Business Development Should Not Depend on Coincidence
By Stijn van Oirschot ยท
Most firms wait for work to arrive by coincidence. The ones that grow give someone the unglamorous job of opening doors, absorbing the rejection, and following up.
In most law firms, work arrives by coincidence. A partner runs into an old contact, a referral lands, a client mentions a new matter over lunch. It is a pleasant way to grow until you realise it is not really growth at all. It is luck, dressed up as a strategy.
The firms that have stopped relying on luck have done something most of their peers find uncomfortable. They have admitted that selling is a job, that the job needs an owner, and that the owner does not have to be a partner.
Why selling still makes lawyers uncomfortable
Law firms do not have classic sales departments that own revenue. The sales engine is embedded in the partnership and supported by the wider organisation, which sounds collegiate but usually means it is nobody's responsibility in particular. Partners are brilliant at the work and understandably wary of anything that smells like selling. So the outreach that would build a pipeline simply does not happen, and the firm tells itself that this is how professional services work.
It is not. Selling in a law firm is not cold pressure. It is relationship building done deliberately rather than by accident, and the discomfort around selling is precisely what stops firms from doing it.
Someone has to own the outreach
The unlock is to give the unglamorous part of the work a dedicated owner: a business development professional whose job is to open doors, start conversations, and follow up with discipline. This is not a marketing role that puts material out into the world and hopes. It is a role that turns activity into conversations and conversations into relationships.
There is a subtle advantage that firms underestimate. A dedicated business developer can absorb the rejection so the partner never has to. When a prospect says no to a business development manager, the relationship between the partner and that contact is untouched. The partner is protected, the door stays open, and the work of reaching out keeps happening. In many cases it is better for the partner to be reached on their behalf than to make the approach themselves.
A no is rarely a no. It is a not yet.
The reason partners avoid outreach is the fear of hearing no. The reframe that changes everything is simple: a no is hardly ever a rejection. It is a not yet. Not this moment, or not this topic, or not this need. Treat every approach as the start of a long relationship rather than a transaction with a pass or fail, and rejection loses its sting. The contact who is not ready today is exactly the contact worth staying close to, because the need will come.
Start with the low-hanging fruit
None of this requires a cold list bought from a database. The richest source of opportunity is already inside the firm, sitting in the partners' own networks. A useful exercise: take a single partner's professional network, find the twenty contacts who are general counsel or sit close to legal buying decisions, and hand that back as a focused target list for the month. Almost every partner has warm relationships they have never thought to develop commercially.
From there the division of labour becomes natural. The partner approaches the contacts they feel comfortable approaching, and asks the business developer to reach out to the ones they would rather not. The work gets done, the relationships get warmer, and nobody has to pretend to be a salesperson they are not.
Outreach without data cannot defend itself
The first question any investment in business development will face is the obvious one: what will it deliver? Without data, that question ends the conversation. With it, the conversation changes. A firm that knows its network, tracks its conversations, and can show what its outreach has produced can answer the challenge directly and ask for more. This is the real case for a customer relationship management system in a law firm. It is not the software. It is the ability to prove that deliberate business development works, so that it keeps being funded. (The harder part is rarely the system itself, a point we have made about the firm's wider stack.)
Structure helps too, and it does not need to be elaborate. A strategic plan flows into practice group plans, which flow into individual actions. Even executing a fraction of that plan beats having no plan at all, because a fraction of something deliberate will always outperform a great deal of coincidence.
From client to customer
Underneath the practicalities sits a mindset shift that the best firms are already making. For a long time the word "client" has carried a quiet assumption that the relationship is one of deference, that the lawyer is consulted and the work simply arrives. A firm that starts to think in terms of customers, people whose business has to be earned, kept, and grown, behaves differently. It listens harder, follows up faster, and never assumes the next instruction is owed to it.
That commercial instinct is something partners can develop. It is the thinking we put leaders through in The Law Firm Growth Game, where running a firm for a day makes the link between effort, relationship, and revenue impossible to ignore. The discomfort with selling tends to fade once people have felt, in a simulation, what happens to a firm that waits for work to come to it.
The work is unglamorous. That is why it pays.
Firms do not lose business because their partners cannot sell. They lose it because nobody owns the steady, unglamorous work of opening doors, absorbing the rejection, and following up. Give that work an owner and a little structure, and growth stops being a happy accident.
If you want to build a business development engine that does not depend on luck, book a conversation with us.
Common questions
Should a law firm have a dedicated sales or business development role?
Yes. When outreach belongs to everyone it belongs to no one. A dedicated business development professional who owns the work of opening doors and following up turns growth from a series of coincidences into a repeatable process.
Why do partners avoid business development?
Usually the fear of rejection. Reframing a no as a not yet, and letting a business developer absorb the initial approach, removes most of that fear and protects the partner's relationships.
How should a law firm start outbound business development?
Start with the warm network already inside the firm. Mine a partner's own contacts for the people close to legal buying decisions, build a short target list, and split the outreach between the partner and a dedicated business developer.
Why does a law firm need a CRM for business development?
Because business development that cannot be measured cannot be defended. A system that tracks the network and the results lets the firm prove what its outreach delivers and justify continued investment.
Is outbound selling appropriate for a law firm?
Yes, when it is understood as deliberate relationship building rather than cold pressure. The goal is to start and nurture relationships over time, not to push a transaction.
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