Law Firm Leadership

What Practice Group Leaders Need to Do Differently for BD

The practice group leader role carries significant BD responsibility that most firms never explicitly define. Here is what it actually requires and why most practice group leaders are not set up to deliver it.

10 min read

The practice group leader sits at the most important leverage point in law firm business development. They are close enough to individual attorneys to influence their daily behavior. They are senior enough to shape how marketing resources are deployed. They have enough practice area knowledge to identify the BD opportunities that are actually worth pursuing.

In most law firms, that leverage is mostly unused. Practice group leaders are selected for practice quality and client relationships, not for BD leadership capability. The role is defined around practice management. BD activity is expected but rarely defined, measured, or held to account. The result is that the most important BD multiplier in the firm is running at a fraction of its potential.

What the role actually requires

A practice group leader with a genuine BD mandate needs to do five things that most currently do not.

First, set the practice group's annual BD targets in writing and report against them to firm leadership quarterly. Not general goals about being more active in the market, but specific targets: number of new client relationships developed, revenue from cross-selling into existing firm clients, pipeline value from active BD conversations.

Second, maintain a current understanding of every attorney in the group's BD activity and provide specific coaching to those who are not progressing. This is not a performance management function. It is the same kind of coaching a practice group leader might provide on legal work product, applied to BD activity instead.

Third, maintain a monthly working relationship with the marketing department. The practice group leader should be the primary interface between the marketing team and the practice, briefing the marketing team on client situations that should inform content strategy, approving or redirecting marketing resources toward the highest-return opportunities, and providing feedback on what is and is not producing results.

Fourth, identify the two or three cross-practice cross-selling opportunities that are most worth pursuing within the current firm client base and actively facilitate those introductions rather than leaving them to the individual attorneys involved.

Fifth, communicate the practice group's BD narrative to the rest of the firm in a way that makes the group's market position and target client profile legible to attorneys outside the practice who might make referrals.

Why the role needs explicit redefinition

Telling a practice group leader that they should be doing BD is not the same as redefining the role to include BD accountability. Most practice group leaders hear the expectation and then continue to prioritize the things that are defined, measured, and consequential in their current role: practice quality, attorney retention, client satisfaction, billing.

BD accountability becomes real when it is built into the criteria for the practice group leadership role itself. When the managing partner's annual evaluation of a practice group leader includes a specific review of the practice group's BD performance, and when that review has consequences for continuation in the leadership role, practice group leaders make different choices about how they spend their time.

This is a structural change that requires managing partner commitment, not just a conversation with practice group leaders about doing more BD. The conversation without the structural change produces temporary effort and no lasting change.

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