What makes rainmakers different? What do they have that other lawyers don’t? The easy answer: They have clients. But, as a developing body of research is showing, they also have tendencies that make business development come as naturally to them as, say, being critical does to their partners.

The latest report comes from Lawyer Metrics, an analytics company founded by William Henderson, the Indiana University law professor. Called simply “The Rainmaking Study,” it’s an effort to identify client-magnet traits.

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The Lawyer Metrics study rests on an analysis of 300 personality assessments of both rainmakers and client service partners, which was bolstered by 85 in-depth interviews. The paper concluded that rainmakers had higher propensities to seek dominance, become consumed by their work and effectively manage teams, and that they possessed an enhanced taste for risk-taking (compared to other lawyers). According to Monique Drake and Evan Parker-Stephen, the authors of the study, lawyers with those attributes “are more likely, as a statistical matter, to develop a strong client following.”

Now a skeptic might say that nearly all partners in big firms are consumed by their work or, for the most part, will shy away from risk. True. What this study finds, according to Parker-Stephen, is that on work engagement, for instance, “all partners score highly. But rainmakers score higher than the others.” And on risk, the rainmakers were, compared to average Americans, risk-averse. They were just less risk-averse than their client service partners.

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