Over the past months, I have found myself reflecting quite a lot on the conversations I have had with lawyers over the years about business development, pipeline, positioning and growth. Not from the outside looking in as a BD professional or consultant, but from the inside, living it myself every single day as a business owner across multiple businesses.
It has made me even more empathetic towards lawyers and professionals in law firms who are expected to contribute to growth, build relationships, create visibility, generate opportunities and convert work, often while also doing their day job.
Building pipeline is hard work.
Not conceptually because most people understand the theory. But operationally, emotionally and consistently, it is difficult. Every day requires effort. Every day requires visibility. Every day requires follow-up, conversations, research, relationship building, refinement and decision-making.
You cannot build meaningful pipeline if you do not know:
- Who you are for
- What problem you solve
- Why someone should choose you
- Where your audience actually spends time
- Whether there is genuine urgency behind their buying behaviour
That level of clarity matters enormously and I am most certainly not pretending I have this perfectly figured out either. When I look across the different businesses I am involved in, some had immediate clarity from day one. The audience was obvious and the pain point was visible and therefore the value proposition connected quickly.
Others have evolved more gradually. We are moving alongside the market, testing ideas, adjusting positioning, refining offerings, listening carefully to feedback and figuring out what genuinely resonates. That process takes time and sometimes longer than you expect (and it certainly feels like that, especially if you are as impatient as me).
That has probably been one of the biggest reminders for me personally: growth is rarely linear. Even in my consulting work, where things are going well, none of it happens by accident. Opportunities do not simply appear because you have experience or a network. There needs to be consistency behind it, there needs to be presence and there needs to be a deliberate effort to stay close to the market and understand what clients are struggling with today, not six months ago.
And perhaps most importantly, there needs to be intelligence: real intelligence and not just data sitting in systems, but actual understanding:
- What clients are prioritising
- What pressure they are under
- Where budgets are shifting
- What creates urgency
- Who influences decisions
- Where relationships already exist
- Why some opportunities move and others stall completely
The more I experience this firsthand as an entrepreneur, the more I understand why so many law firms still struggle with pipeline development despite having incredibly talented people. Because pipeline is not built through occasional activity but it is built through structured, consistent and intentional effort over time.
This is also where I increasingly believe the conversation around the business of law becomes so important.
A law firm is still a business. It may be a partnership and it may sell expertise rather than products, but many of the same commercial principles still apply:
- Market positioning
- Audience segmentation
- Buyer behaviour
- Relationship management
- Sales maturity
- Lead conversion
- Client experience
- Data intelligence
- Consistency of execution
Yet many lawyers were never truly taught how these things work together commercially. Not because they lack capability, but because historically the profession rewarded technical excellence first and commercial understanding second.
I am glad to see this is slowly changing now. Mostly because clients are more informed, competition is stronger, markets are noisier, attention is fragmented, buying behaviour is evolving quickly and of course, AI and technology are accelerating expectations around speed and value.
Which means firms can no longer rely purely on reputation and relationships alone.
They need clearer positioning, they need stronger pipeline discipline, they need better intelligence, they need more intentional growth strategies and they need people across the firm to understand how commercial growth actually happens.
Ironically, becoming an entrepreneur myself has probably made me a better advisor to lawyers and law firms than ever before because now I am not just teaching these principles but I am living them myself.