---
title: How Do Lawyers Get More Clients?
description: Learn how lawyers get more clients by targeting the right people, developing existing relationships and turning the right opportunities into work.
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---

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# How Do Lawyers Get More Clients?

![Scott Simmons](https://insights.legalbalanceinstitute.com/hs-fs/hubfs/AI-Generated%20Media/Images/image00013.jpeg?width=48&height=48&name=image00013.jpeg)

 Scott Simmons

October 5, 2026

A lawyer tells me, “I need more clients.”

My first question is usually: what does “more clients” mean?

Very often, what they actually mean is they’re not making enough money. Their pipeline is inconsistent, they’re too reliant on referrals, or they simply don’t know where the next piece of work is coming from. So they assume the answer is more clients.

It might be, but I’d want to understand what sort of clients they need before we start worrying about where to find them.

At its simplest, lawyers get clients by becoming known and trusted by the right people, developing relationships, creating opportunities and knowing what to do when those opportunities appear. That doesn’t mean you need to become a prolific networker, spend half your life on LinkedIn or suddenly develop a love of selling, but you do need to be a bit more deliberate about the clients you want and how you’re going to get in front of them.

## **Before you try to get more clients, define “better”**

Let’s say you generate £10,000 from one client you enjoy working with, doing exactly the sort of work you want to do. Another lawyer generates the same £10,000 from ten clients paying £1,000 each, several of whom are difficult to deal with, slow to pay or bringing work they don’t particularly want.

Same revenue, very different practice. Those ten clients mean more relationships to manage, more emails, more calls, more demands on the lawyer’s time and probably more administration. They may also be taking up capacity that could be spent working with better clients.

I’m not suggesting the client paying £10,000 is automatically a better client. It isn’t simply about finding the people with the biggest budgets. But if what you really want is to earn more money, getting more clients isn’t necessarily the answer.

### **What does a better client look like?**

[When I work with lawyers on their ideal client type](https://insights.legalbalanceinstitute.com/how-to-get-better-at-business-development-as-a-lawyer) (ICT), we look at much more than revenue: which clients do you enjoy working with? Who brings you the type of work you want? Who pays on time? Who respects your advice? What sort of work do you want to become known for?

The alternative is to accept whatever comes through the door. I’ve seen lawyers do that because they’re focused on revenue, so almost any new client looks like a good client. It’s only later that they realise how much time some of those clients are taking up, or that the work they’ve won isn’t taking their practice in the direction they want it to go.

So I think there’s a better version of the original question: **how do I create more opportunities with the right clients?**

Once you know that, you’ve got something much more useful to work with.

## **Start with the clients you already have**

When lawyers decide they need to do more business development, there’s a tendency to immediately start looking for new people. They think about networking events, LinkedIn, referrals, conferences and all the other places they might find prospective clients.

Before doing that, have a look at the people you already know. Your existing clients already know you, they’ve seen your work and, assuming you’ve done a good job, there’s already some trust there.

When did you last speak to them when there wasn’t an immediate legal matter to deal with? You could simply get in touch and find out how things are going. What has changed? What are they working on? What have they got coming up?

This isn’t about turning every client conversation into a cross-selling exercise. Be curious about what is happening with them. You may find there’s something else you can help with, or that another part of your firm could help. You may know an entirely different professional who can help because it’s unrelated to law. There may be absolutely nothing at the moment, but you’ve still spoken to your client and learnt a bit more about what is happening in their world.

It’s easy to overlook existing clients because “getting clients” sounds as though you need to find people you don’t already know. You don’t.

Developing existing client relationships is something we explore in much more detail in [**The BD Breakthrough Blueprint®**](https://www.legalbalanceinstitute.com/courses/BDBTBP).

## **Work out where the right clients are**

Once you know the sort of clients you want, you can start deciding where to spend your time.

I see lawyers doing this the wrong way round with LinkedIn quite often. They decide they need to post more frequently before they’ve really thought about who they’re trying to reach or what they want to become known for. The same thing happens with networking: someone decides they need to “do more networking”, so they start looking for events.

I’d start with the audience. Where are the people you want to work with? Who already has relationships with them? What do they read? Which professional groups are they part of? Where are you realistically likely to come across them?

Depending on the answers, that might lead you towards existing relationships, referrals, introducers, networking, LinkedIn, articles, search, speaking at events or involvement in a particular professional community. You probably won’t need all of them.

### **Make it easier for people to refer you**

Referrals are an obvious source of work for lawyers, but it helps if the people who know you understand what they should refer to you.

If I know you’re “a commercial lawyer”, that doesn’t give me much to go on. If I understand the type of businesses you work with, the issues you regularly help them with and the situations where it would be useful to introduce you, I’ve got a much better chance of recognising an opportunity.

So rather than simply asking whether enough people know you, ask: **do the people who know me understand the type of client or situation they should refer to me?**

### **Meeting people is the start, not the result**

Networking can obviously help you meet potential clients and referrers, but meeting someone isn’t the same as creating an opportunity, and creating an opportunity isn’t the same as winning a client.

Sometimes a relationship leads to work. Sometimes the person introduces you to somebody else, and sometimes nothing comes from it at all. The same applies to content: articles, LinkedIn posts, speaking and webinars can help the right people discover you, understand what you know and remember you when they have a problem you may be able to help with.

All of those things can help create opportunities. You still need to know what to do with them when they appear.

## **Marketing creates awareness. Sales turns opportunities into clients**

My wife has worked in marketing for more than 30 years. Many years ago, she explained the difference between marketing and business development to me like this: **“Marketing is drawing the horse to water; business development is making it drink.”**

Your LinkedIn posts, articles, webinars and conference talks are marketing. They can help people become aware of you and what you do. If somebody reads one of your articles and then gets in touch because they have a problem, marketing has done its job and you now have an opportunity.

What you do with that opportunity is business development. Or sales.

At Legal Balance Institute, we don’t see much point in trying to create a meaningful distinction between the two when what we’re talking about is turning an appropriate opportunity into paying work. I suspect one reason professional services has become so attached to “business development” is that it feels more comfortable than saying “sales”, but selling is just a word. It’s what you do, and how you sell, that counts.

For me, good selling is about understanding what somebody is trying to achieve, asking enough questions to understand their situation properly, deciding whether you can actually help and, if you can, working out the right way forward with them. There shouldn’t be anything uncomfortable about that.

## **“But I’m a lawyer, not a salesperson”**

I understand why lawyers say this. Most lawyers were trained to practise law, not to sell legal services. But a law firm is still a business and, without paying clients, there isn’t much of a business.

Legal services involve some of the most important, transformational decisions of people’s lives. Your technical knowledge isn't a reason to remove yourself from the commercial conversation. It's one of the reasons you are best-placed to have that conversation properly. Do you really want to leave that conversation to someone without the legal knowledge and experience you have?

That doesn’t mean lawyers need to start behaving like stereotypical salespeople. In fact, many of the skills lawyers already use are exactly the skills they need in a good sales conversation: asking questions, listening, analysing information, identifying problems, explaining complicated things, advising people and making recommendations.

You still need to learn how to use those skills in a commercial conversation, and there is one particular trap lawyers need to watch out for: A prospective client starts explaining their situation and you recognise the legal problem almost immediately. Because you know the answer, you start explaining what they need to do.

Legally, you may be absolutely right, but you may still know very little about the client, what they’re trying to achieve, why it matters, what concerns them, what else is happening or how they will decide what to do. Being able to identify the legal answer quickly is useful; assuming you therefore understand the client is something quite different.

I look at the discomfort lawyers have with selling in more detail in [**How to Sell Legal Services Without Feeling Salesy**](https://insights.legalbalanceinstitute.com/how-to-sell-legal-services-without-feeling-salesy), but you certainly don’t need to turn yourself into a different person to become better at it.

## **Don’t confuse visibility with business development**

LinkedIn is a good example of how easy it is to confuse marketing activity with business development.

A lawyer starts posting. One post gets 2,000 impressions, another gets 10,000. Something more personal gets lots of comments, so naturally they start paying attention to what performs well.

There’s nothing wrong with that, until getting more impressions, likes and comments becomes the objective. You can end up creating content for the people most likely to engage with it rather than the people you actually want to work with.

I’d ask a different question: did this help the people I want to work with understand what I know, how I think or when I might be relevant to them?

If it did, the post may have done its job perfectly well without going viral.

I see a similar issue when coaching lawyers who are doing plenty of BD but aren’t happy with the results. They’re going to events, having coffees, meeting people and posting online, but they haven’t been clear enough about who they actually want to work with. Once they are, it becomes much easier to decide which activities are worth their time.

## **You don’t need to be everywhere**

There’s no shortage of things lawyers are told they should be doing: LinkedIn, networking, SEO, webinars, video, newsletters, events, referral campaigns, podcasts. If you try to do all of them while also doing your actual job, something is going to give.

Choose a few things that make sense for the clients you want and that you can realistically keep doing. For one lawyer, that might mean putting more effort into existing clients and professional introducers. For another, LinkedIn and a couple of important industry events may be much more useful. Someone with a specialist practice might get more from writing and speaking.

There isn’t one correct answer. I’d much rather see a lawyer consistently doing two or three things that put them in front of the right people than starting an ambitious BD plan they’ve abandoned by next month.

## **Start smaller than you think**

If you’re currently doing very little business development, don’t make your first job organising a webinar or launching a newsletter. Pick an existing client you haven’t spoken to for a while and get back in touch. Find out how they’re getting on.

This is so simple that it is often overlooked. In fact, we devalue it by suggesting that clients don’t want to hear from us. Why wouldn’t they? Most of the time, clients don’t know they have a legal issue until it’s too late. You can be the proactive trusted advisor whose call highlights an issue before it becomes a problem.

Then start creating some new relationships. One exercise I often give lawyers is to find five relevant people on LinkedIn each day and send them a connection request. Five isn’t based on some piece of research that says it’s the optimum number; it’s simply the number I use because it’s manageable.

And I mean relevant people, not five random CEOs. Look for people who fit the type of client or professional relationship you want to develop. Have a look at their profile and, if they accept, don’t immediately send them a sales pitch disguised as a thank-you message.

If they’ve posted something genuinely interesting, comment on it. If there’s a reason to start a conversation, start one. You’re simply trying to become connected to and develop relationships with more of the right people.

That’s enough to get started. You don’t need to create an entire BD strategy on Monday morning.

## **When an opportunity appears, learn what to do with it**

You can become more visible, build relationships, get introductions and receive referrals, and eventually somebody says, “Actually, we might need some help with this.”

Now the nature of the conversation changes. Creating the opportunity is one skill; winning the work is another.

You need to understand what is happening before you recommend a solution, establish whether there is a good fit, understand what the prospective client is trying to achieve, help them decide what to do next and, at some point, ask for the work.

That’s the part we tend to be more comfortable calling business development than sales, but it is selling. I cover it in much more detail in [**How to Sell Legal Services: A Practical Guide for Lawyers**](https://insights.legalbalanceinstitute.com/how-to-sell-legal-services-a-practical-guide-for-lawyers).

## **And then follow up**

Not every opportunity turns into work immediately. Someone you meet at an event may be interested in talking again, a prospective client may need to discuss things internally, or an introducer may say they know somebody you should meet.

None of those opportunities is particularly useful if you don’t do anything afterwards. Creating an opportunity is only useful if you take responsibility for progressing it.

Following up doesn’t mean repeatedly emailing someone to ask, “Just checking whether you’ve had a chance to consider my previous email.” Sometimes it’s simply continuing the conversation and giving the relationship somewhere to go.

## **Getting better clients is something you can learn**

If you want more clients, I wouldn’t begin with a list of BD activities. Start by deciding what a better client actually looks like for you, then look at the people you already know. Work out where else those clients are likely to come from and choose a few sensible ways of getting in front of them.

When an opportunity appears, you then need to know how to handle the conversation properly, follow it up and ask for the work.

Most lawyers already have some of the skills they need to do this. They listen, ask questions, analyse problems and advise people every day. What they haven’t necessarily been taught is how to apply those skills to winning and developing client relationships.

That’s what we teach in [**The BD Breakthrough Blueprint®**](https://www.legalbalanceinstitute.com/courses/BDBTBP). It gives lawyers a practical process for developing relationships, creating opportunities, having better commercial conversations, following up and building a more deliberate pipeline of work.

If you’re going to put time into business development, the aim shouldn’t simply be more clients. It should be more of the clients you actually want to work with.

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