank you. And how about for the firm's like the firm who wants I mentioned my friend Howard Rubin. Very successful Rainmaker. He's been on our podcast and been on our blog. And he's, you know, admittedly getting a little bit older and he's like, trying to get and him and his partners are still doing all the rainmaking and all the young associates are not bringing in their own book of business. So he talked about his strategies, the firm that's looking for those, you know, somewhat younger, not kids, but young partners to bring into the firm. How do they position themselves for your best candidates?

Well, I would say First of all, sometimes firms that see talent and the people coming up in the ranks, but they're not bringing in business yet, might want to turn to a business development coach. And there are a lot of really good ones that can come in and do group programs or individual coaching. But we talk about that as more of a succession planning opportunity with our candidates. So it's an opportunity to join a firm, usually with a more modest book of business, because you're going to be taking over some clients, from people who are going to be retiring into the future. From the firm side, they want to see somebody who has their own clients, because that's kind of shorthand for knowing they know how to get business and they know how to keep it, they know how to keep clients happy. But you probably don't want someone who's so busy, they need so much extra staffing, because they're trying to bring in people who are gradually going to take over their clients. So it's a really nice opportunity for someone who let's say they're interested in going to a firm where normally you would need a million dollars or more business to qualify or, you know, some of the bigger firms, it's more like five or $10 million, you know, somebody with half a million dollars or $2 million dollars or something like that could be a great succession plan, because they're generating revenue already. But they have some space to take on some of the firm clients as people retire. And you want to make sure that they have enough time in front of them that they're going to stay at your firm a long time. So if you want to retire at 70, you don't bring in someone who's 68 to replace you, that really makes sense, isn't there, right? Yeah. But um, and you also as a firm, need to make sure that whatever you promised you live up to, that is a source of frustration, a lot of times for rainmakers who join a firm, oh, I've got $2 million, but there's a $5 million book of business I'm going to inherit, and the partners leaving in this many years, and then the partner doesn't leave. And there's no hope in sight, that they're actually going to be inheriting the clients, they were promised. So you have to have some open and honest conversations, and live up to what you've promised. And if for some reason you changed your mind or you change what the plan is, you have to be upfront about it.

Perfect. Oh, just have always a couple of short questions I asked at the end of this podcast, tell us about any personal productivity strategies you have or any apps you use. That's one of my personal ones I love to learn. Well,

we follow the EOS system Entrepreneurial Operating System, when we found a piece of tech called ninety.io. That helps us run all of our EOS based meetings, it's a place to keep all our goals and rocks and to do lists, and a place where you know everything is centralized. So that's been really good for us. We also use Slack as a team, by the way,

thank you for that, cuz I got all my books here. Rocket fuel, get a grip traction. We're all in on EOS. And we actually, we started with the one that gave you bloom growth. And I know there's better tools out there. So

shout out the word 90. Very, very happy with it. And it's very inexpensive for how much we get out of it. So that's one of our favorite tools.

Yeah, we heard there's some more advanced like tools. That's great. And sorry, I cut you off on Slack. slackers too.

So yeah, we like Slack and, and we're trying very hard to have certain channels for certain things, and to have certain methods for different types of communication so that we're not always checking everything, because that takes up a lot of time. And I time block a little and I actually have a timer because I I met with somebody who was talking about the you know, the 25 minute blocks with the five minutes in between. And I thought it was so helpful when I did the training with her that I ordered one off of amazon it wasn't and whenever I use it, I find myself immensely more productive,

your focus for 25 minutes and then you take a little break. You have to take

a little break. Otherwise I'll just sit forever and I find my attention wandering. When you make yourself you know I only have 25 minutes or you know we're pioneering the Six Pillars of becoming a happier

told me about data. Sorry, I missed I missed

all about we think that it's very hard to be a lawyer especially in the modern age when you know the rates are going up and clients are becoming so demanding because they're spending so much money. It's hard to have a sustainable practice over a whole career. And and I'm a big advocate for doing business development from the First day, but we also believe that taking care of yourself is so important because you have to be alive to enjoy your practice. And there are so many lawyers. I mean, we I think we all read about the suicide recently in the UK, but suicide rates for lawyers are 22 times the general population. And there they've done some studies with bar associations. More than half of the lawyers surveyed admit to being problem drinkers. And and sometimes people under report that there are all kinds of other substance abuse and mental health issues that lawyers experience. And then they don't take care of their own health. I mean, they, there are all kinds of stories about lawyers who have a heart attack at their desk at 45. And, and that's it. And so we're trying really hard to explain how to have the power and leverage and control over your career so that you can actually retire happily at whatever age you decide. So we we have the six pillars that go together, you know, once you take care of yourself and develop in this, then you can set boundaries and plan intentionally don't accidentally become an insurance defense lawyer if what you really wanted to do was something else. And we we'd like to talk about continuous learning. I mean, you have to take your CLE anyway, you should make those hours count. Learn about some learn about cybersecurity or cannabis or healthcare law, or something that you think your clients could really use. Learn more about your clients businesses so that you can really be useful to them. Make sure that you keep reinventing yourself over your career so that you stay interested so that it's something that really grabs you but so that you can be the most useful possible and then think about your legacy. So that's doing that succession planning, not just dying at your desk and hoping somebody takes over. But thinking about like, how do I want to be known? Do I want to be known for mentoring others or helping a little bit for being a very, you know, intellectual go to person for being a rainmaker and then having a really meaningful retirement at the end? There are a lot of retirement experts now. Because lawyers throw themselves all in and sometimes they're not connected with their friends and family anymore. They haven't had time for hobbies in a long time. And they can't imagine what's going to happen if they retire. What will they do tomorrow? They say things like, Well, I don't play golf. Okay, well, there are other things you can do in retirement, and you don't have to be done with law entirely. There are a lot of firms that will let you still refer cases and give you a card and you know, a lot of ways of keeping one foot in if you want to and a lot of ways of going to culinary school or taking a cruise around the world if that's not what you want to do. But

find the six pillars they're gonna roll out on your website or so

we've we've been doing some happy Rainmaker videos that are I think, finished being edited that will be appearing on my LinkedIn and on our website. And we're creating a landing page for the six pillars of becoming a happy Rainmaker. We'll have some of those videos and some of our own material. And then we'll have a lot of advice from other experts. I spend a lot of time being a connector and introducing people to the experts that can actually help them when I can. But not everybody feels comfortable reaching out to legal recruiter for that. So we're trying to create an information space so that everyone can find the people that they really need.

Congratulations. That sounds like a couple of great initiatives. Last question, Where can people find you?

Well, we've got I'm on LinkedIn every day. It's Jennifer Gilman law firm matchmaker. Gilman has two L's and I website is always a great place to go. It's Gilman strategic group.com And you can get on our newsletter, which we really try to share very helpful content. It's not salesy, I promise.

Awesome. Jennifer, thanks so much for this. This was great. And I look forward to I'm gonna see you at our networking event next week. And hopefully, we'll see you April 2526 at tgr live.

I would love it. I'm gonna see if I can fit it in.

Awesome. Well, thanks, everyone. Have a great week. And Jennifer, awesome job. Thank you.

Thank you for listening to the 10 Golden Rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast. Please send questions and comments to podcast at 10 Golden rules.com That is podcast at t e n Golden rules.com.