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$ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ A $ $ lawyer with a small Victoria firm, Erik Magraken doesn't have the luxury of a business development department to help him drum up clients. His firm still does lots of marketing, but Magraken has also taken it upon himself to do some of the work on his own, much of it from home. "What I've done is I try to commit one to two hours a day, usually in the evening, for business develop- ment and law firm marketing," says Magraken, a 32-year-old partner practising personal injury law at MacIsaac & Co. But while people like Magraken work to get their names out there, lawyers at major firms find they, too, are having to work harder to market themselves. With the recession taking a toll on business mergers, corporate lawyers are finding themselves with extra time to seek out new work. While insolvency files and litigation stemming from the financial distress are filling part of the gap, the economic turmoil nevertheless presents a new imperative for practitioners, says Deborah Glendinning, a partner and co-chairwoman of the national class actions specialty group at Osler Hoskin & Harcourt LLP in Toronto. "Obviously, in these economic times, business development is something that people need to be focused on." Adding to the pressure to mingle at conferenc- es and shine off the clubs for golfing season are changes with the profession itself. Rick Powers, a lawyer and associate dean at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, says the big firms can no longer count on rainmakers, the three or four senior partners with connec- tions, to bring in work that fills the in-baskets of junior lawyers. "Those people are retiring," he notes, adding the impetus to network is some- thing many lawyers find difficult. "It doesn't come naturally to them. In most cases, they've never had to do it. Times are changing. They're expected to do it now." But as Glendinning points out, generating new files shouldn't be about forcing people into situations they're not comfortable with. "It really is a very personal and individual thing," says Glendinning, who spoke recently about business development at the Rotman's Business Leadership for Women Lawyers program. Younger lawyers with smaller Rolodexes (if they even bother to have one), for example, might better spend their time publishing articles on developments in their field in order to build their reputations. Glendinning prefers a personal touch whereby she makes extra efforts to get to know her corpo- rate clients through daily interactions so she can later ask them to lunch, a golf game, or even less obvious activities like skiing or a hockey game. "It could be an additional five or 10 minutes on every phone call that could add up to an hour every day," she says. But as with so many aspects of life these days, a new key strategy for success appears to lie with technology. Magraken's one to two hours a day, for example, involves for the most part sitting in front of a computer screen updating his Twitter feed, his Facebook profile, and his own Insurance Corp. of British Columbia Law Blog (icbclaw.com/ blog). Magraken also posts content on JDSupra. com, a web site for sharing legal documents, as well as a new Canadian web site aiming to be a hub for legal information, advicescene.com. "It's basically old-fashioned wine-and-cheese schmoozing but it's done online," says Magraken, who notes success in Internet-based marketing now involves going beyond having a static web site. Instead, generating files requires regularly keeping current on developments in his field, which in his case means tracking cases dealing www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com JUNE 2009 27