How Do Junior Partners Make The Business Development Leap?

When sidekick gets promoted to superhero:
How do junior partners make the business development leap?

One day, you’re a highly regarded senior associate, successfully fielding the steady and challenging flow of work that the working partners deposit on your desk. In fact, you do this work so well that you are granted the heady reward of partnership.

What follows is a flurry of announcements, congratulations and celebratory dinners. Once this initial rush is over, you may look at your desk and see that the steady stream of work you enjoyed as an associate has dwindled. The reality hits you right in the gut. Instead of being fed a steady and financially nutritious diet of new work, you are now expected to feed not only yourself, but eventually other associates as well. These days, your future at the firm often depends on it.

Where do you begin? Most law schools do not teach business development. At most law firms, associates are expected to keep their noses to the grindstone, cranking out large numbers of hours rather than engaging in the kind of non-billable activities that lead to new contacts and new business opportunities.

The attitudes and behaviors that made you successful in law school and successful as an associate are not the attitudes and behaviors that will help you develop your own book of business. What’s more, the “boot camp” culture of many law firms make it hard for most junior partners to admit their vulnerability and ask for help. As a result, the stellar sidekick languishes, becoming a less-than-super partner.

Faced with this phenomenon, many law firms contact outside business development coaches with the complaint that their junior partners are “not competent” – that they are not doing their share of new business development. Experienced partners seem to expect that junior partners will magically acquire the skills needed to be successful in this arena.

In many years of responding to these frantic calls, we have learned that junior partners are not incompetent – they are just lost. Virtually every young lawyer has the latent skills to become an excellent business developer, but most of them don’t have the slightest idea where to begin. At most law firms, there is no institutionalized system for helping junior partners develop the essential business development skills they will need to begin feeding themselves and others.

Some worried law firms bring in a business development trainer for a one-time, one-size-fits-all presentation on concepts and tactics. This is not enough. The firm that is serious about its future must embrace a business development mindset and institutionalize a business development system. This does not happen overnight. In almost all circumstances, it requires coaching at the outset to develop these concepts and tactics – and coaching down the road until they become second nature.

Business development is about the cultivation of relationships – “business intimacy” – and the active management of these relationships through a plan that includes personal branding, personal marketing, influencing with integrity and deepening relationships.

The first step is the development of a personal brand – located at the intersection of a junior partner’s passion, his or her competence, and the needs of the marketplace. Your personal brand is the focus point for your personal business plan – which includes the objectives, strategy and tactics that will make your personal brand a reality.

In the next step, you take your brand to market. This involves the disciplined employment of specific tactics that will enhance your visibility and credibility with quality contacts – existing as well as targeted. The “art” at this level is selecting tactics that match the comfort level of the individual attorney’s unique personality type.

In the third stage of your business development plan, you focus on influencing with integrity – converting contact inquiries into actual engagements. Two valuable tools at this stage are structured dialog (specific questions you can use to guide a prospective client toward an optimal – for both parties – decision) and the pipeline discipline (a process that helps you classify prospects and move them through the pipeline to a decision to buy).

The final activity in a customized business development plan focuses on converting one-time engagements into clients for life by deepening and broadening the services you provide. In addition, you want these clients to become advocates for your services. Achieving this elite status is the result of exceptional emotional intelligence skills and outstanding communication skills – both skill-sets that can be learned.

Junior partners are the future of the law firm. With focused business development coaching, they can usually generate enough new engagements within one year to pay for the firm’s investment in the program – successfully making the leap from sidekick to superhero.