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Lawyers Don't Need More Business Development Ideas
- Kelly Caldwell
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
By Kelly Caldwell
Most of the lawyers I coach don't have a problem generating ideas relating to business development. And let's face it — this isn't rocket science. Stay in touch with clients. Be more active on LinkedIn. Follow up with potential referral sources or prospects you meet at events. Build up your sphere of influence. Reconnect with people you haven't spoken to in a while. Write an article. Attend an event. Book a coffee catch-up.
Yes, there are all kinds of great ways to engage in business development, and coming up with strategies that work isn't the hard part. The hard part is doing any of those things intentionally and consistently — while also practising law.
In the course of coaching conversations, I hear some version of this routinely: I'll be able to focus more time on BD when things at work calm down.
It's a reasonable thing to say, but it's also mostly untrue, because things rarely calm down for long. Client work is urgent and business development usually isn't, so when the two compete for the same hour, BD loses. Often, when a quieter stretch shows up, someone has the time to notice that their pipeline looks thin. Then there's a mad scramble — a few coffees get booked, a LinkedIn post goes up, maybe an article even gets started. But, once work picks back up the whole pattern repeats.
When things calm down isn't a strategy. It's a trap.
Doing More is Rarely the Answer
When lawyers get serious about BD, the instinct is often to add something. Post more. Go to new events. Join an association. Start a newsletter. Sometimes that's the right call, but more often it isn't. Usually, it just adds activity to a calendar that was already full.
In most cases, I encourage the lawyers I coach to do the opposite: make your plan smaller. What are you actually trying to accomplish? Which relationships matter most? Where's the real opportunity, and what can you actually sustain — not on a light week, but on any week. Trust me — two or three things done consistently will beat twenty-five things sitting on a plan, every time.
Smaller, in practice, is often smaller than lawyers expect. Some of the most effective BD habits I've built with clients take five minutes a day — a single check-in message, one note logged after a call, one LinkedIn comment left with intention. Five minutes may not feel like “doing BD” – but it is. And it survives a busy week; loftier plans do not.
At the risk of de-bunking the entire concept of the rainmaker-lawyer, I’ll just tell you what I see. The lawyers who excel at BD generally are not innately better at it, and they don’t typically spend more time on BD than anyone else. More typically, what they have is a process that keeps their pipeline moving without them reinventing the wheel constantly. That process varies — for some, it's focusing on a short list of priority relationships, others adhere to a standing block of time for networking and prospecting, and others put time and emphasis on visibility habits. What they have, in other words, is a BD system.
Business Development Systems That Work
There are so many tools and apps and platforms out there for business development. Honestly, from my experience, the best BD systems are not flashy or feature-laden – they’re simple, intuitive, and easy to maintain. They fit naturally into the way you already work, in the environment you're already in, rather than creating another layer of administration.
Let's assume your firm lives in Microsoft. Whatever your BD system is, it really shouldn't depend on you remembering to open separate apps that have nothing to do with the rest of your workday and aren't integrated into your tech stack. You're attached at the hip to your Outlook calendar? Great — use that for follow-up reminders.
I'm a big fan of learning about the tools that my clients are actively using. Once we figure out what they're already using routinely, we explore ways to pull BD activities into that same system. From my experience, this is often better than introducing a whole new tool.
AI is quickly becoming part of that same conversation. Not as another platform to learn, but as a way to lighten the parts of BD that lawyers tend to let slide — capturing what came out of a call before it's forgotten, sorting who actually needs a follow-up this week versus next quarter, turning a rough idea into a first draft of an article, or simply flagging that a relationship's gone quiet longer than it should have. Used well, it's less a new BD activity and more a way of making the existing ones easier to keep up with.
The same principle applies to the activities themselves. If you hate networking events, don’t build a strategy that depends on attending two of them every month. If you enjoy writing, make writing do more of the work. If you're a natural connector, lean into introductions and relationships. Lean into your strengths and interests, because there is no ‘right way’ to do business development – but to succeed in it, you’ll need to carve out ‘your way.’
A good business development system should:
Feel natural. It should work around the way you build relationships and communicate.
Be simple. The more steps involved, the less likely you are to keep doing it when you're busy.
Live where you work. Use the technology, people, and processes already around you wherever possible.
Reduce the need to remember. Calendar blocks, reminders, and recurring tasks should prompt the action rather than relying on you to keep BD somewhere in the back of your brain.
Survive a busy week. If the whole thing falls apart during a trial, closing, or other intense stretch, it's probably too complicated.
The goal isn't to build the perfect BD machine. Trust me: that doesn't even exist. The goal is to remove as much friction as possible between knowing what you want to do and actually doing it.
Business development can have a long feedback loop, which is exactly why it's easy to deprioritize. The coffee you have today might produce nothing for a year or more. An article might lead to a call eight months later. A relationship you've kept up quietly for five years might turn into your biggest client with no warning. Skip it for a day and nothing happens. Skip it for six months and you notice.
The upside works the same way, just slower. A good follow-up, a useful introduction, one solid piece of writing, one real conversation with a client about what else is going on in their business — none of it feels like much on its own. It adds up anyway.
Build It Like a Practice Leader
There's one more test worth applying to any BD system: does it live anywhere other than your head?
A lot of lawyers build genuinely good habits, but they build them as personal habits, not as systems. The relationships, the follow-up cadence, the sense of who needs attention and when, all of it sits with one person. That works fine right up until it doesn't: you get busier, you bring on a junior, you finally get an assistant who could take some of this off your plate — and none of it is delegable, because none of it was ever written down anywhere but your memory. If it lives in your brain and your brain alone, it is a habit - not a system. Systems can be delegated; habits cannot.
Thinking like a practice leader means building the system so someone else could run parts of it. A junior can send the follow-up if the trigger and the message live somewhere shared. An assistant can manage the calendar blocks if they know what's supposed to go in them. That's not about doing less BD yourself — it's about making sure your BD doesn't have a ceiling that's exactly the height of your own bandwidth.
The Goal Isn't to Do More
My job isn't to hand lawyers more ideas — they almost always have plenty of great ideas. Often, the help they need involves figuring out where they actually want to grow, deciding what matters enough to protect, and building enough structure that the work keeps happening without a monthly burst of guilt-driven effort.
The best business development plan isn't the most ambitious one. It's the one that's still standing after a bad week.
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