When today’s lawyers entered the legal profession, especially the older generation, most probably envisaged that they would spend their days advising clients on important business or personal matters, achieving a high degree of respect that comes from a career in the professions, and earning a good living. Few, I suspect, recognised that they would have to become skilled at business development. However, in today’s highly competitive legal markets, developing business development skills – the ability to manage and grow existing clients, as well as bring in new ones – is essential if lawyers want to be successful. In fact, today’s lawyers will never make partner in their firm unless they are good at business development, regardless of how technically brilliant they are as a lawyer.
In the past, when the legal market was booming, work came flooding into the firm or was brought in by a few “rainmakers”. Clients, who had instructed the firm for years, were handed down from the senior partners to their junior colleagues as the former approached retirement. Most lawyers in the firm never had to worry about where the next instruction was coming from, only how to get all the work done given the constraints of a 24-hour day.
