Support solutions
Making business development work for law firms

‘Management twaddle’ might be the response of many partners to an upstart from a support department suggesting that there are different, and possibly better, ways to operate. But such recalcitrance to business-development efforts may undermine a firm’s ability to improve profitability and gain competitive advantage. Damian Greiff, head of business development at Berrymans Lace Mawer, explains why and how firms can use commercial principles to succeed.

The chargeable hour is still king. Despite many innovative suggestions from law firms for alternative methods of remuneration, it is clients’ conservatism that means that time is literally money. As the head of a support department, I realise that I am often asking partners to stop doing what makes the firm money. My purpose, of course, is to get them to do things that will ultimately make the firm even more money.

I am not sure that I succeed in this aim all the time. There will always be a core who regard marketing and business development with disdain and who for their own, often complex reasons, like the familiar surroundings of case work.

Perhaps a good place to start at is the partners’ viewpoint. Partners of a certain age will rightly say that they went to law school to train to be lawyers and after several years of practice they have now become good lawyers. Had they wanted to go into a career in sales they would have joined Currys or Dixons immediately after school and, anyway, sales is rather a sordid activity for a lawyer to get involved with. Added to that is the hard wiring operating at a very primal level in every legal brain: the chargeable hour is good, the non-chargeable bad. It is little surprise that many partners are somewhat reticent to get involved with an activity for which they have no training and which challenges the basic instinct to record chargeable time.

These are genuine challenges to overcome, but there are ways to go about disarming the objections.

We have been called the ‘me generation’, interested only in ourselves. Certainly in a work context we tend to do what will bring reward, recognition and advancement. For lawyers this is clearer than in many other walks of life. Hitting your billing targets brings reward and advancement. It is therefore perfectly understandable that anything that threatens a partner’s ability to meet the target will either be ignored or actively avoided. One answer lies in changing the targets. More firms are coming round to the idea that a partner’s role must be more than occupying a position at the top of the fee-earning tree.

By using an appraisal system based on a balanced-scorecard model, activities beyond fee earning are identified and, more importantly, recognised. Just what gets added will vary from firm to firm and person to person, but a generic example might look like figure one.

In such a role, fee earning accounts for less than a third. There is no refuge in the files. The management of the firm has outlined what it regards to be important in that partner’s performance. Positive reinforcement works in tandem with the sanctions for non-compliance to provide a strong stimulus for partners to act in the best interests of the firm.

It should also be pointed out that not everybody is temperamentally suited to business development and it is a common mistake to believe that everybody should be made to develop business just because that is what partners are supposed to do. For some, the thought of standing in front of relative strangers hawking their wares is terrifying enough to make them physically sick. They should not be derided for this as they are probably the same people who derive great satisfaction from reading through hundreds of pages to uncover an ancient statute or long-forgotten ruling that will save their clients millions. The strength of any partnership is the mix rather than uniformity of skills of the individual partners.

Lawyers are no different from many other professions and occupations in which people undertake university education to become proficient in their chosen discipline. After a number of years of successful progress, they are suddenly told that future career development now depends on their going out and building their own practice (somewhat curiously contradicting the mantra that clients belong to the firm, not an individual).

Just as they are beginning to become useful in their firm, successful people are diverted by something that is alien to their previous experience and, to top it off, they are abandoned with the cold comfort that previous generations have all trod the same path and that the only way to learn is to get out there and do it. I would like to say that this is a gross exaggeration but, for many partners, it is an all-too-familiar recollection. The far-sighted way of tackling the concerns of those new to business development is to develop a training programme that will mix formal training with on-the-job mentoring by those identified as being among the best in the firm when it comes to business development.

Training and more particularly continuing-professional development for partners is not as well established as it might be. Commercial companies have career paths and training programmes for their management cadre. Why is there no post-qualification programme leading to the equivalent of a ‘legal MBA’, which would be a requirement for those wishing to be part of a firm’s management team or, ultimately, senior partner?

Though I am sure you will be able to bring to mind exceptions, partners are for the most part intelligent and highly motivated people. To get them to embrace a new discipline, it is essential that they feel a sense of ownership – and therefore control – over what they are asked to do. Simply telling them to go after a list of prospects that have been identified as having the type of work the firm does is not going to motivate anyone. Worse still is the brief telling the poor unfortunate that he/she has been assigned to bring in a particular organisation that has resisted the overtures of the firm for the past decade but is now, mysteriously, ready for the taking.

Working with partners to identify what it is they offer (the proposition), and the types of organisation and market sectors that they know, should result in plans tailored to the skills and expertise of the partner, making it much more likely that there will be commitment to the programme. There is a great difference between commitment and involvement best summed up in what seem like the names of specific Chinese years. For instance, do you have a firm full of ‘pigs’ or ‘chickens’? You can tell by reference to the breakfast plate of bacon and egg that the pig was committed whereas the chicken was merely involved. You can probably recognise the type who is first to put up a hand in a public arena and announce a wish to be involved but then fails to make the initial or any subsequent meetings. By involving partners at an early stage you can go a long way to ensuring that you are working with pigs and not chickens.

Make sure that the plans you prepare with partners are realistic. Too often the temptation is to create an enormous list of activities along with dates by which it is all to be completed. Within weeks, partners find themselves falling behind the schedule, becoming disillusioned and sooner or later giving up. Unless there is to be a very drastic reduction in hours, business development will remain a part-time activity. It now has more importance by being on the scorecard rather than being a 5.30 and weekend activity. Realistic plans take into account the importance of small but regular milestones against which progress can be measured. This is the same approach to eating an elephant – the only way to do it is to cut it up into bite-size pieces.

Moving highly successful and ambitious people from one area in which they have excelled into a new area where they have to start from much lower levels of expertise and experience carries with it potential problems connected with failure or perceived failure. Business development is not a precise science. While it would be comforting to think that all business decisions are made on a rational basis and as the result of impartial evaluation, we know that human nature means that this is not so.

Business can be won or lost for the most bizarre reasons. One firm spent several fruitless years chasing a prospective client that they knew they could service better than the incumbent law firm. Eventually, and quite by accident, they discovered that the head of legal within that organisation was living with one of the partners from the retained law firm. Business developers need to be empowered with the ‘freedom to fail’. No-one is advocating a self-flagellating programme of failure but if you’re going to fail, then fail fast.

One of the ways of avoiding failure on a regular basis is to have a robust process of assessing the prospects of success. Too often, firms are added to tender lists to make up the numbers and ensure that procurement has been undertaken among a sufficiently large group to ensure that the buyer has genuine choice. This is a statutory requirement for government departments and local authorities and is increasingly being used as part of good governance requirements for commercial companies. What do you think your chances of success are as a ‘make weight’ compared with a position as the incumbent? Turning down opportunities to pitch can seem to be a cardinal sin for those eager to develop business. But so is wasting time and resource when you have little or no chance of success. I probably turn down two out of every three opportunities to pitch. Initially horrified, my partners now know that when I bring them an opportunity we have a good chance of success and approach their specific tasks as committed ‘pigs’.

Building a culture of action, implementation and adoption

It would be a very foolish head of a support department who would profess enough clout to be able to make partners change their behaviour. (Perhaps, after the legislative changes proposed in the Clementi review of legal services, this might become possible if support-department heads become full equity partners.) If a new culture is to be established, or an old one changed, it will only do so with leadership from the top of the firm. Senior management needs to be seen to be fully behind the firm’s business-development programme and making examples of any who do not fall into line. Tolerating non-compliance is a cancer that will eventually corrode even the best planned programmes.

While the threat of sanctions will always focus the attention and promote compliance, more positive reinforcement is also needed. Success should be shared by all and not just by the people directly involved. A sense of group achievement has a wonderfully motivational effect on those who might be finding the going tough. One way of spreading the good news is by asking the client to provide a debrief when you have won. Many people forget to do this and only attend post mortems to find out why they lost. Praise from a client is hardest won and longest remembered.

Action and implementation are good words that I recommend you use liberally in your presentations and pitch documents. (Compare ‘we would wish to offer a service whereby our marine-department members are available to you 24 hours a day’ with ‘our marine department is ready for action any time of day or night. Just call 020…’) But we all know that talk is cheap and action is expensive. Any new client will soon be able to judge if our promises when courting them are being delivered after appointment. It is the same with business development. Partners’ action plans are promises to themselves. How can we make them be true to themselves?

Plans that succeed generally have SMART objectives. SMART is not new and for many is now somewhat clichéd but it is still a highly useful tool for setting and meeting individual or firm-wide goals. SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timed. If an objective conforms to these five criteria then it stands a good chance of being accomplished. Writing SMART objectives is not easy. It is often more comfortable to have a rather vague general statement such as ‘we will try to see more influential people in the property market in the near future’. When called to account, it is easy to say we achieved the objective because we tried on several occasions to see people but we couldn’t get an appointment. A SMART objective would require ‘that we meet the in-house counsel of two of the four largest property companies in Singapore within the next six months’.

Being more proactive

If SMART is almost a cliché then ‘proactive’ is worse, especially when you hear that a certain firm has a proactive approach to the delivery of the incoming post. Setting aside any quibbles about the word, however, it is worth considering what proactive really means. As far as I am concerned it is the things that you do that set you apart from your competition and give prospects the confidence to appoint you for the first time.

Earlier in my career I spent a few years working for a research organisation. This has left me convinced of the benefits of research. The more you know about your prospect, the more authority your pitch will carry. This does not have to be bespoke commissioned research. There is a huge amount your information-services department can glean from a search on the internet: report and accounts, online trade press, an organisation’s own website, etc. The more you know the more you can start to sound like them playing back their own company-speak. More than just establishing rapport, it goes to show that you have made the effort to find out about them. Best of all is the chance to talk to senior people within the target organisation. It is a consistent finding in all research undertaken among those with the authority to appoint law firms that their biggest shortcoming is a failure to get to know the client’s business thoroughly. Being the exception to this general rule is what being proactive is all about.

Those firms that appear sympathetic to the clients’ legal needs probably do so because they understand the courtship cycle. Any appointment takes place according to the client’s timetable, not the firm’s. If the firm is unknown to the prospect then a period of warming up is required in which, through various marketing activities, the target gets to know a little more about the firm and its capabilities. At some point, the target may accept an invitation to a seminar covering his area of work. Still, the chance of work may be remote.

Only when the client is ready and your firm is sufficiently front of mind will you get the invitation to talk business. The first exchanges may not result in work but rather than purging the target from the database, the cycle needs to continue until the target is ready to talk again. In the meantime, being proactive is essential to keep you profile raised in this target’s consciousness.

Implicit in what has gone before is the need for patience. Any prospect feeling pressured by a supplier will start to retreat, so it is important to reward activity and not only results. A plan to manage prospects during fallow periods can be as important as a client-relationship-management plan to defend existing work and generate additional work from a current client.

CRM has been around for a while and many firms having invested heavily in CRM systems. For me, this misses the point. It is about building a relationship with the client. I do not want the key relationships to be between a client and a software programme. Nor does the client want to be the recipient of attention prompted by a system at pre-programmed intervals, disregarding other pressing issues of the day. CRM undertaken properly has to be the best chance of developing a proactive programme in which you are anticipating, identifying and satisfying clients’ needs profitably – which you might just recognise as the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s definition of marketing.

Herding cats?

It is often said that getting partners to do something is like herding cats. I have yet to determine categorically whether this is unfair to partners or cats. On balance, I think it must be partners because it is possible to get them committed, as long as you provide incentives, training, support, encouragement and reward. Like all human activity, what starts as unfamiliar and even mechanistic over time and through repetition becomes habit. The tricky bit is making sure that these are good habits.

Damian Greiff is head of business development at Berrymans Lace Mawer. He can be contacted at damian.greiff@blm-law.com