Time to wake the sleeping giant

This article was originally posted in The Briefing.

Mark McGowan, Senior Account Director at Nexl, explores why outdated approaches to business development are holding firms back, and what it takes to transform the CRM from a contact book into a true engine for client relationships and sustainable success.

Here's a question worth pondering: if your firm's CRM disappeared tomorrow, how many of your lawyers would notice?

For most law firms, the honest answer is uncomfortable. The CRM (that expensive, well-intentioned system gathering dust between IT and the BD team) has become one of the legal sector's most politely ignored investments. Partners avoid it, associates couldn't tell you their login details, and the BD team spends a disproportionate amount of time cajoling people into updating contact records that are already out of date.

Firms built around individual relationship heroes grow more slowly, churn clients more readily, and are structurally fragile when those individuals retire, defect, or simply have a bad year.

The address book with ambitions

Traditional CRM systems were built for a different world, one where sales teams needed a central place to store leads, log calls and track pipeline stages. That model works well when you're selling software or a product. It's considerably less effective when the 'product' is complex legal advice, the 'sales cycle' lasts years, and the relationship between lawyer and client is built on trust, discretion and mutual history rather than a sequence of touchpoints in a funnel.

Yet somehow, the legal sector adopted the same technology, bolted it onto a fundamentally different business model, and then expressed surprise when nobody used it.

The result is what researchers behind the Rethinking Rainmakers study aptly describe as "tech without traction." The report, commissioned by Nexl and produced in partnership with growth consultancy Camojee, draws on responses from over 200 professional services firms globally. Its conclusion is blunt: firms have the licenses but not the behavior, because the tool doesn't make the right action obvious, easy or relevant to how lawyers actually work.

Measurement blindness and its consequences

What makes this particularly striking is the scale of what firms are flying blind on. The research found that most law firms can't tell you their client churn rate, measure the return on their marketing investment, or say whether their lateral hires are paying off.

This is a strategic leadership problem, because you can't manage what you can't see. If your technology isn't showing you which client relationships are cooling, which cross-sell opportunities are sitting unrealized, or which partners are quietly losing their book of business to a competitor, then you're not running a growth strategy: you're running on hope and instinct.

To be fair, instinct has served many a rainmaker well. But the research is clear: firms built around individual relationship heroes grow more slowly, churn clients more readily, and are structurally fragile when those individuals retire, defect or simply have a bad year. The firms pulling ahead are those that have found a way to institutionalize what the great rainmakers do intuitively, and that requires more than a new piece of software.

Beyond the platform: building a growth system

This is where many technology conversations in legal go wrong. The answer to a bad CRM isn't a better platform: it's a fundamentally different approach to how business development is designed, enabled and executed across the firm.

High-performing firms are building growth systems, where business development is something every lawyer in the firm can participate in without it feeling like a distraction from the work they were hired to do. That means clear processes, shared accountability and technology that actively reduces friction rather than adding to it.

A growth platform is the engine of that system, pulling intelligence from emails, calendars and matter activity to surface the right action at the right moment. But the platform is only as effective as the system around it. At Nexl, we work with firms to build BD infrastructure and habits that make growth something every lawyer can contribute to, not just the natural rainmakers.

The leadership question

The Rethinking Rainmakers study identifies a pattern it calls "willing leaders, weak systems." This refers to firms where senior partners champion better business development in principle, but haven't connected strategic intent to the operational infrastructure needed to deliver it.

That gap is where growth stalls. BD and marketing leaders are well placed to close it, but the conversation needs to reach partnership level and be framed around growth rather than technology. The firms defining legal market leadership over the next decade are building growth engines now. So, the question worth putting to the table is whether your firm has infrastructure capable of building one too and, if not, what can you do to get there.

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