Lawyers receive years of training in how to do legal work. Very few are taught how to win it.
Then, somewhere around senior associate or partner level, the expectation changes. Being an excellent lawyer is still necessary, but now you're also expected to develop relationships, create opportunities and build a practice.
The usual advice isn't terribly helpful. Network more. Post on LinkedIn. Attend conferences. Keep in touch with clients.
Those are activities. Getting better at business development requires you to develop the skills that make those activities productive.
To get better at business development as a lawyer, focus on six capabilities: choosing the right relationships, understanding what clients care about, having better commercial conversations, communicating your value, progressing relationships and doing all of that consistently.
All of those skills can be learned.
You don't have to become an extrovert or adopt a sales personality that feels completely alien to you. You do, however, have to learn how to sell legal services. Done well, that means being curious, asking better questions, listening properly and helping clients make better decisions.
When I was practising law, I went to networking events because I was told they would be useful.
I didn't really know why I was going. I had no particular strategy for who I wanted to meet, what I wanted to learn or what I would do afterwards. Looking back, I can see how much time and energy can disappear into networking when there is no thought behind it.
Going to the event wasn't the problem. Confusing attendance with business development was.
I see the same confusion now in different forms. Lawyers write articles or LinkedIn posts and call it BD. They attend conferences, speak on panels and diligently add people to their CRM.
Some of those activities are primarily marketing. Others can create opportunities for business development. But none automatically develops a relationship or progresses an opportunity.
The capabilities underneath the activity determine whether anything useful happens next.
|
Activity |
Simply doing it |
Becoming good at it |
|
Networking |
Attend events |
Choose the right events and people, have useful conversations, and follow up |
|
|
Post regularly |
Use your expertise to become relevant to people you can genuinely help |
|
Client meetings |
Explain your expertise |
Understand what is driving the client's decision |
|
CRM |
Store contacts |
Use what you know to develop relationships intentionally |
|
Follow-up |
Send "great to meet you" |
Give the relationship a useful reason to continue |
|
Presentations |
Deliver information |
Help an audience understand something relevant to their situation |
A busy diary is a poor measure of your business-development ability. You can spend hours at events, publish every week and have hundreds of contacts without becoming noticeably better at winning work.
Networking is useful when you know why you're doing it.
You don't need to meet everyone in the room. You need to identify people where a professional relationship makes strategic sense, learn enough about them to understand whether that relationship is worth developing and, crucially, do something afterwards.
For me, follow-up is the part that counts.
An event can create the introduction. An article can create awareness. A LinkedIn post can give someone a reason to notice you. Business development begins when you use those opportunities to develop a relationship.
One reason lawyers resist business development is the picture they have of selling.
If selling means talking about yourself, applying pressure and trying to persuade somebody to buy something they don't really need, the reluctance is understandable. I wouldn't recommend becoming good at that either.
Selling legal services well is still selling. But professional, consultative selling starts with understanding.
The lawyer needs to find out what is happening, why the client cares about it, what they are trying to achieve, what could get in the way and how they will make a decision. Only then can the lawyer sensibly explain how they might help.
That approach has much more in common with being a trusted advisor than performing a sales pitch.
Legal training rewards expertise. Clients come to lawyers because they expect them to know things, solve problems and give advice. It is hardly surprising that, in a business development conversation, many lawyers reach for the same behaviour.
They start demonstrating what they know.
The problem is timing. Your expertise becomes much more useful commercially once you understand the client's situation well enough to connect that expertise to something they care about.
Rejection also feels different when you're selling your own services. A lawyer who is perfectly comfortable having a difficult legal conversation can still find it uncomfortable to ask for work or follow up on a proposal. Avoiding that discomfort doesn't remove the commercial requirement, particularly once building a practice becomes part of the job.
The answer is practice rather than personality transplantation.
Your business development time is limited, so indiscriminate networking is expensive.
Start by deciding who you can genuinely help and which relationships deserve your attention. Think about the problems you are particularly well placed to solve, the clients you would like more of and the people who could introduce or expose your expertise to those clients.
Then consider where those people actually are.
That could lead you to an industry event, but it might equally lead to a carefully chosen LinkedIn connection, an introduction from an existing contact or a conversation with somebody you already know.
The activity follows the target. Starting with "I need to do more networking" isn’t the right logic.
The rainmaker with the largest contacts list doesn't automatically have the strongest practice.
A smaller number of well-chosen relationships gives you the opportunity to understand people properly, remain useful and follow up with some intelligence. It also makes business development more manageable when client work gets busy.
Before adding another event to your diary, ask what you want the event to produce. If you can't identify the people or types of people you would benefit from knowing, there may be a better use of the time.
Lawyers are trained to identify legal problems. Business development requires you to understand the context around the legal problem as well.
Suppose a prospective client tells you they need help with a particular transaction.
A perfectly reasonable question might be:
"Tell me what you need?"
You will probably get useful information about the work. But compare it with:
"Why is this important to you?"
Now the conversation can go somewhere different.
The answer might reveal an objective, a risk, an internal pressure, a commercial decision or something else entirely. You won't know until you ask.
That information changes the conversation because you're no longer working only with a description of the legal task. You're beginning to understand what solving it could allow the client to do.
Better questions aren't a clever script for manipulating a prospect towards an instruction. Their purpose is to help you understand.
That requires curiosity.
If somebody gives you an interesting answer, resist the urge to immediately turn it into an opportunity to demonstrate your expertise. Ask another question. Find out what sits behind the answer. Listen for the words and priorities the client uses rather than mentally preparing your next piece of advice.
Lawyers are paid for answers, which can make asking questions feel like the preliminary part of the conversation. In a good business-development conversation, the questions are doing serious work.
A productive BD conversation isn't a compressed pitch about your firm.
The client's position should come before your proposed solution.
PRECISION Selling™️, which we use at Legal Balance Institute, gives lawyers a structured way to approach consultative selling conversations. The underlying principle is straightforward: understand enough about the client and their situation before deciding what you should recommend.
Without that discipline, expertise can get in the way.
A prospective client mentions a problem that you have solved 30 times before. You recognise it immediately. You know the legal issues, the likely solution and exactly how your team could help. So you tell them.
The difficulty is that you may have diagnosed the legal problem without understanding the buying decision. What is the client trying to achieve? Why now? What happens if they don't act?
Your experience becomes more persuasive when the client can see its relevance to their circumstances.
Lawyers often assume that winning the work depends on proving how much they know.
Competence obviously counts. Nobody wants to instruct a lawyer who can't do the job. But a catalogue of credentials doesn't necessarily help a prospective client understand why you are the right lawyer for this particular job.
There is also a practical advantage to holding back. If you explain your solution before you have properly understood the problem, you are making assumptions. Better questions give you more information. More information allows you to make a more relevant recommendation. The conversation becomes less about presenting yourself and more about understanding whether and how you can help.
Lawyers commonly describe their services through expertise and activity.
"We have considerable experience in this area."
"We'll review the documents and advise you."
"We've acted on lots of transactions like this."
Those statements might give you credibility, but they don't necessarily explain the value of choosing you.
Value sits with the client. Your job is to connect what you do with the outcome, decision, risk or problem they have told you about.
Imagine the client has explained that uncertainty around a particular issue is holding up a commercial decision. Describing your legal research process tells them what you will do. Explaining how your advice will give the management team enough clarity to make that decision connects your expertise to the reason they sought advice in the first place.
The difference is subtle but commercially useful.
Two firms pitching for the same work may both have excellent lawyers, relevant sector experience and an impressive list of credentials.
Repeating those credentials more enthusiastically doesn't necessarily give the client a better reason to choose one of them.
The earlier conversation gives you the raw material for communicating value. If you've asked good questions and listened properly, you know more about what the client is trying to accomplish. You can explain your recommendation in those terms.
That is one reason good business development can't be reduced to becoming better at pitching. The quality of what you say about your service depends heavily on what you learned before you started talking about it.
A good conversation can still produce absolutely nothing.
I have seen the consequences of poor follow-up very clearly with one client. They had more than 20 proposals showing as outstanding across an 18-month period. When we narrowed the review to the previous six months, there were still 14 proposals that had never been followed up.
Fourteen pieces of potential work were sitting there without a clear outcome.
We put a proper follow-up system in place. In the first three months of the client's financial year, they reached 47% of their financial target. By month seven, they had reached 107%.
I want to be careful with the causation here. Not all of that performance came from those outstanding proposals. A good proportion did, however, come from following up and closing proposals, whether the answer was win or lose.
There are two useful lessons in that example:
First, an outstanding proposal isn't a pipeline forever. At some point you need to find out whether there is an opportunity.
Second, following up isn't an administrative task sitting at the end of business development. It is part of selling.
"Let's keep in touch" isn't much of a next step because nobody knows what keeping in touch means.
A useful conversation will often give you a natural reason to continue it. You might agree to send something, make an introduction, arrange another conversation or come back to a particular issue.
Where there is no agreed action, look for a legitimate reason to contact the person again rather than manufacturing a generic check-in.
That might be something you have read that relates directly to your conversation. It might be a development in their sector. It might simply be something you promised to find out.
The purpose isn't to remind them that you exist. It is to make the next contact worth receiving.
Client work has deadlines. Business development usually doesn't.
That makes BD remarkably easy to postpone. You can have the best intentions on Monday and discover on Friday that urgent work has swallowed the week.
Trying to solve the problem by finding large, protected blocks of time can make it worse. If your BD routine only works when your diary is unusually kind to you, you haven't built a particularly useful routine.
I tell my clients to find the smallest worthwhile action they can take, even on a very busy day. It might take two minutes.
One example is sending five LinkedIn connection requests to carefully chosen people. I don't mean clicking "Connect" on five random profiles to hit a target. They could be prospective clients, potential referrers or industry specialists who might give you a decent platform to demonstrate your expertise.
Five considered requests are achievable when an hour of "doing BD" isn't.
Small actions also support one of our values at Legal Balance Institute: 1%s are everything. Improving business development behaviour doesn't require a heroic burst of activity followed by three weeks of silence. Small actions become commercially useful when they form habits you can sustain.
Another habit I recommend takes more work at the beginning but becomes very simple once it is set up.
Create meaningful client or contact segments in your CRM. Then, when you read something relevant to one of those groups, you already know who might genuinely appreciate seeing it.
Send the article or resource with a simple subject line such as "Saw this and thought of you". Add a couple of sentences explaining what caught your attention and ask for their view.
The segmentation is important. Sending everything to everyone isn't relationship development. Relevance is what gives you a credible reason to make contact.
That is part of the thinking behind CRM NERD™️. A CRM becomes useful for business development when it helps you decide who needs attention, what you know about them and what should happen next. Otherwise, it is a rather sophisticated place to store names.
Don't try to fix your entire approach to BD this week.
Choose a small number of relationships that are worth developing. Be specific about why each person is relevant and how you might genuinely be useful to them.
Then do something with that information. Start one useful conversation. Ask questions before reaching for your credentials. Find out why the issue you're discussing is important to the other person. Listen for the outcome or concern behind the immediate legal need.
Before the conversation ends, identify what should happen next.
Then follow up.
Record the next action in your CRM (or whatever system you actually use), and make sure there is a date attached to it. If the week becomes too busy for anything larger, take one of the two-minute actions that keeps the habit alive.
The aim isn't to create a week that looks impressively full of BD. It is to become slightly better at doing the things that create and progress worthwhile relationships.
Some lawyers will always enjoy networking more than others. Some will find it easier to walk into a room full of strangers. Some will be more comfortable posting publicly or picking up the phone.
None of those preferences determines whether you can become good at business development.
The skills underneath good BD can be practised: choosing the right people, asking better questions, listening, understanding what a client values, connecting your expertise to that value, progressing the relationship and following up consistently.
Most lawyers were never formally taught those skills. They were taught how to become technically good lawyers and, at some point, were expected to work out the commercial part for themselves.
You don't have to keep working it out through trial and error.
The BD Breakthrough Blueprint®️ gives lawyers a structured way to learn and practise how to sell legal services through consultative conversations, relationship-building, follow-up, objection handling and pipeline development.
If you want to develop the capabilities behind effective business development, rather than simply adding more BD activity to your diary, explore The BD Breakthrough Blueprint®️.