Obviously, you can’t learn business development in a single afternoon. It’s a mindset, a set of habits—and a journey that ideally begins early in a lawyer’s career.

You can find below three practical strategies law firms can use to build momentum and nurture future rainmakers.

When it comes to training, you can’t just say “they will be happy” anymore. Law firm leaders—and even clients—are increasingly asking a tougher question: “What’s the ROI?”

You can find below some tips on how to use ROI for effectively promoting your favorite training - whether the audience is internal lawyers or external clients.

It doesn’t matter whether you're rolling out a BD session for your partners, a writing workshop for your juniors, or even offering a thought leadership session to clients, the success of any training hinges on one thing: engagement.

At last month’s Training Roundup, BD expert David Freeman shared practical insights that can help law firm trainers and L&D leaders gain traction with any audience. Here are three ideas that stood out:

Most law firms invest heavily in networking training, yet their lawyers struggle to turn connections into real business opportunities. In this article, we break down five common networking mistakes lawyers make—and practical steps to turn their professional circles into revenue-generating relationships.

Most lawyers struggle with networking events, not because they lack social skills, but because common psychological barriers get in the way.

For example, have you ever experienced the Spotlight Effect, where you feel that everyone is watching and judging you? (If so, you probably respond to this “spotlight” by either finding it difficult to start conversations or you over-compensate by talking way too much.)

In any event, as these barriers interfere with our ability to develop and nurture valuable relationships, it’s important to devise strategies for overcoming them. In this article, you will discover 5 tips to help you with your networking obstacles.

From first-year associates to senior partners, many lawyers feel like frauds.

It doesn’t help that we tend to be high-achieving perfectionists. Even worse, we’ve chosen a profession with an unbelievably demanding culture that can easily amplify our destructive thoughts.

In this post, you can read tips on how both individual lawyers and their firms can help address the challenges posed by impostor syndrome.

If you’ve found yourself in frustrating contract negotiations with foreign lawyers, read on for some tips about how to effectively handle such negotiations without losing your head. In particular, you will learn about:

• How to manage bizarre behavior and emotions in the conference room,

• How to respond to requests for suspicious provisions, and

• How to deal with overly-complex provisions from your counterparts.

Stefanie had it all. She was recently promoted to partner. She had a wonderful team of dedicated associates. And, the ranking agencies were describing her as some sort of up-and-coming überlawyer.

But then, things got weird...

Dear Slavic Colleagues,

Over the years, I’ve often been asked by Slavic lawyers to help with the problem of omitting articles in their writing. If you find an associate struggling with this issue, let me recommend some software solutions.

Read on for five tips on how to coach your associates to achieve meaningful improvement in their writing.

The Problem

Lawyers oftentimes torture clients by hiding their actions outside of verbs. For example:

Dear New Associate,

Let me begin by congratulating you for not only successfully escaping from law school but also for landing a job at your new law firm! You’ve worked hard to reach this stage, and I’m sure you would like to continue on your path of achieving excellent results.

To help you on your way, let me share with you some survival insights on how to use your writing as a tool for impressing your supervisors.

In this post, you will learn how to stand out in online meetings by (i) using your eyes to comfortably connect with your audience, (ii) leveraging the value of your facial mimicry to avoid sending mixed messages, and (iii) utilizing your upper body gestures to convey energy and confidence towards your audience.

In this article, you can learn about how to harness the power of Chat Gpt to define ambiguous legal terms precisely, avoiding potential disputes and ensuring clarity for all parties involved.

In our Precision Pitching course, the students learn to effectively pitch themselves in meetings with clients. Although our students are enthusiastic with our consultative approach to pitching, they frequently raise questions about how to actually get meetings with clients. Or, to be more blunt, they say the following:

Why would clients want to meet with lawyers? We tend to be boring and have little interesting to say.

If you find yourself facing the same problem, you can find below some tips on how to be interesting for clients.

Tom felt like his law firm was driving him crazy. Despite his attempts to make everyone happy, nobody was, including him.

His supervisor kept tearing up Tom’s contracts with a red pen to highlight all his stupid mistakes.  So, Tom tried to please his supervisor by slowing down and being more thorough.

But, his practice head kept warning him that he was spending too much time on his drafting and that this was causing the firm to lose money from write-offs. So, Tom tried to please his practice head by speeding things up.

But then, he got the red pen again. And then, he got the lectures about write-offs again. And now … you got the picture.

How can lawyers make their writing more sophisticated by taking advantage of the Apple Effect?

What can lawyers learn about selling their services from Alec Baldwin’s famous “brass balls” speech?

It’s bad enough that most lawyers hate the concept of networking. But, even worse, when we drag ourselves to sit through a networking event, we oftentimes fail to capture the value of such events by not following up effectively with our new contacts. (And, NO, sending a lazy Linkedin request to connect is not effective networking.)

In this post, you can read about how to use Chat Gpt to help you capture the value of your networking.

On November 16, we held our Profitable Pricing course. In this course, we encouraged lawyers to embrace Alternative Fee Arrangements (AFAs) not only to escape the downward pressure against billable rates but also to uncover cool projects with clients (e.g. becoming an outsourced legal department).

For your convenience, we’ve summarized some key takeaways - both from us as well as from our students.