Lawyers Don’t Need More Business Development: They Need a Plan That Fits (Minis with Megan)

A lot of lawyers hear business development, business development coaching, and assume I'm just telling lawyers to post more on LinkedIn or schedule more coffee meetings, and we obviously will talk about those things too.

But a lot of the times we spend time talking about why people feel like they don't have the capacity, and we uncover that they don't have the systems, they don't have the internal support to do business development consistently.

When you meet with your business development team, if you work in a big firm, they most often are not going to ask you about your billable hour requirement.

We do.

One of the things I want to make sure that is you are hitting your hours.

And how do we make sure that you are essentially getting paid first from the firm? That might mean developing an internal networking plan so that you can get more work from inside.

Maybe it's even just a simple bio revision.

I spent a lot of time talking about how updating your bio is not the most important thing, and I stand firmly behind that.

However, if there is work that you want to be doing and you don't mention it anywhere, it's not on your LinkedIn, it's not on your bio, you haven't written content about it, but you do a particular niche kind of work, you have to ensure that you're updating those pieces of content.

That's kind of an easy way to ensure that you are hitting your billable requirement 'cause then people can find you internally and externally.

I often sit down and also talk about how their origination credit works.

Is it worth it for them right now to go and chase brand new work, or is it better for them to collaborate across the firm? And sometimes that looks different depending on how senior you are, how junior you are, how many hours you have left, if the firm restructured their compensation package.

And all of that fits into the plan going forward on how you specifically are going to do business development.

That way you can be more strategic.

A lot of the times people are coming to us and saying, "I don't really know where to start," and that makes perfect sense, and we need to figure out, well, what are the mechanisms, what are the levers that you need to pull to figure out what that strategic plan is? I can make you a beautiful plan, but if it's not gonna get you paid, probably isn't the best plan.

Also depends on where you are financially for that moment, right? So if you are saying, "I really just need to make sure I'm hitting billable hours, and it doesn't really matter right now if I'm bringing in brand new work because I'm on partner path and I need to make sure that that minimum is hit," then we're gonna develop a plan for how you're going to network internally inside the firm so that people know that you exist, people know you have capacity.

We want to make sure that you're hitting all of those things.

A lot of lawyers hear business development, business development coaching, and assume I'm just telling lawyers to post more on LinkedIn or schedule more coffee meetings, and we obviously will talk about those things too.

But a lot of the times we spend time talking about why people feel like they don't have the capacity, and we uncover that they don't have the systems, they don't have the internal support to do business development consistently.

When you meet with your business development team, if you work in a big firm, they most often are not going to ask you about your billable hour requirement.

We do.

One of the things I want to make sure that is you are hitting your hours.

And how do we make sure that you are essentially getting paid first from the firm? That might mean developing an internal networking plan so that you can get more work from inside.

Maybe it's even just a simple bio revision.

I spent a lot of time talking about how updating your bio is not the most important thing, and I stand firmly behind that.

However, if there is work that you want to be doing and you don't mention it anywhere, it's not on your LinkedIn, it's not on your bio, you haven't written content about it, but you do a particular niche kind of work, you have to ensure that you're updating those pieces of content.

That's kind of an easy way to ensure that you are hitting your billable requirement 'cause then people can find you internally and externally.

I often sit down and also talk about how their origination credit works.

Is it worth it for them right now to go and chase brand new work, or is it better for them to collaborate across the firm? And sometimes that looks different depending on how senior you are, how junior you are, how many hours you have left, if the firm restructured their compensation package.

And all of that fits into the plan going forward on how you specifically are going to do business development.

That way you can be more strategic.

A lot of the times people are coming to us and saying, "I don't really know where to start," and that makes perfect sense, and we need to figure out, well, what are the mechanisms, what are the levers that you need to pull to figure out what that strategic plan is? I can make you a beautiful plan, but if it's not gonna get you paid, probably isn't the best plan.

Also depends on where you are financially for that moment, right? So if you are saying, "I really just need to make sure I'm hitting billable hours, and it doesn't really matter right now if I'm bringing in brand new work because I'm on partner path and I need to make sure that that minimum is hit," then we're gonna develop a plan for how you're going to network internally inside the firm so that people know that you exist, people know you have capacity.

We want to make sure that you're hitting all of those things.