Lessons for Lawyers from Steve Jobs [VIDEO]

Advertisement

Apple LogoThis is Small Business Week and I’m going to share with you some inspiring talks by business visionaries in this week’s blog posts.

The first is one of the most famous commencement speeches ever given — the 2005 Stanford commencement address by Steve Jobs. One of my favorite lessons from Jobs’ talk is “Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.”

Advertisement

The most successful lawyers I know have followed the less-traveled road to success. They have freed themselves from conventional thinking within the legal profession. They have marketed when others have not. They were among the first to adopt alternative fee structures while others lost clients to the hidebound billable hour. They have recruited Superstars for their firms while others were happy just to fill office chairs.

Our success in helping more than 18,000 lawyers grow their firms has always been rooted in contrarian thinking.   When firms have believed that the best path to fill their coffers was to be everything to everyone, we have demonstrated the profitable power of specialization. When firms have clung to traditional advertising, we have shown lawyers that the road to better ROI lies in isolating a target market and reaching out to them one-on-one for a more engaging experience. When the legal professional scoffed at Internet marketing and social media, we proved how having a strong online presence led to more leads.

Advertisement

Steve Jobs was a contrarian his whole life. Listen to Jobs speak about seeing opportunities in setbacks — even his own death, which was much closer than he knew at that time:

Advertisement

© The Rainmaker Institute, All Rights Reserved

Published by

National Law Forum

A group of in-house attorneys developed the National Law Review on-line edition to create an easy to use resource to capture legal trends and news as they first start to emerge. We were looking for a better way to organize, vet and easily retrieve all the updates that were being sent to us on a daily basis.In the process, we’ve become one of the highest volume business law websites in the U.S. Today, the National Law Review’s seasoned editors screen and classify breaking news and analysis authored by recognized legal professionals and our own journalists. There is no log in to access the database and new articles are added hourly. The National Law Review revolutionized legal publication in 1888 and this cutting-edge tradition continues today.