Mary Anne Heckbert on being a "numbers person" in legal BD

Mary Anne Heckbert started her career as a proposal writer before working her way up as a team leader and into senior BD management roles. As a self-professed Excel nerd, numbers have run through her work from the start, shaping how she thinks about pricing, profitability, and client experience. Today, as Director of Business Development at McMillan, Mary Anne brings a data lens to legal growth and compassionate approach to leading teams.

How did you start working in legal BD?

I started in the legal sector fresh out of university and worked with a sole practitioner who needed an office manager/legal assistant/law clerk. From there I moved to BLG and when they had an opening on the BD team for a proposal coordinator, I took it and loved it. I ended up becoming a proposal writer quickly thereafter, then the team manager, before moving into senior BD management roles.

Was there a moment early on that shaped how you approach your work today?

There was this moment with my first boss, Urszula Dorosz, who I learned so much from. I had nine proposals on the go, which was a lot for a junior writer. I remember I was feeling overwhelmed, and I gave Ursula draft to review, and she sent me a message that said, “I have some notes, come on by.” I go to her office, and I said something along the lines of, “Can it just be good enough?” And she said, “Yeah, it can.” The way she said it made me realize, yes, it can be good enough, but is that what you want? In that moment, she gave me the grace to say, today it can be enough, but not every day. I’ve taken that message with me in my own professional development and growth. Sometimes, yes, good enough is enough, but not all the time. It was such a defining moment for me.

Have you taken the same approach to managing people?

Yeah, I have. I oversee the BD team, which includes proposals as well as directories, awards, experience management and BD support for practice and sector groups. Some people want to do good work today and keep doing that same good work for the rest of their career, and some people want to constantly grow, learn, and do more. I think it's really important to meet people where they're at and recognize that not every day is necessarily about growth and learning. Some days it's okay to be good enough. Definitely not all the time, because stagnancy is not what we're after, but compassion is important.

How does approaching growth with a value and profitability lens change your focus compared to a more traditional BD background?

I'm very much a numbers person. I was doing an actuarial sciences degree before starting in legal. Most lawyers don’t want to think about the numbers. They want to do good work, build client relationships, and be seen as a trusted advisor. I see myself as filling this gap. Lawyers will say, “I'm not a numbers person.” Often, they are, but they don't want to think about their client relationships in terms of numbers.

You've spent years close to how firms price and scope work. What are clients pushing hardest on right now when it comes to fees and value, and how should firms be responding?

We just did an International Bar Association (IBA) webinar, and a lot of it was focused on this topic: are clients price sensitive or value sensitive? Are they more focused on reducing costs or increasing value? Part of the commentary I'm seeing is that clients are responding to this market the same way that we are. We're all navigating this new world together, working out what the introduction of AI means for the services we deliver.

I read this article the other day that said purchasing legal services is still seen as a differentiated good; it's not a commodity yet. There are obviously commoditized service offerings, like startup packages, but legal is still a service that is highly personalized and focused on individual objectives.

As AI takes on more routine elements of legal work, what do you think becomes the differentiator for firms competing for work?

There are obviously table stakes to winning work. You need a reasonable approach, experience, expertise, and breadth of team. But when you go to differentiate yourself in the market, it's really about addressing that human element: what does this client ultimately want? A client can ask AI and get a reasonable answer, but does that take into consideration the client’s priorities, internal dynamics, and risk tolerance? Does that answer connect the question to the business outcomes or anticipate potential challenges the way a trusted advisor does?

Legal advice is not always a simple formula. You can pull out a precedent and say, this is how we'll approach it, but there’s more around it. There are negotiations, reading the room, and creative thinking, and it's so much bigger than what AI can do.

I was reading another article about how, as AI creates more (sometimes fake) information, more value will be derived from human judgment and connection. An AI system can give a fair response from what you feed into it, but for a lot of legal work, you need more than that. You need a person on the other end of the phone with you asking, “Have you thought about this?” The answer may be no, but now you've sparked an idea, and we can engage in a simultaneous creative process.

That connects to another insight from our IBA webinar. Someone was talking about how eventually the proposal reader system on the client end is going to tap into proposal software on the law-firm end, and so fundamentally, the proposal itself is going to come down to the pitch in the room.

How is AI changing your day-to-day or your team's day-to-day?

I love using Excel, but there are some things now where AI is better than Excel. There's so much AI can do that is so helpful, especially when it comes to “boring stuff.” I will say, however, that it can't help someone who doesn't know what they're doing. You have to have a baseline understanding to be able to do good things with it. That is why I'm focused on training our junior team members. We're not going to serve ourselves well ten years from now if I don't teach them or help them do it from scratch the first time.

Is there a piece of conventional wisdom about how firms price and win work that you would push back on?

One small thing I definitely push back on is rounded numbers. Lawyers like to have cleanliness in numbers, and it does look better aesthetically if you bill $14,000 versus $14,037. But why are we rounding all of our numbers? Either the client is losing out because we're rounding up numbers that should be lower, or we're doing it for an artificial reason. If it's a budget, that's one thing, but if not, I want clients to get every penny of value out of us.

What advice would you give to someone new to law firms?

There's this challenge in law firms. Lawyers are very driven and very smart, and they know what they want. Part of the reason they have us, as internal teams, is that we have our own expertise. But the challenge in legal is to be both assertive and deferential simultaneously. A lot of the people I've seen succeed in legal marketing have the ability to do both. You need to prove your worth, and at the same time support the lawyers and acknowledge that they know their clients and the law.  

One of the consultants I worked many years ago, Ann Lee Gibson, did a lot of training with my team. She presented to us on the professional credibility sequence from Powerful Professionals by Murray Hiebert. It has five steps that we, as strategic partners, need to take to become trusted advisors. We often think of our job as helping lawyers be trusted advisors, and sometimes we forget that we need to be trusted advisors to the lawyers.

The first step is, do you have the expertise to help me? Maybe that's in pricing, legal project management, or awards or directories. The second step is, do you know what I do? Have you read the bulletins and insights to build your knowledge? Then you have to tap into the way someone works. Get to know their personalities and care about them as people, just like we tell the lawyers to do with their clients.

It's a lot of work to go through all five steps, but it's valuable in the end. When a lawyer says, “You are my go-to", that is the best compliment we could get.