Networking has long carried an uncomfortable association with sales, but a new conversation is reframing what it means for lawyers to build lasting professional relationships.
In a recent discussion, Steve Fretzin spoke with Dillon Zwick about a question central to every successful legal career: what if networking was a science of human connection rather than a sales exercise?
Zwick presented not a vague philosophy but a structured, repeatable system grounded in research on connection, memory, and trust that lawyers can deploy consistently.
The system is designed to help legal professionals cultivate a small, focused circle of relationships that reliably drive referrals and genuine opportunity over time.
Zwick pointed to research from psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, whose work examined how human memory decays at a predictable and measurable rate.
Ebbinghaus’s findings, now widely known as the forgetting curve, revealed that strong bonds fade slowly while weaker ties disappear quickly, regardless of the effort invested.
That insight has direct implications for how lawyers should think about the people they meet at industry events, conferences, and professional gatherings throughout the year.
Networking events serve as entry points, useful primarily for access, but it is the one-on-one follow-up conversation, the coffee meeting or direct call, that determines whether a relationship is genuinely worth building.
Once a smaller group of high-potential connections is identified, the strategy should shift toward doubling down on those specific relationships rather than spreading effort thinly across every person met.
Too many lawyers treat networking as a series of disconnected events, showing up, exchanging brief words, moving on, and then wondering months later why nothing came of the interaction.
The problem is not a lack of effort or ambition, but a lack of structure and deliberate follow-through in the critical period after an initial meeting takes place.
By understanding how memory naturally decays over time, lawyers can better appreciate why consistent, well-timed follow-up is essential to staying present in the right people’s minds.
Filtering for the relationships most worth investing in allows legal professionals to concentrate their limited time and energy where it is most likely to produce meaningful returns.
Applying a consistent follow-up cadence means lawyers can remain genuinely visible and relevant to key contacts without the interaction ever feeling transactional or sales-driven.
The core argument Zwick makes is a compelling one: the lawyers who build the strongest books of business are not necessarily the most extroverted, but the most strategically consistent in how they nurture relationships over time.