~an introduction to a four-part series on brand messaging for lawyers~
Lawyer Hero
I decided to try to become a lawyer more than forty years ago, while I was attending community college.
I say “try” because I had no idea whether I could do it.
I didn’t know a single lawyer. Never talked to one face to face. And no one in my family (except my future brother in law), or my circle of friends for that matter, had even gone to college.
But I was intrigued by two things. First, I was transfixed at the time by the Watergate hearings. The characters were all fascinating to me. Well spoken, articulate, smart and, from both sides of the political aisle, appeared to be after the same thing.
Taking on the Powerful
Others may disagree, and I’ve come to wonder a bit, but at that time, for me, every one of those characters was laser focused on the rule of law and the fact that it would be applied equally to everyone, even the most powerful man on the planet.
And just about all of those characters had one thing in common.
They were all lawyers.
The Italian Stallion
Second, I was a fan of a television series called “Petrocelli” where a pretty cool lawyer/rancher with an Italian leaning nose and surname road around in a dusty pickup truck saving his clients from legal peril.
I’m not sure how I was going to mix the two, and I know a television series shouldn’t play any role in a life planning event, but what can I say? I was an impressionable young lad with a skull full of mush.
And I wanted to be some combination of Petrocelli and those Watergate heroes.
A Measure of Success, and the Reality of Sales
Fast forward to today. I don’t own a ranch or drive a pickup truck, and I haven’t taken down any presidents. But I’ve been a lawyer for nearly four decades, and I’m proud of that.
Of course, like so much in life, the road you’re on often takes you to places you might not have considered.
One of the things I never considered, until a few years ago, was the importance of selling what you do, whether it’s law practice or lawn maintenance. You can be the absolute best at what you do, and it won’t matter if you can’t get the word out to the people you’d like to help.
And so I began to study this area and apply it to my own practice.
I spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars in the process and came across some very smart people who really know what they are talking about.
One of them is Casey Demchak, who created what he calls the Key Message Copy Platform. I bought his course a few years ago and studied it to see how it might be applied it to my own practice. And I’m glad I did.
Casey’s approach isn’t limited to law firms. In fact, he doesn’t even talk about law firms. But I took his core principles and some of my other learnings and created my own platform for my solo law practice.
I’d like to share some of those principles with you in the next four posts.
And I’ll even show you what my platform looks like.
I hope you’ll check them out.
