All this BD training. Why aren’t lawyers doing more BD?

You’ve brought in the experts. You’ve offered the workshops. Lawyers have completed their BD plans. So why aren’t they doing more BD?

Here’s the shift: business development isn’t only something lawyers learn. It’s something they have to become capable of doing. Knowing what to do, knowing how to do it, and actually doing it are three different problems—and most training solves the first one.

We’ll run familiar BD advice through the BD Advice “Stress Test” to see what it really asks of a lawyer: what we’re teaching, what we’re leaving them to work out alone, and what turns the learning into something they keep doing. You’ll leave with the “Stress Test” to use on any advice, from any source, including mine.

Grow your network. Join the committee. Write the article. Speak at the conference. Get your name out there. It’s familiar advice, and most of it is sound.

But have you ever wondered how much of that activity actually turns into business? Some of what we encourage lawyers to do is less effective than we’ve assumed—and a few shifts in how they do it change the return entirely.

We’ll look at where a lawyer chooses to focus, how they get known by the right people rather than more people, and what moves a relationship from friendly to useful. The difference between being busy with BD and actually building towards business usually comes down to a handful of decisions, not more hours.

Pitch training may be the most overrated way to help lawyers win more work.

Not because the pitch doesn’t matter, but because it’s one moment in a process that starts long before the meeting and isn’t finished when the pitch ends. Teach only the pitch and the rest is left to chance. Lawyers have to be able to navigate five different conversations: Opportunity. Discovery. Solution. Budget. Objections.

We’ll take each one apart—what makes it work, where lawyers lose the work without realizing it, and why a brilliant pitch still loses to a firm that understood the problem better. Then what changes when you stop teaching lawyers to pitch and start teaching them to sell.

Congratulations! Your lawyers have completed their BD plans. Targets identified. Activities listed. Forms submitted.

Now what? Ten coffees, three conferences and six articles later, the plan has been honored and nobody can say what moved. One-size templates, the annual ritual and the activity counts all make a plan look productive without asking it to produce anything.

So we’ll build a different one. It starts from the relationships and opportunities actually in front of a lawyer, identifies desired progress and related steps, and gets revisited each quarter. You’ll leave with the BD Progress Plan format to take back to your lawyers.

Because the real value of a BD plan isn’t in completing it. It’s in what the lawyer does with it.