Hemenway & Barnes wins $1M of Virtual Law Firm Marketing Training
RainmakerVT, the first virtual training website for lawyer business development, gave away $1,000,000 worth of training at LSSO’s RainDance Conference on Wednesday in Chicago.
The winning firm, Boston's Hemenway & Barnes, will receive thousands of hours of free training in the “rainmaking flight simulator,” a virtual world where lawyers guide an avatar through a variety of business development situations.
Mike O'Horo (left) and Craig Levinson (right), co-Founders of RainmakerVT, led off Wednesday's session at RainDance by demonstrating the site's capabilities. By stepping inside the RainmakerVT virtual world, attendees tested their networking acumen against a conference room of their peers and walked away with a new appreciation of this novel category of lawyer training.
“I am delighted that my firm will have this opportunity,” says the winning attendee, Susan Post Munafo, Business Development Manager at Hemenway. “I had never 'experienced' the site before, and, frankly, I was incredibly impressed by the presentation. The interface is professional and engaging. The sales process presented is simple, relevant, and easy for attorneys to replicate. Most importantly, the attorneys can learn, on their own time, by 'doing' and mastering these sales scenarios from the privacy of their offices.”
“Law firms understand that the cost-reduction strategies that sustained their profits-per-partner (PPP) levels in 2009-2010 are exhausted and not repeatable. Going forward they must train a much larger number of their lawyers to generate revenue," O'Horo said. "Having trained lawyers one-on-one for 20 years, we recognized that automation would be the only cost-effective way to train hundreds of lawyers simultaneously.”
Users of the networking simulator have expressed consistent surprise at how many incorrect answers they provide to the scenarios posed -- and the crowd at Raindance was no exception. As with every prior demonstration, participants guessed wrong far more than half of the time. As O’Horo notes, however, “The incorrect answers are not black and white, but shades of gray. They are nuanced versions of what lawyers actually think, say, and do. There is a lot of subtlety built into the context-sensitive video coaching triggered by each choice, which makes the learning experience challenging and fun.”
“We're very excited for Hemenway & Barnes,” says Legal Sales & Service Organization's (LSSO) Board Member Beth Cuzzone, Director of Business Development at Goulston & Storrs. “For years, we've been struggling with the barriers to training the bulk of a firm's lawyers – cost, scalability, lawyer availability, along with a general aversion to lawyer sales activity. In one fell swoop, RainmakerVT removes these obstacles and also addresses the 'lawyer psyche' issue. With its online scenarios where lawyers can practice and make mistakes privately, the site removes all the discomfort associated with bringing in clients.”
Those sentiments were echoed by RainmakerVT's founders. “We couldn't be happier for the lawyers at Hemenway,” said Levinson. We created RainmakerVT to make a difference in the legal community, to help hundreds of thousands of lawyers who, otherwise, would never have been afforded access to this level of training.”
“The million dollar give-away is just an extension of that desire to help as many attorneys as possible.”
