How to train lawyers to become confident business developers

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Most lawyers already have the makings of strong business developers. They research thoroughly, build persuasive arguments, and handle objections as part of their daily work. As AI takes on more of the work that once belonged to junior lawyers, firms need to help lawyers apply those skills to winning and growing client work from the start of their careers.

We invited Darryl Cross, CEO of TerraLex, Jessica Vanto, Director of Professional Development at Seward & Kissel, and Ivan Ivanovitch, Client & Markets Advisor at Ambition, to share how firms can build modern BD training programs with Steven Ongenaet, VP of Client Services & EMEA Managing Director at Nexl.

Use AI as training wheels

AI is now part of lawyers’ daily work, and Jessica is clear about where its limits sit today. “There is the all-important rule of physics in law that lawyers have to be right,” she says. “AI is not yet at the point where lawyers can rely on it for legal advice. Everything still needs to be checked.”

For now, she sees AI as most useful in the work that surrounds legal practice. “It’s more helpful in administrative tasks, like how to scale your impact in the marketplace, how to get your voice out, how to echo your profile throughout the industry.”

AI comes up at every meeting with Darryl’s member firms. “It’s the number one topic that all of our member firms want to talk about, whether it’s managing partners, member firms, or young associates, and they’re all looking at it from a different angle.”

He sees big potential for using AI tools to support business development. His team has built AI agents for clients that monitor industry news and suggest questions lawyers can raise at their next client meeting.

“That’s a great tool in and of itself, but it also trains lawyers how to use AI,” says Darryl. “It’s kind of like a set of training wheels. They get to learn AI through the process of doing something that doesn’t involve their work. I’m heavily pushing that side instead of saying change the way you practice law and be happy about it, because they’re not going to be.”

Lawyers already have the skills

Darryl has spent about 30 years helping law firms grow and has seen how the stigma around sales has persisted. “In my first role, when I was very young and very naive, I was delivering sales training and using the word sales. Someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘We don’t say that here.’”

That discomfort is still common. Nexl’s Rethinking Rainmakers research, produced with Camojee, found that 31% of professional services firms view the word “sales” negatively.

Ivan is confident the skills can be taught. “I’m very optimistic when it comes to teaching and coaching for business development, and I do believe that every professional has the potential to become a rainmaker,” he says.

For Darryl, the challenge lies in how lawyers have been trained to think. “Most lawyers have been trained for precedent and being error-free,” he says. “The mentality of a 30% probability of winning a client is diametrically opposed to that.”

His answer is to connect business development to work lawyers already do well. “The discovery you do for a case, that’s like discovery you do to learn about a client’s business needs.”

“If I was hiring a sales team, and I was presented with a highly educated, hardworking candidate who loves doing discovery and research, makes good arguments, and overcomes objections, I would take them. And that’s almost every lawyer we talk to,” says Darryl. “The skills are there. You just have to switch the point of view.”

Grow confidence through coaching

Ivan compares business development to fitness. “Business development and marketing efforts in a law firm are very similar to nutrition and fitness. Pretty much everybody knows what needs to be done, but not everybody does it,” he says.

Jessica, who is a certified coach, sees the same gap in her work. “You can give lawyers a roadmap and specific plan for doing business development and then have a curious outcome where they don’t really execute on it,” she says. “Perhaps they’re connecting the marketing plan with sales, and that’s not why they got into law. That’s not what drives their practice and their passion around their profession.”

Coaching helps lawyers work through that resistance. “Coaching interventions can really help somebody uncover and reframe the way they’re thinking about the act of putting their practice out there, trying to develop business, and converting existing relationships into a business relationship,” says Jessica.

Ivan has found that support matters most for lawyers who fear rejection or embarrassment. “Many of them were fairly introverted in my experience, and it took quite a bit of encouragement. But then the results were incredible,” he says. “Once they reached out to the client and found a receptive audience, that gave them the confidence to continue engaging in that.”

His advice for lawyers who find business development uncomfortable is to start with a personal connection. “When you introduce the human element and talk to clients as people, and establish a personal relationship, even going for coffee or lunch without any particular agenda, I find that lawyers were really curious to stretch themselves in that way,” he says.

Jessica has seen the same shift happen when lawyers can see their colleagues making progress. “Every individual wants to be a part of the collective. So, if you notice that the collective is moving, and you’re not part of that, it can be incredibly motivating to plug in more,” she says. “Lawyers will overcome their skepticism and change their mindset pretty quickly if they know that everybody’s swimming in one direction and they’re not following.”

Focus on key relationships

For firms with small teams and limited budgets, the panel agreed that the best place to start is with the relationships lawyers already have.

Ivan’s framework gets lawyers to look at their top five existing clients and consider how to deepen those relationships, then list the five clients they most want to work with over the next year, and finally identify three to five connectors, such as alumni or business contacts, who can help raise their profile.

Darryl uses a similar model. “There are 15 people that’ll make or break your year. It’s five clients, five prospective clients that look like them, and five referral sources,” he says.  

He suggests planning around work lawyers have done in the past. “Capability is not the same as probability. Those are very different things,” says Darryl. “If they look back three years, who did they do work for? Base your entire plan around that.” The same thinking applies to qualifying new opportunities. “Just because someone is alive and has money does not qualify them as a possible client of ours.”

Ivan points out that most lawyers are further along than they think. “If you’re a practicing lawyer, chances are you have at least five to ten clients who already love you because they keep giving you work.”

Build BD into every career stage

Jessica thinks firms should start this work early in a lawyer’s career. “By the time you’re a fourth- or fifth-year associate, you have a sufficient amount of expertise to start writing, speaking, getting out there, at least to be at a conference and shaking hands.”

Fear of investing in associates who may leave the firm shouldn’t hold you back. “Those are people that you should be investing in because they’ll eventually send work back. It’s all virtuous,” says Jessica.

She recommends a yearly self-evaluation for every lawyer. “Never underestimate the impact of having someone do a self-evaluation year on year,” she says. “Get them to think about what they did to expand their practice, their network, how are they building themselves?”

As lawyers become more senior, the expectations should become more formal. “At the counsel level, I’ve often seen it connected to compensation,” says Jessica. “The partners should have clear expectations. All the lawyers coming up behind them are going to be looking to them for accountability signals, and so they should be building it into their leadership and management as well.”

Darryl suggests a simple exercise for senior associates, who are often highly skilled at research. “They’re already really good at doing research all day long. Get them to study the industries and look for business signals, so then they start thinking like a client. It’ll allow them to spot expansion opportunities and knock on someone’s door and say, ‘Hey, something’s going on with this client or one of our client’s competitors. We should probably go talk to them about it,’” he says. “That is one skill we could teach that could transform a law firm in five years.”

He also wants lawyers to change how they open client conversations. “Firms have to stop what I call ‘showing clients their baby pictures,’” says Darryl. “I don’t want to hear about when your firm was founded and how many offices it has. Clients will nod and be polite, but they don’t care. They want to talk about their stuff, and then we’ll get to your stuff at the end.”

Scale with structure and support

Building BD into every stage of a lawyer’s career means delivering training across the whole firm, and for Jessica, that starts with treating each participant as an individual. “I often say it’s like scaling the bespoke,” she says. “You’ve got to be prepared to think of every lawyer in a program as an individual, even if you’re a 2,000-lawyer firm.”

Darryl sees scale as the hardest part of BD training. “Let’s say your firm has 1,000 lawyers, and you’re working with 20 at a time in depth for six months. It’d take 20 years to get to all of them at that pace, and by then all the people you started with will have forgotten everything,” he says. “One of the biggest opponents of scale is the atrophy of skills. You just never get ahead. You’re always catching up.” His approach pairs in-depth work with a small group alongside short, regular training sessions for everyone else.  

Ivan has seen scale work through formal programs for priority clients. In these programs, lawyers plan 12 to 24 months ahead and anticipate the regulatory, economic, and geopolitical issues likely to affect each client and its industry. “I found that lawyers were incredibly curious intellectually, and they love having structure and guidance, and the plans make it feasible for them to execute,” he says.

Firms are also looking beyond lawyers for help. Ivan has seen more firms hiring client-facing BD leaders with deep industry experience. “It does not make sense for somebody who bills $2,000 an hour to be spending their time doing client meetings or pitches and proposals. You need the right people to do it,” he says. The best candidates bring a strong commercial focus. “They have to speak the language and think like clients.”

Measure proficiency

Revenue is the obvious measure of BD training, but also the hardest to demonstrate. Jessica recommends bringing data into training from the start. “You should be tracking all the data points you can and trying to connect them to new clients or more work.”

Darryl thinks it’s important to set realistic expectations. “It’s unfair to say I went to this training session, I got no business out of it, therefore, it’s not worth my time. It doesn’t work that way,” he says.

He suggests looking at skill proficiency as a metric of success and compares lawyers’ BD skills to flying. “Some are fighter pilots, some are airline pilots, but there’s one skill they all have to have: land the plane.” For lawyers, the minimum standard is a client conversation. “Have a conversation with the client, not embarrass yourself, come back with some good ideas. Get everybody on that level,” says Darryl. “Then, let’s raise that to the next level.”

Progress needs clear steps along the way. “It’s like running a marathon. If you only give them the outcome, 26 miles, and say, ‘See you in 12 weeks,’ most of them aren’t going to do very well,” he says. His advice is to set milestones and put lawyers into small groups of peers. “Don’t make it a contest, make it team-based, get people in teams of three so they self-manage each other, almost like running buddies.”

Those groups only work when lawyers are at a similar stage. “Don’t take someone that has no experience or no book of business and pair them with an Olympic-level athlete type rainmaker,” says Darryl.

Trust and collaboration will set firms apart

Looking ahead, Ivan expects firms that build a client-centric culture with lasting infrastructure to be more profitable. That culture needs support that holds up over a decade or more, so that it’s not at the whims of new leadership. “When you follow up consistently and it’s embedded into the culture, most likely they’ll see higher profitability in the future,” he says.

Darryl believes the speed of collaboration will decide which firms win. “The future is the ability to collaborate proactively and at speed. That will determine who wins and who loses,” he says. “We all basically have the exact same thing to offer. We have smart lawyers that work hard, we’re full service, we care, we’re dedicated to our clients. None of that is different.”

For Jessica, the human side of practice will matter more as technology takes on more of the work. “It’s a human business. The lawyer-client relationship can still be sacred, and it’s grounded in trust. It’s human-to-human assessment of risk, managing through a crisis, and having a trusted advisor at your side,” she says. “You can have all the right answers to a legal question, but the ability to look another human being in the eye and debate it, make a decision, step forward, knowing that you have someone at your side is fundamental to our profession.”

She wants firms to keep those qualities at the center of how they develop lawyers. “The human side of practicing law is a critical skill that will outperform a machine any day,” says Jessica. “So, I’m very hopeful.”