Hurray, it’s Monday! (Or is your job making you miserable?)

My Monday morning started with a peruse through some news headlines while waiting for a few people to join me for a breakfast meeting. The headline that caught my eye from the Globe and Mail was ‘High-paying jobs that will make you miserable‘. Naturally I clicked through, and sure enough, lawyer was amongst the top five most miserable jobs listed. This is hardly the first time a list like this has included lawyers.

I spend a lot of time encouraging, chasing and coaxing lawyers to be more active in their marketing. But if work is making a lawyer miserable, it’s hardly surprising that there isn’t a high level of motivation to go out and bring more in. Marketing may not be every lawyer’s cup of tea, but the motivation to market will be significantly higher if it results in work that excites the lawyer. No matter how busy we are, we can always find time for things we enjoy.

Surely most lawyers can identify the aspects of their work that brings them the most joy or satisfaction. It could be a particular type of specialized legal work or an emerging area of law. It could also be work for a particular industry, or maybe it’s a type of client, such as family businesses, artists or former military members.

Focusing marketing effort in an area of genuine interest will help lawyers find the motivation, improve the quality, and make the long-term commitment needed for successful marketing and business development results. Marketing efforts focused on one area does not mean abandoning the rest of the practice. But the more a lawyer can deliver enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and dedicated legal advice in an area that he or she enjoys, the faster his/her reputation for that work will grow. Best of all, these days, building that reputation is easier and less expensive than ever thanks to the many online tools at our disposal.