|
Anna Rappaport
|
|
For the last 10 years, Anna Rappaport, a solo business development and partnership coach in Washington, D.C., has been coaching lawyers and helping them succeed.
“When a lawyer believes she has done everything she can, that’s when I come in,” Rappaport says. “I try to help the lawyer make basic shifts in attitude and perception. At that point, the lawyer is motivated to change, and at that point, I become a very good resource.”
Rappaport has a background in both coaching and law. She worked as an executive coach before and during her years at George Washington University Law School, where she got her J.D. in 2004.
|
She worked for the U.S. Department of Commerce for 2 ½ years after law school, working on nonproliferation programs, before she decided to launch her coaching practice. She specializes in helping attorneys who are “stuck” in their careers for some persistent reason that is actually within their control. She calls herself “a sounding board, focusing partner and strategic resource” for her clients.
One typical client, Rappaport says, was an attorney who wanted to become a mediator and had a strong background in family law. The “obvious answer” for this lawyer, Rappaport says, would be to move into family law mediation, but the lawyer didn’t like family law when she practiced it.
“She had baggage that went with her,” Rappaport says. “I helped her, as I help my other clients, to open up their perceptions to considering things that they didn’t think they wanted to do.”
Another example is an attorney in a large law firm who wanted to expand her book of business, but who felt difficulty in reaching out to ex-colleagues who would have been good sources of new work. The lawyer always felt that she didn’t fit in well with the circles of her former colleagues and was hesitant to approach them.
“I explored with her what her negative perceptions were and where they came from,” Rappaport recalls. “How does a perception, once you have it, influence other thoughts and ideas that you have? It’s all too easy to limit yourself. In our coaching sessions, we explore these things and I suggest practical, step-by-step solutions. In a person who wants to change, it can work quickly, faster than psychotherapy.”
Rappaport says that these days, strategy isn’t just for corporations and law firms; individual attorneys, in a highly competitive market, need to develop a strategy to distinguish themselves from other lawyers who are in similar positions and who are equally qualified on paper.
One way of doing that, she says, is for a lawyer to pick a very specific area of law that she plans to occupy and call her own.
“The problem is that many lawyers have a low tolerance of risk,” Rappaport says. “Lawyers don’t want to choose one or two areas. They’re afraid to say they want to dominate an area. It takes a lot of courage to try, but you can’t be everything to everyone. It’s a matter of staying true to the vision that you created.”
In an article published in the April 2016 issue of Law Practice Today, a publication of the American Bar Association, Rappaport stated her “unspoken rule of business development: the greater your courage, the better your results.”
As she pointed out in the article, her own career helps prove that point. In 2010, facing a crossroads in her life, she decided to move to Turkey, where she did not speak the language or know anyone. This unusual step worked out well for her, as she developed a successful Istanbul-based practice, coaching Turkish lawyers.
By Jonathan Groner, Independent Marketing Contractor, for the May/June 2016 issue of the Capital Ideas Newsletter.