Law Firm Growth Podcast · Jan Roos - Legal Marketing Expert, Author, and Speaker

Always Be Curious: Why the Glengary Glen Ross Approach Kills Referrals with David Freeman

·29 min·2 clips

Freeman swaps 'always be closing' for 'curious' in his Glengarry Glen Ross slide, turning networking into questions instead of pitches.

1. The Law Firm Growth Podcast episode "Always Be Curious" covers legal business development and referral building, using the Glengarry Glen Ross "always be closing" scene as its foil. 2. Guest David Freeman, founder of Lawyer Book Builder, has trained and coached over 10,000 lawyers at more than 260 law firms over 31 years. 3. Freeman's thesis is that "it's all about relationships," and that lawyers should drop the sales framing for service, curiosity and value-added contact. 4. He recommends progress measures such as how many potential clients and referral sources a lawyer knows, with micro wins like a response or a meeting counting toward the long game. 5. Rather than asking for business, he suggests joint marketing with referral sources like CPAs, including co-written articles, podcast series and local speaking events, plus leadership roles in organizations that give permission to contact members. 6. He tells of an intellectual property lawyer targeting in-house counsel at the INTA conference, who offered interviews for a planned newsletter, reached out to five people and got three meetings, one lasting 45 minutes by phone. 7. He also describes an antitrust lawyer who wrote a Forbes column, compiled it into a first book draft in about a year and a half, and won work from major corporations. 8. Freeman says even resistant lawyers have a lane, such as a self-described quality stickler who could lead training and best practices, or a lawyer who hates speaking but will write, and he says referral sources must be told the profile of work wanted after a lawyer first gives value. 9. He argues AI tools like Harvey will make relationship skills more valuable, citing a Florida billboard lawyer's line "my job is to find clients," a survey respondent who would hire for large social followings, and a college roommate who lost 75% of his business in one day. 10. Suited to lawyers and law firm marketers building referral-based practices.

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