I didn’t have a ton of success getting my own book of business when I was working at the large law firm because I was making a lot of mistakes. Obviously there is a bit of a political game to be played in a large law firm. You’ve got consultants that come and they sit with the partners and they talk about business plans and you get a little business grad school type training. And you’re supposed to write a marketing plan that fits within your practice group’s plan. And then the practice group is supposed to write their marketing plan that fits within the overall law firm’s plan. And I threw myself into it. I did what was asked. I wrote and I spoke and I played golf and I met people and I glad handled them and I did all of these things. And I taught at the law school level for multiple years, an entire course as adjunct professor, but none of that worked.

And it wasn’t until I got on my own that I realized that probably the number one mistake that I was making when I was doing the marketing at the big law firm is that I overshot my clients in the sense that I was creating content, I was giving speeches, I was posting things that was too advanced for them. It was stuff that I assumed that like, okay, boy, if you’re a real estate developer and you’ve got all this success building all these different buildings and attracting joint venture partners and creating a capital stack and getting loans and you buy the land and you do the … You must be really smart. You must have all these ideas about what you like in contracts and what you don’t. And you must have thoughts about your favorite project delivery methods. And let me tell you that as I’ve gotten very close with hundreds of different clients, I have found that even the ones that are the most sophisticated types, and I’m talking about companies that have physical presences on multiple continents that have thousands of employees, the people who are at the top of those organizations, they’re not thinking about the stuff that lawyers are thinking about.

And so I was sort of screaming into a void about all this advanced stuff because I was trying to meet my clients at a level of thought process and sophistication that really didn’t exist. And I was just overshooting them. And if they looked at a lot of the content that I was creating or the stuff that I was trying to talk to them about, they didn’t care about that stuff and they didn’t really know what the topics were. They wanted what they wanted and they wanted it on time and they wanted on budget and they didn’t have a lot of thought and attention to dedicate to a lot of the stuff that I wanted to talk about. And so I was overshooting them in terms of the level of sophistication. I was not talking to them about the stuff that they cared about. And so when I was able to shake off this B school business plan from the consultants that I was supposed to create that is going to fit in the practice groups plan, that’s going to fit in the firm’s plan.

And I just said, “What is it that I think people want to know about? ” That was a huge unlock for me. And another one is that I was timid, reluctant to post on social media. And I don’t know why that was the case. I mean, but I can tell you that if you’re like me and you have a few thousand LinkedIn connections, just by way of example, if you post every single day, 10% of your network is going to see your posts. And the conventional wisdom among people who are really Instagram pros or LinkedIn pros or people that use social networks to create content is you almost have to be posting multiple times a day. Now, I don’t do that now. I generally, my law firm will make a post a day and if I’m not distracted by client work, I’ll do another post a day.

But you shouldn’t be timid or reluctant to post. And nothing grinds my gears more than I’m on LinkedIn and I see somebody and they preface it by saying, “I don’t post much on LinkedIn.” And I almost kind of want to just not listen to whatever it is they’re talking about because I’m like, “You know what? At the risk of sounding like a jerk, you’re real dumb You should post on LinkedIn every day.” So being too reluctant to post because I thought that it was unseemly big mistake, creating content and entering the market in ways where I was overshooting what my clients really cared about, the stuff that they’re going to engage in, big mistake. And another huge mistake that I made when I was marketing myself in the big law firm is I was being a lawyer, not a person. It’s like, “Oh, I’ve got all these leather bound books and mahogany furniture and look at me and look at my degrees.

Let me tell you what, nobody cares.” And so I have leaned into being a person more than being a lawyer. And you know what? I’ve gotten criticism from some of my mentors recently. They’re like, “Jeremy, what are you doing not in a suit and tie on your videos?” And it’s like, you know what?

I put on a suit and tie and I sit here and I talk to judges all the time. My court attire is two feet away from me. But when I’m entering the marketplace, who sits in their office and puts a tie and a jacket on to be by themselves? Only somebody that’s a lawyer and not a person. You know what? Wonder why I’m not wearing a suit and a tie right now is because I don’t feel like it. And anybody that would do that is trying to put on errors in ways that I think is inauthentic. And so overshooting my clients, creating content that was too advanced for them, being timid and reluctant to post, being a lawyer and not a person, and just generally ignoring my own instincts. I mean, I have tried to project it to the world in a sense of, I’m like you, I’ve got a family, I’ve got my personal life, I’m not all about business, but when I litigate, I litigate to win.

And when I write contracts, I write contracts aiming to use this on my colon where it’s appropriate and not a comma. And I do everything that I do to the end degree. I try as hard as I can, but I don’t have to push aside the fact that I’m a human being. I don’t have to ignore my own instincts. I can do it all. I can enter the marketplace being authentic to myself and have it resonate with people and I can meet them where they’re at. All of this stuff has taken me from having two clients that I brought with me from the big law firm to having hundreds of clients. And I mean, great clients. The kind of clients that the big law firm that I used to work at would die to have. It would be very easy for me to take my book of business right now and go right back into the kind of firm that I worked at before and instead of being a relatively junior income partner to go right in as an equity partner.

Why? Because I’m baiting the hook with the right kind of bait. And so there is a big law mentality for marketing that led me to make a lot of mistakes, that led me nowhere when I was in the big law firm that I was able to correct. And it’s a lot of trial and error. And I certainly learned a ton about a lot of stuff at the big law firm that has helped me market my services now, but freeing myself up from the shackles, like casting off the stage weight that was around my neck about trying to enter the market in a way that was politic in the large law firm that I worked for. Casting all that off has been a huge advantage for me, and it’s something that I would encourage you to lean into well as you start and operate your own law firm.