This article is written by Ramanuj Mukherjee.
Have you heard that story about how elephants are tied with a small rope and it works?
Ok let me tell you anyway.
One man once visited an elephant sanctuary. There he found huge elephants tied to a stick with tiny ropes.
The elephant can take down the entire tree even. What is that small rope for the elephant?
Ok forget a tree, elephants were even tied to small sticks.
What is going on?
He asked around.
The Mahout, i.e. the elephant manager explained: when elephants are young, they are tied with ropes to trees.
Being young, then can’t escape the rope despite much, much effort. They try and try, they cry, they fight with the rope, and they fail.
Eventually, they give up and stop fighting with the rope. They accept that they can’t escape that rope.
Then when they grow up and become mighty elephants, they still do not try to escape because they do not believe any more that the rope can be escaped. If they ever tried, they could find out the truth.
So they are bound by their own belief, and not really the rope.
If you think an elephant is a dumb animal, you are highly mistaken. Elephants have the largest brain, much larger than us, and three times more neurons. They can use tools, they have amazing memory, they can read human body language, they can even learn to paint. Here is an elephant that paints.
So why can’t they understand that the rope is nothing, it is only their belief that can hold them back?
Well, it is no different for human beings. We can make things happen with our beliefs. And our beliefs can be sometimes so strong that we do not realize the truth even if it stares in our face.
Is it possible that you are being constrained by some belief systems that stop you from growing in your practice as a lawyer?
We spent time identifying some myths that impact a large number of young lawyers. Do any of these resonate with you? Have you come to believe any of these myths by chance?
#1 I need grey hair to succeed as a lawyer. Young lawyers have to keep slogging without much money or success until they have put in a decade or two into practice of law.
#2 I need to be born in an elite legal family to succeed in the profession, otherwise, I am at a disadvantage.
#3 I should not specialize early in my career. By specializing, I will lose clients and it will be hard to manage.
#4 Business development equals solicitation and therefore illegal.
#5 Successful lawyers don’t need any management/ customer service/ technology/ marketing/ administration to run our practice profitably. If we follow the footsteps of successful lawyers of the previous generation, we will succeed.
#6 It is better to practice in the Supreme Court or High Court rather than tribunals or lower courts.
#7 I must charge less than big law firm partners or other lawyers to get work from a client.
#8 Big clients will prefer to go to big law firms only.
#9 I have to pay my juniors less otherwise I will be left with very little.
#10 It would take a long time to train and onboard junior lawyers.
#11 I live in a small city or town – there is no work here and the absence of good opportunities is why I am not succeeding.
#12 The legal profession is unfair. There is no value of honesty and integrity.
#13 There is no point in training or investing in juniors because juniors will leave once they get trained.
#14 Expectation from clients or seniors is very high and cannot be satisfied. The more I do, the more they will ask me to do and I will never be appreciated.
#15 The market is bad – we can’t do anything in this terrible economic environment.
#16 Clients try to take advantage of lawyers, we need to one up them if we have to survive.
#17 Courts are shut due to pandemic – how can anyone run a profitable practice in these times?
Have you ever felt the pull of any of these myths
Even if one tries to fight it, the environment of negativity that looms large in the legal profession overall can be very daunting, because everyone around you will echo some of these myths.
That will reinforce these myths in your mind, and make you believe that these things are gospel truths. You will start seeing many exceptions, but such exceptions will not convince you to investigate deeper, but you will think “exceptions prove the rule”.
These myths are not objective, they are only amplified by an agreement amongst a lot of lawyers.
Often, these are expressed by seniors and mentors as well, even if it is inadvertent.
Have these and other myths stopped young lawyers from succeeding in the profession?
Remember that it is upon the elephant to prove that the stick and the rope have no power over it.
If the elephant does not move, the confinement to the rope and the stick remains.
The elephant must face the challenge head on.
It is upon young lawyers to question these myths, and really move on with their careers.
If you look around, you will notice that the legal industry has rapidly evolved in the past five to ten years.
Several young lawyers who have questioned these myths and started out on their own have built thriving independent law practices and their own firms.
We offer a course library known as Master Access, and it has been taken up by hundreds of lawyers who have built their own law practices and independent law firms over the last 2 years.
We write about these successful lawyers from time to time and invite them to our webinars. Tomorrow, I will share with you a list of their testimonials. You could check them out even today on our YouTube channel.
But why trust us blindly?
Look around yourself, and see if you can find young, successful lawyers doing very well in the legal profession, and none of these myths have stopped them from achieving everything that they deserve to achieve.
Can you think of any lawyer who questioned these myths and succeeded?
Reply and share his story with us. Your own, if you are that person.
Now, let’s think of a different question – “What would it take for you to question the myth and move forward”
It is not an academic inquiry – you will need to be armed with an arsenal of weapons.
What are the weapons for a lawyer? Client acquisition and delivery of results.
But you already know that. What is the difficult part? Most lawyers believe that it takes experience, connections, resources to do these things. Four us though, it all starts from skills. With the right set of skills, you soon realise nothing is really out of your reach.
What are the skills you need?
Let’s get to that later. First, let me tell you why we are so confident about what we are saying here. How can we say those 17 things described above are myths and a set of skills can help you to overcome these?
It is because we have dismantled each of those and proven them wrong at LawSikho, through our work with young lawyers who have built thriving practices, for themselves, inside another law firm and even their own law firms.
We have helped over 150 lawyers to break their barriers so far, and helped them to find their own clients and grow their own practices, through our Master Access program.
Let me give you some examples:
- A Bhopal-based lawyer who runs a law firm in partnership with her husband uses the Master Access to focus on different kinds of corporate work, while her husband practices litigation.
- A Delhi-based company secretary with a law degree earlier was offering compliance-related services to clients. She has now started offering a range of corporate advisory services and regularly performs contract drafting work, trademark prosecution and opposition services.
- A Bombay-based litigator who largely focussed on traditional civil and criminal litigation has also been able to add commercial advisory, contract drafting and commercial litigation work to his portfolio of services.
And countless others!
How does the magic happen? Well, it’s quite simple actually.
Take a look at our master access program to get a sense of what may have worked for them.
Btw, you do not have to actually do any course, you can just visit this page right now and benefit from it. Just by reading the list of skills mentioned on this page, you will be able to get a massive clarity on what you need to do next.
I can’t enroll into an expensive program like Master Access right now, can you still help me in any other way
Absolutely. Glad you asked:)
While doubling your revenues progressively or earning an income of INR 1.5 – 2 lakhs per month requires consistent time and effort, we have decided to introduce you to some of the most powerful tools that our students are being trained to deploy, in a 2-day workshop on
Some of the topics we will discuss in the session are:
- How to perform industry research and identify new practice areas
- How to think from a client’s perspective
- How to identify the pain points of a client
- How to transition an incoming client query into paid legal work
- Why do clients walk away after taking quotes from you and how to avoid that
- How to justify your pricing
- How to transition to a retainer arrangement so that you have a certainty of income
This will be a 5-hour workshop spread over two days, with detailed in-class and take-home exercises to apply these principles to your own practice and career goals.
If you deploy the tools consistently, you can create a pathway to generate 2 new clients and an additional income of INR 50,000 per month, as a short term goal.
In the long term, of course, you can double, triple, quadruple or even scale this further.
It costs just INR 500, and this is the first time we are offering this knowledge, tools and methods through an affordable workshop like this. Grab the chance while it’s there, you can sign up here: https://lawsikho.com/course/beat-covid-crisis-and-recession-how-can-you-get-2-new-clients-every-month-and-earn-an-additional-50000
You will get trained live with Abhyuday Agarwal, our COO in this session. Abhyuday has himself overseen growth of multiple businesses from 0 to 1-6 cr+ annual revenue in the legal domain, so getting a chance to learn from him is very special. You really do not want to miss this opportunity.
I also want to know more about Master Access. What is it?
The Master Access is a powerful library comprising more than 100 class hours of training every month, skill sets, powerful coaching, and a library of templates. You cannot use all of it, that is why it’s a library. However, use what you need, when you need.
These training sessions pertain to various practice areas, ranging from corporate, disputes, litigation, IP, media and entertainment, technology law, policy and tax.
It also includes training on how to develop and manage a legal practice, which is extremely important for lawyers who aspire to build an independent practice, or a small law firm, or to grow their practice.
Young lawyers have used Master Access in a variety of ways to build law firms, get amazing jobs, grow their practices more profitably and grow faster in their career.
Alright, enough about Master Access, I have a question about you!
At this point, it is really important for me to know something about you.
Have any of these 17 myths influenced your career? How?
My second question is – have you ever broken through even one of them, or even questioned one? Did you ever grow beyond them? What happened when you tried?
Breaking your barriers is not easy, it will take time, money, effort, failure and repetition. If you have ever done it, congratulations, it calls for celebration.
Write back and let me know!
Following courses are open for enrollment:
Diploma in Advanced Contract Drafting, Negotiation and Dispute Resolution
Diploma in English Communication for Lawyers – oratory, writing, listening and accuracy
Diploma in Labour, Employment and Industrial Laws (including POSH) for HR Managers
Certificate Course in Introduction to Legal Drafting: Contracts, Petitions, Opinions & Articles
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