Law school teaches you to think like a lawyer, and your first years at a firm teach you to do the work well, to be precise and thorough and to get it right when the pressure is on. Then you make partner, and an expectation arrives that none of those years really prepared you for: you are now expected to bring in business.
Nobody hands you a method for it. You’re expected to remain a great specialist and keep delivering great work, and on top of that to grow a book of business of your own. The partners who manage to do all three end up with a name, and we call them rainmakers.
This thought sat with me for quite some time and it got me thinking, that’s where Seeker started, with a question we kept coming back to: what are rainmakers actually doing that everyone else isn’t?
There is work behind the rain
From the outside, rainmaking can look like a matter of personality, as if some people are simply better with people than others, but that’s rarely the whole story.
The partners who consistently win work tend to be doing a few things, whether or not they would describe it this way. They keep track of what’s changing in business and in the law, and they think through what each change means: who it affects, what problems it might create further up or down a supply chain, and which of their clients could be exposed. They also pay close attention to their relationships, noticing milestones, turning up at the events where clients and referrers gather, and finding thoughtful reasons to stay in touch. Even when nothing much is happening, they still send season’s greetings.
Some partners do this by instinct, while others have built a routine around it, but either way there is real, deliberate work behind it. So the difference that matters isn’t between partners who are naturally good at relationships and those who aren’t. It’s between leaving the next conversation to chance and deliberately creating a reason to have it.
Work looks inbound, but it was usually won earlier
Most partners will tell you that their work comes through referrals, whether from existing clients, from colleagues in other practice groups, or from people who read something they wrote or met them at an event. That’s true, but the enquiry is usually the last step in a process that started well before the phone rang.
Before that call, someone noticed something changing in a business or its market, understood what that change could mean, and stayed close to the people involved, so that when the matter finally came up, the client thought of them. Sometimes that means you’re the first name that comes to mind when the work arises, and sometimes it means you’re already part of the conversation before the client has even started looking for a lawyer.
Good work matters enormously, and in some practices it’s enough to keep referrals flowing on its own. More often than it appears, though, new work comes from great work combined with the steady effort of staying close to people, tracking what’s changing, and understanding what those changes mean for a client’s business.
Where it breaks down
The trouble is that you can be busy delivering work while doing very little to create the next piece of it.
Client work comes with deadlines and winning new work doesn’t, so business development gets pushed to next week and then to next month, and between current matters and managing a team, staying in touch is usually the first thing to slip. The cost of that only shows up later. By the time a gap appears in your pipeline, you can’t build the relationships or the trust you need overnight.
Meanwhile, your clients’ needs keep changing, and some of those changes open a brief window in which you could be genuinely useful, before they’ve decided what to do or who to call. If you miss that window, the work tends to go to whoever was paying attention. That’s why this kind of work can’t be something that only happens when you have spare time, or when you suddenly find yourself needing more business.
More information was never the answer
When we looked at how partners try to keep up, we saw a great deal of reading, from newsletters and alerts to trade press and legal updates, and none of it was short on information.
The problem is that the news doesn’t know your relationships. It doesn’t know your past matters or which of your clients a particular development might affect, and in the same way, your contact list has no idea what’s changing in the world. Connecting the two, matching the right development to the right person, is the hard part, and it’s usually left to whatever spare moment a partner can find between everything else.
Even when you do make that connection, a change on its own isn’t a reason to call. The real reason is knowing why it matters to that particular person, and knowing what to say still isn’t the same as finding the time to say it.
What we built
Seeker turns market events into specific, timely reasons to contact specific clients, with a draft ready for you to send.
It reads the market through a lawyer’s lens, covering funding rounds, RFPs, regulatory moves and the wider events that ripple through whole industries, and it matches what’s changing to your practice area, your past matters and the people you know. When something is worth acting on, it shows you who it matters to and why, and gives you a first draft to react to rather than a blank page to start from.
It also brings your team into the work, because business development shouldn’t be a solitary job that only gets done late at night. The people who already work alongside you can help spot opportunities and follow them up, so the effort doesn’t rest entirely on one person.
What Seeker won’t do is push outreach for its own sake. Not every relationship needs a touchpoint today, and not every change is a reason to call, so a handful of good reasons to reach out will always be worth more than a long list of weak ones.
Being the lawyer who gets considered
Being the right lawyer for a piece of work isn’t the same as being the lawyer who gets considered when that work comes up.
Relationships give you access and trust, and understanding what’s changing gives you something useful to do with that access. Rainmakers have always combined the two, and we built Seeker so that more partners can do it consistently, as part of their routine rather than something left to chance or squeezed into whatever time remains at the end of the week.
A steady flow of new work also brings something partners don’t often talk about, which is choice. When the next matter isn’t something you have to worry about, you get to decide what kind of work you take on and what you’re happy to turn down.
If that sounds like the work you’ve been meaning to get to, you can try Seeker free for your first month, or book a call and we’ll walk you through how it works.
Find your next piece of work this week.
Seeker reads the news for your practice, keeps your relationships warm and finds the warmest path in.