Be more focused on lawyer business development. Don’t get caught up in endless cycles of planning. Take small actions, even imperfect ones.
Key Takeaways
- Embrace Imperfect Action: Perfectionism is vital for legal work product, but it paralyzes business development. Calculated risk-taking and action must precede perfect clarity.
- Fire Bullets Before Cannonballs: Avoid burning all your resources on unverified, massive marketing campaigns. Test your strategies using low-cost, low-risk micro-experiments to calibrate your aim before scaling.
- Action Drives Real-World Progress: Over-planning functions as a form of procrastination. True market feedback can only be gained by executing strategies and refining your approach based on real-world results.
Most lawyers, regardless of their level of experience, should be more focused on lawyer client development. Having your own clients is important for many reasons. At most firms, having a book of business (or at least demonstrating a strong ability to develop one) is a prerequisite to making partner. When you originate client work it increases your compensation. You enhance your ability to move laterally. Most importantly, having your own clients allows you to have greater autonomy over your career and personal life because you’re not as reliant on others for work.
Having your own clients is not easy. It creates a whole new set of pressures and responsibilities. When you own the client relationship, you own the ultimate responsibility to produce great work and provide great client service to maintain the relationship. When something goes wrong, you own the responsibility to fix it.
But in a choice between having or not having a book of business, having clients offers more options and provides more benefits.
Make Progress Through Imperfect Action
Most lawyers are meticulous, detail-oriented, and analytical. Their “Type A” perfectionism serves them well in the practice of law, but it’s often a hindrance when it comes to business development.
While the consequences of being imperfect in your legal work product can be harsh, “imperfection” is something you have to embrace to market and build your practice. You must take risks, go out on limbs, and take action without perfect knowledge of the outcome.
When you’re practicing law, your job is to de-risk situations for your client. When you’re building a practice, you must act entrepreneurially and take calculated risks on behalf of yourself.
That’s not to say that planning is not important. It’s critical to determine your direction before you start taking action. In an ideal world, lawyers setting out to build a practice would get ready (cast a vision), aim (set a goal and craft a plan), and fire (take action). In the real world, too many lawyers spend so much time aiming that they never fire at the target. They plan endlessly and never actually initiate meaningful lawyer client development activities.
Successful People Have a Bias Toward Action
Successful people across domains have a clear idea of what they want in mind before they start taking action, but their tolerance for excessive planning is low. They have a bias toward action. They use the feedback they receive to review and refine what they’ll do next.
They view their plan as dynamic and subject to change based on the results of their actions, rather than set in stone. In today’s fast-moving legal marketplace—where hybrid work structures and automated legal tech are standard practice—if you believe your plan must be perfect before you can take action, you will quickly be left behind.
The same principle applies whether you’re building a legal practice, a startup business, or trying to take flight for the first time in human history.
Here’s a Lesson From the Wright Brothers
When the Wright brothers set out to build a plane, they faced stiff competition and seemingly insurmountable odds. Among their competitors was Samuel Pierpont Langley, who was well-connected with leaders in business and government. He was awarded a $50,000 grant from the War Department. He assembled a talented team that had access to technology and resources. The Wright brothers, on the other hand, were working with a ragtag team out of a small bicycle shop in North Carolina.
The Wright brothers ultimately won the race to build a working plane because they emphasized action over planning. Unlike their competitors, who would spend enormous amounts of time and sums of money planning test flights, the Wright brothers tested frequently. After a failed flight, they would go back to their workshop, make tweaks, and test the plane again. Their competitors worked mostly in their heads. The Wright brothers took action and eventually took to the skies. Instead of endlessly aiming, they fired over and over, adjusting their approach along the way.
The Wright brothers succeeded because they applied lessons learned from taking action. Their well-financed, well-connected competitors failed because they tried to eliminate risk by creating a more perfect plan.
Fire Bullets Before Cannonballs
Best-selling author and renowned business strategist Jim Collins urges businesses to prioritize action over perpetual planning. In his book Great by Choice, Collins explains that businesses (like people) have limited time and resources. He introduces the strategy to Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs, using the analogy of a hostile vessel bearing down on your ship.
If you panic and fire a massive cannonball right away, you’ll likely miss because you haven’t dialed in your aim—and worse, your gunpowder is completely gone.
However, if you fire a small bullet first, you might still miss, but you use very little resource. You can fire another, and another, calibrating your aim with each successive shot. Once you hit the target, you can confidently fire your big cannonball where it counts.
Experiment and Refine
As you set out to market your practice and build sustainable lawyer client development habits, don’t get caught up in endless cycles of planning. Conversely, when you do take action, don’t go all-in on an approach without doing some experimenting first. Take small actions, even imperfect ones, and assess the results. You’ll learn from your successes and, yes, your failures, and be able to refine your plan for the next set of actions you take.
If you’re the type of person who can’t stop “aiming,” try a “ready, fire, aim!” approach instead.
Attorney Business Development FAQ
You don’t need an entire open afternoon; you just need 15 minutes a day. The trap most lawyers fall into is thinking that business development requires grand, time-consuming gestures. Instead, treat it like an administrative habit. Send one quick message on LinkedIn, check in on a former client, or share a relevant update with a referral source while having your morning coffee. By breaking it down into tiny, manageable “bullets” rather than waiting for a “cannonball” window of time, you build momentum without disrupting your billable targets. For more advice on navigating this balance, read Developing a ‘What’s Next’ Mindset Can Help You Build Business.
In legal service procurement, the devil your prospect knows is often less scary than the unknown friction of onboarding a new firm. To break this inertia, you must lower the barrier to entry. Don’t try to pitch for their entire legal portfolio right away. Offer to take on a single, discrete project or an overflow file to demonstrate your capabilities with minimal risk to them. Furthermore, make the logistical transition effortless by proactively mapping out how your firm handles document transfers and tech alignment to ensure no disruptions to their business continuity. For a deeper breakdown of this challenge, see Overcoming Client Inertia: The Real Reason You Aren’t Closing New Business.
Reframe “sales” as “service.” As a lawyer, your natural instinct is to solve problems and protect your clients. Shift your marketing activities to match that mindset. Instead of boasting about your credentials, focus entirely on educational thought leadership. Write short, practical articles tackling specific industry pain points, host collaborative virtual roundtables, or share helpful regulatory updates with your network. When you lead with value and position yourself as a helpful guide rather than a vendor, client development becomes an organic byproduct of your expertise.
The bridge from a transactional file to a lifetime client lies in exceptional client experience and structured off-boarding. When a matter concludes, do not let the relationship go cold. Send a formal closing letter that clarifies ongoing responsibilities, but pair it with a feedback discussion. Ask what went well, identify future operational vulnerabilities they might face, and establish a clear communication cadence for regular follow-up. When you demonstrate that you care about their business outside of an active billing window, you organically transform an isolated legal matter into an ongoing partnership.
Related: “What’s Holding You Back? Building Your Book of Business Through Imperfect Action“
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