“There is a quiet myth in the legal community that networking — bar associations, chambers, industry groups, referral organizations — is universally productive. It often is not.
A lawyer we know recently audited her year. One hundred hours invested across ten groups. She could not point to a single referral that traced back to any of them.
The pattern is more common than the profession admits. Networking gets defended because it feels like work, looks like effort, and offers a sense of progress. But effort is not the same as outcome.
Most firms have never bothered to track where their actual referrals come from — case by case, source by source. The ones that do almost always discover the same thing: two or three sources are doing nearly all of the work, and the rest are absorbing time.
Before you commit another year of dinners, panels, and breakfasts, the question to start with is which of those rooms have ever actually mattered. The answer is usually a much shorter list.”
– Hugo E. Gomez, Founder (Abogados NOW)
Track what’s actually working: