tell your story:  how to develop your representative experience

Representative experience can be a powerful marketing tool. Because your future clients and referral sources want to see you have done exactly what they need, having well-written, compelling pieces of representative experience can significantly enhance your chances of landing a new client or of being referred.

In addition, representative experience can be added to your biography, included on your firm's website, used in proposals for new business, added to your speaker's biography, sent to prospective clients and referral sources as background information on your capabilities, and in many other ways.

Representative experience should:

• Exemplify the type of work you would like to attract more of
• Focus on the value you bring to your clients
• Showcase your unique areas of expertise
• Highlight your significant accomplishments and wins
• Underscore the creative approach you use to solve your client's problems
• Draw attention to the results you generated on behalf of your client

Use the following worksheet to develop one piece of representative experience, then set a goal of categorizing your primary areas of expertise and develop three to four pieces of representative experience for each area of practice.

Type of Client:

Identify the industry or client-type (i.e., $100 million manufacturing company, or CEO of a major corporation).

Client's Issue or Problem:

Concisely describe the key issues faced by your client; why they hired you to intervene on their behalf; discuss what was at risk for the client, potential liability to the client.

Your Solution or Approach:

The creative way in which you served the client; focus on the value your expertise brought to the client. Identify the steps you took to resolve the issue(s) at hand, even if it means summarizing a complex case or transaction into a few sentences.

Result Achieved:

The end result; an award received for the client; financial settlement of a case that would have cost the client millions and possibly put him/her out of business; successful sale of a business; dissolution of a partnership; setting a new legal precedent. How your intervention resulted in success for the client.

We have updated our Representative Experience pages on our website by practice area and by industry and invite you to review the entire summary. Click here to view our extensive representative experience.

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