There’s a direct relationship between the amount of time you spend networking and the amount of business your efforts can generate, writes Mike O’Horo in To generate referrals from networking, how much time must you spend? But for most lawyers, any time is more time than they can afford to spend on “relationship building:”

… people who spend 5-9 hours per week networking generate 50% of their total business from it. … Unfortunately, even the two hours or fewer that yields lesser results is beyond what most lawyers can or will do. For many lawyers, two hours per week is their total weekly business development time budget — for all activities — and most struggle to sustain that consistently.

That doesn’t mean you should stop trying to establish meaningful connections, however. Instead, says O’Horo, you need to rethink the way you communicate with potential clients and referral sources to change the outcome of your networking. Read the post for a full explanation of how to do that.