Your Lawyers Are Stuck in the Consideration Phase
By Stijn van Oirschot ·
The strongest business development teams do not support partners. They out-know them. A look at the client buying journey, the pipeline most firms cannot see, and how influence is really earned.
Ask a law firm to describe its sales pipeline and two things tend to happen. First, a pause, because the firm does not really have one. Second, a fair question: why would the chief financial officer care anyway? Those two reactions, the missing pipeline and the indifference to it, explain why so much law firm business development feels busy without being commercial.
The firms pulling ahead have noticed something their peers have not. Their clients are moving through a buying journey whether the firm participates in it or not, and the team best placed to guide that journey is the one most firms treat as support staff.
Clients buy in stages, and most firms only show up at the end
Every client engagement has a journey behind it: a slow shift from unaware, to interested, to considering, to ready to instruct. Marketing and business development can map that journey and place the right touch point at each stage. Most firms do not. They appear at the very end, at the pitch, and wonder why the work feels like a coin toss.
It usually is close to a coin toss. Industry research has long suggested that only around one pitch in thirteen results in new work. A firm that arrives only at the pitch stage is competing on the slimmest possible odds, having skipped every earlier moment where the relationship was actually won or lost.
The consideration phase is where deals quietly stall
When a pursuit goes cold, the honest diagnosis is rarely that the firm was outpriced. More often the client became stuck in the consideration phase, unsure how to move forward, and nobody helped them across. A partner trained to dive straight into the legal substance will miss this entirely. A business developer who understands buying behaviour can see it, name it, and do something different.
That is a coaching role, and it is aimed at the lawyers as much as the clients. Helping a partner recognise that a prospect is stuck, and that repeating the same credentials will not unstick them, is one of the highest-value things a business development professional can do. It is also one of the least requested, because most teams are kept busy delivering things rather than diagnosing situations.
Influence is earned by out-knowing the room
Business development does not gain a seat at the table through a job title. It earns one by knowing more than the lawyers about the things that win work: how clients buy, what the market is doing, where the firm is strong, and which opportunities are worth the chase. Provide a knowledge base at the level of the lawyer or above it, and lawyers respect it instantly and want more. Provide order-taking, and the function stays where it started.
This is why the strongest firms are reshaping the team around influence rather than headcount. They hire the best people they can find for specific strategic roles, not the most people they can hire quickly. The most telling early appointment we see is a director of operations and transformation, a role that did not exist in most firms five years ago, because it signals that business development is being built as a commercial function, not a service desk.
Build the pipeline before you chase the pitch
Winning work is rarely a single event. Studies of the legal buying journey put the number of meaningful touch points before a new engagement in the low to mid teens. That is a dozen or more deliberate moments of contact, content, and conversation, each one nudging the client along. A firm that treats business development as pitch production will never assemble that sequence. A firm that treats it as pipeline will.
The work becomes intentional. Which clients are we trying to deepen? What is the next touch point for each, and who owns it? At the firms that do this well, almost every partner participates in a structured planning and targeting process, which is what turns a pile of good intentions into a pipeline the finance function can actually take seriously. (This is the strategic role we have argued business development should hold, rather than merely supporting it.)
Artificial intelligence has changed who can do the work
The ground has moved quickly. Not long ago, a minority of any business development team used artificial intelligence in their day-to-day work. Today it is the substantial majority. The tools have lowered the cost of research, drafting, and analysis to the point where a small, capable team can produce what used to require a large one. That makes the case for hiring for quality over quantity stronger, not weaker. The scarce resource is no longer hands. It is judgement.
Commercial judgement is the thing partners were never taught
All of this rests on a commercial instinct that most partners were never given the chance to develop. They were trained to be excellent lawyers, not to read a buying journey, weigh a pursuit, or decide where the firm should invest its limited attention. That instinct can be built, but it is built by doing, not by listening to a presentation about it. It is why we run The Law Firm Growth Game, a business simulation in which partners make real commercial decisions and watch the consequences unfold, so that the language of pipeline, investment, and return stops being abstract and starts being theirs.
The function that out-knows the firm will lead it
The future of law firm marketing and business development is not more output. It is more influence, earned by understanding the commercial picture better than anyone else in the building. The teams that get there will not be the ones waiting for requests. They will be the ones the partners cannot make a decision without.
If you want to build that kind of commercial capability into your partners and your business development team, book a conversation with us.
Common questions
What is sales enablement in a law firm?
Sales enablement is the practice of giving partners the insight, content, and process they need to win work at each stage of the client buying journey, rather than only producing a pitch at the end. It treats business development as a pipeline to be managed, not a series of one-off requests.
What is the legal buying journey?
It is the path a client travels from being unaware of a need, through interest and consideration, to instructing a firm. Research suggests a new engagement typically involves a dozen or more meaningful touch points along that path, most of which happen long before any pitch.
Why do most law firm pitches fail?
Industry research has long indicated that only around one pitch in thirteen wins. The most common reason is that the firm engages only at the pitch stage, having missed every earlier moment in the buying journey where the relationship is actually built.
How does a business development team gain influence with partners?
By knowing more than the lawyers about how clients buy and where the firm can win. When a team provides insight at or above the level of the lawyers, it earns respect and is invited into decisions. Order-taking keeps the team in a support role.
How is artificial intelligence changing law firm business development?
It has lowered the cost of research, drafting, and analysis so dramatically that small, skilled teams can do what once required large ones. The advantage now lies in judgement and strategy rather than sheer capacity.
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