It's September. How much of March is still happening?

For the last few years, you've heard from me on Mondays and Fridays with a short tip and one action to take that week. It’s been wonderful to hear so much encouraging feedback. As a result, I wanted to take another step towards continuing to offer you value.

This is something a little different.

Mondays will continue to stay the same, but the weeks will alternate. One week, the tip you're used to: one idea, one action small enough to finish between meetings. The next week, this: The Rainmaker Engine, a piece on what I'm actually seeing inside firms: where business development breaks down, what's working with the lawyers I coach, and what has finally started to change after thirty years of watching the same problem repeat.

Fewer emails, more substance. The tips give you one thing to do this week. This is for the bigger question underneath them: why so little of what firms invest in ever gets acted on, and what has to be built around a lawyer for it to stick.

Below is the first issue. If it lands, feel free to forward along to colleagues at your firm.

Your firm ran a business development retreat in March.

I would bet it was good. The material was well crafted, the facilitator knew what they were doing, and the lawyers in the room nodded at the right moments. Some of them wrote things down.

It's September now, and the follow-up question after 6 months should be: 

What percentage of what was triggered in that room is still happening?

I have been doing this work for thirty years, and the answer to that question has stayed stubbornly the same across most of the 260+ firms I’ve engaged with. A large firm may run a hundred training programs in a year inside its own walls, but in most cases, follow-through drops off dramatically once the program ends.

And the reason why this is such a common occurrence is what I’d like to spend some time on today, because what I believe is quite the opposite of what many leaders in our industry say. 

It is not the lawyers' fault.

To blame a lawyer for not doing what we told them to do outside the billable hour is not an accurate reflection of reality about how human beings work, and especially about how busy lawyers work. We ask one person to be the deliverer of the work, the finder of the work, and the minder of the work, all at once, and then we act surprised when the finding quietly loses to the delivering. It is an extraordinarily difficult mix, so perhaps the problem isn’t motivation at all. Perhaps it’s what happens after we ask them to act.

Firms have training systems, and many have gotten quite good at those.

What almost nobody has is an action system.

Training builds the appropriate muscle. Something else entirely has to make the muscle move on a Tuesday in June when three matters are on fire and the BD plan is in a folder somebody last opened in March.

I think about this as an exoskeleton. The training gives a lawyer the capability. The exoskeleton is the structure you wrap around them afterward so the capability actually gets used: the weekly reminder, the buddy who asks, the one step small enough that somebody can say yes to it. That is scaffolding around knowledge they already have.

For years, I approached this the way most of us did. I trained practice group leaders to reinforce the behaviors, and I encouraged the lawyers I trained and coached to create their own reminder systems. Both made perfect sense. But over time, I saw the limitation: even highly motivated lawyers and leaders get consumed by the demands of the day. The issue wasn’t whether they cared or knew what to do. They needed a structure that made follow-through easier and more consistent.

The issue is not new. I have been describing this gap for most of my career, usually to a room that nodded and then went back to investing in more training.

What is new is that technology has finally caught up with the pain. It is now genuinely possible to take a plan, break it into steps small enough that a slammed partner can finish one between meetings, and push those steps at them week after week without a human being having to remember to do it. That was not just a few years ago. It is true now.

Which means the question worth asking at your next budget conversation has changed. It is no longer whether you want business development training. Your firm has bought that, more than once, and been disappointed.

The question now is whether this is the year the training you buy actually gets implemented.

Two things worth checking before your next program

1. Ask what the follow-through mechanism is, in writing, before you sign anything. Not the workbook. Not the portal login. The actual weekly mechanism that reaches a lawyer who has forgotten the program exists.

2. Look at what you are measuring. Most firms measure success: matters opened, revenue originated, the scoreboard at year-end. Those numbers lag, and there is nothing anyone can do about them on a Thursday. Measure progress instead. Conversations had. Lunches booked. Follow-ups sent. What gets measured gets managed, and what gets managed gets done, but only if the thing you are measuring is something a person can actually do this week.

I am not telling you your March retreat was a waste. It almost certainly was not. The content is almost never the problem.

The problem is that it ended without an exoskeleton to drive it into action.

A partner I coached this morning told me she had no time for business development. Not “not much time.” None. Two closings this week and managing a deal that has gone sideways.

So we did not talk about a plan. We looked for one thing small enough to say yes to, and she found it in about four minutes: one email to a client she had not spoken to since the spring.

What she said at the end is why I love this work:

That is the entire game. One step forward each week. That’s it.

Pick the last training program your firm paid for. If I asked three lawyers who attended what mechanism they had in place to remind them to act on what came from the training, what would they say?

And a harder one: what should that mechanism be?

Thanks,

David Freeman, J.D.