What to Look for in Partner BD Training: A Buyer's Guide for Law Firms

Law firms spend years teaching lawyers how to become better lawyers. Then partnership arrives and, alongside the technical work, leadership and management responsibilities, there is another expectation: bring in work.

Some new partners are well prepared for that part of the job. They have spent years building relationships, developing a network and creating opportunities. Others have had far less exposure to business development. They may have strong client relationships but little experience of winning new clients. They may be comfortable presenting but hate networking. They may know plenty of people but have no reliable way of following up with them.

Yet firms often put these partners into the same BD programme because they have one thing in common: they were promoted at roughly the same time.

In my experience, that is one of the biggest mistakes firms make when developing new partners.

Effective partner BD training starts by understanding what each lawyer can already do, what they avoid, where their confidence sits and what their practice requires. It then needs to teach practical work-winning skills and create enough practice, coaching and accountability for those skills to be used when everyone gets back to client work.

If you're evaluating business development training for partners, I would look at four things:

Look for training that starts with each partner's existing capabilities, teaches how legal work is actually won, reinforces learning through coaching and accountability, and helps the firm measure behavioural and pipeline progress—not just attendance or immediate revenue.

Here is what each of those things looks like in practice.

1. Does the training start with the partner?

A cohort of newly promoted partners isn't necessarily a cohort of people with the same BD needs.

One partner may already have an excellent network and several active opportunities but struggle to turn those opportunities into instructions. Another may be very good at developing existing client relationships but have almost no external network. Someone else may understand what they ought to be doing but lack the confidence to start a commercial conversation or ask directly for the work.

Training designed around an assumed starting point risks being too basic for some people and leaving gaps for others. It can also assume that every successful partner should develop business in roughly the same way.

Successful business developers can look very different from one another.

Some lawyers are comfortable in a room full of people they don't know. Others are much better building relationships one-to-one. Some can develop their reputation through speaking and content. Others have strong existing client relationships that could produce more opportunities if they learned to have better commercial conversations.

Partners still need a broad range of work-winning skills. Personalisation has to sit alongside the requirements of the role. A partner who dislikes following up still needs to follow up.

The aim is to develop each lawyer's confidence and capability in a way that works for them, while addressing the gaps that could limit their ability to win work.

A provider therefore needs some way of understanding what the partners already do, where their work comes from, which activities they find difficult, what opportunities they are trying to develop and where their confidence drops.

Without that understanding, personalisation amounts to little more than using everybody's first name during the workshop.

2. Does it teach how legal work is actually won?

A list of BD topics isn't the same thing as a business development method. Partners need to understand how those activities connect.

They need to decide which markets, organisations and people they want to develop and where realistic opportunities are likely to come from. Without that focus, BD can produce plenty of activity with little commercial direction.

They also need to build and develop professional relationships. Networking may form part of that, but relationship-building extends well beyond attending events. Lawyers need to be able to start conversations, remain useful to people they want to know better and create sensible reasons to stay in contact.

When a relationship develops into a possible opportunity, the skills change again.

Lawyers are trained to provide answers. In a prospective-client conversation, that strength can work against them if they start demonstrating expertise before they properly understand what the client is trying to achieve.

Good selling in legal services is consultative. The lawyer needs to ask questions, listen properly and understand the client's situation, desired outcome and concerns before deciding what to recommend. They need to be able to discuss their expertise without turning the conversation into a pitch, deal with objections and ask for the work when the time is right.

Follow-up is part of the same process. A promising conversation has little commercial value if nobody does anything with it. Partners need a manageable way to keep track of relationships, opportunities and commitments, decide the next action and take it. A CRM can support that behaviour; maintaining the relationship remains the lawyer's job.

Presentations and pitches have their place too. Legal expertise alone doesn't guarantee that a lawyer will communicate an idea clearly or make a persuasive case for why the client should instruct them.

Whatever terminology a training provider uses, its approach should connect these activities. How does a partner move from identifying the people they want to work with to building the relationship, recognising an opportunity, having the commercial conversation and progressing it towards an instruction?

3. What happens when the training finishes?

I've seen partners go through conventional BD training, learn useful things and then struggle with implementation. There isn't much follow-up. There isn't much coaching afterwards, including group coaching. Nobody is really holding them accountable for applying what they learned.

Client work has a built-in system of accountability. There is a deadline, a transaction, a hearing, a client waiting for advice or a colleague who needs something. If the work isn't done, somebody notices.

Business development often works differently. The lunch you intended to arrange can wait. The contact you meant to follow up with isn't going to complain that you haven't done it. Nobody chases you because you haven't spent an hour thinking about your target market.

Technical work therefore has a habit of winning.

A partner can leave training knowing exactly what to do and still find that very little changes. The knowledge has to compete with work that is urgent, familiar and already surrounded by accountability.

I've seen partners apply much more of what they learned when coaching and reinforcement continue after the training and they know somebody is going to ask what they did, what happened and what they're doing next.

That accountability can come through individual coaching, group coaching or an internal process run by the firm. Regularly returning to application is the important part. Partners need opportunities to use the skills on real relationships and opportunities, discuss what happened and decide what they will do next.

Coaching also gives firms something a post-training feedback form cannot: visibility into whether people are actually applying what they learned.

Greater application can lead to changed BD behaviour. Changed behaviour can create opportunities and build pipeline. Some of those opportunities may eventually become instructions and revenue.

Legal sales cycles can take months, and plenty of factors beyond training influence whether a client eventually instructs. A credible provider should be wary of promising a fixed or immediate revenue return from a training programme. I'd also be cautious about anyone promising a specific revenue return without understanding your partners, pipeline, clients or sales cycle.

The firm can still look for evidence of progress long before the revenue appears.

4. Will the firm support the behaviour it has paid to develop?

The provider can create the conditions for practice and reinforcement during a programme. The firm determines much of what happens afterwards.

If a firm tells new partners that business development is part of their role but pays little attention to what they are doing, rarely discusses their pipelines and provides no accountability after the programme, urgent client work has a considerable advantage.

A BD plan that works only when a partner has a quiet week isn't much use in legal practice. There will be busy weeks. Partners need an approach they can maintain around client responsibilities and return to when a particularly demanding period knocks the plan off course.

Firm leaders also need to think about the signals they send. Asking partners to invest in relationships while every internal conversation concentrates on today's chargeable work creates competing priorities. If the firm wants partners to develop work, business development needs to remain part of the management conversation after the trainer has gone home.

Firms can run group coaching internally. Practice leaders can discuss BD activity and pipeline. Partners can hold each other accountable. BD teams can support the process. The firm needs to decide who owns the follow-up, because otherwise it is very easy to lose once client demands reassert themselves.

A good provider should be prepared to discuss the firm's role as well as its own. Even excellent training will struggle to produce consistent behaviour if the working environment repeatedly pulls partners in the opposite direction.

Don't start by measuring revenue

Revenue is an important measure of successful business development. It sits a long way downstream from a training session.

Suppose you train a new partner this month. Before that training can contribute to revenue, the partner has to apply something they learned. Their behaviour has to change. They need to develop relationships, have conversations, identify or progress opportunities and move some of those opportunities through the pipeline. Only then might an instruction appear.

Asking immediately how much revenue the training produced skips most of the process you're trying to develop.

Start closer to the behaviour. Are partners applying what they learned? Are they following up more consistently, having better commercial conversations, developing target relationships and progressing genuine opportunities?

Then look at the pipeline. Are opportunities being created? Are existing opportunities moving? Over a suitable period, instructions and revenue can tell you more about the commercial result.

The progression looks something like this:

learning → application → changed BD behaviour → opportunities and pipeline → instructions and revenue

Training is only one influence on that progression. Looking at the earlier stages gives the firm evidence of whether partners are using what they were taught without pretending that every eventual instruction can be attributed to the programme.

Questions to ask a prospective BD training provider

A course outline will tell you what a provider intends to cover. The buying conversation should tell you how it expects behaviour to change.

Useful questions include:

• How will you establish the current BD experience, behaviour and confidence of our partners?
• How will the training adapt to different starting points within the group?
• What should our partners be able to do differently after working with you?
• How does your approach reflect the way legal and professional services are sold?
• How will participants apply the training to real clients, prospects and opportunities?
• What happens between training sessions and after the formal programme ends?
• What coaching, group coaching or reinforcement is available?
• Who will hold participants accountable for applying what they learn?
• What should the firm do internally to support the programme?
• How should we measure changes in behaviour before instructions and revenue appear?
• How will the approach work when partners are busy with client work?

Listen for specific answers. “We tailor everything to the client” tells you very little unless the provider can explain what it looks at, what it changes as a result and how those decisions affect the programme.

I would be equally cautious about a provider that can describe an excellent workshop in detail but has little to say about the following three months.

Developing rainmakers rather than depending on them

Some partners will always take naturally to business development. They start building relationships early, experiment, work out what gets results and become increasingly good at winning work.

Law firms can easily end up depending on those people.

Firms can take a more deliberate approach. If winning work is part of the partner role, they can identify the capabilities their partners need, teach those skills, give people opportunities to practise and create enough reinforcement and accountability for new behaviour to take hold.

That requires more thought than booking a workshop. It also means the firm's ability to develop rainmakers becomes less dependent on which partners happen to work BD out for themselves.

How Legal Balance Institute can help

Our approach combines mindset, practical selling, relationship development, CRM, networking and presentation skills, supported by coaching and reinforcement. Within that approach we use LBi methodologies including PRECISION Selling™️, MIRACLE Mindset™️, CRM NERD™️, Pain-Free Presentations™️ and Nimble Networking™️.

Looking for BD development for a partner cohort or practice group? Talk to us about your firm's objectives, the lawyers involved and the skills and behaviours you want to develop.

Looking to develop your own BD skills? Explore The BD Breakthrough Blueprint®️.