Pouring Resources Into Business Development and Coaching Provides Mixed Results

The largest law firms are pouring substantial resources into business development training, cultivating leadership skills and professional coaching, according to a new report, and they're fielding teams of marketing professionals and lawyers to court and maintain clients.

But the report found that the efforts — and the results — have been uneven, especially when it comes to developing leadership and building effective client teams.

The study, conducted between July and November 2019 and featuring responses from 65 professional development leaders representing 40% of the Am Law 100, was led by Marcie Borgal Shunk, president and founder of legal consulting firm The Tilt Institute, and Silvia Coulter, principal at LawVision Group, both frequent contributors to Marketing the Law Firm.

"One thing I was pleased to see was the high level of investment in coaching and training for business development," Borgal Shunk says. "That was a plus. I was less pleased to see the client teams at law firms, which have been an area of focus for years, have not necessarily solved the equation, and they haven't been as effective as we hoped."

The survey found that 86% of partners and 93% of associates received sales and business development training. On the professional development side, half of the firms represented in the survey provided individual assessments to lawyers, and just a quarter offered personal assessments to non-lawyer professional staff.

Size was a major factor in the resources firms devoted to professional development, with 7.2 full-time employees devoted to those efforts at Am Law 100 firms, compared to 2.8 at Second Hundred firms.

Meanwhile, the survey found that client teams are present in many firms, but also that their success rate leaves significant room for growth. Only 7% of those surveyed said their client teams programs were "wildly successful" and only 14% said the teams were "highly effective."

Coulter says she didn't believe there was any fundamental flaw with the concept of a client team, but rather a lack of effective training on how to put members' skills to work.

"Some firms, like Eversheds and Morgan Lewis, have seen great success with their client teams," Coulter says, noting she spoke with representatives from both firms at a recent panel she moderated. "When run well with the right strategic focus, they can be wildly successful. But they are not living up to expectations at some firms, and that is due to them not getting the right training."

The survey also found room for improvement when it comes to leadership development.

"On the leadership side we found, not surprisingly but interestingly enough when you attached numbers to it, that leadership development is an area that has been under-focused," Borgal Shunk says.

The survey found that 66% of firms offered leadership development for attorneys, mostly starting at the senior associate level. But just 32% of partners and 15% of associates received leadership courses, and more often than not, leadership training was provided as part of a broader program on development instead of as its own, focused program.

"You have attorneys taking a course on leadership at a university and then that's it," Coulter says. "Excellent leadership requires ongoing training in order to hone skills. You may learn something from a course, but you won't learn how to deal with the nuances of leadership — especially when you are running an organization that is flat and everyone thinks they have a say."

Borgal Shunk and Coulter say that part of the issue with getting more firms active in leadership training is the perception that it is not a teachable skill: You either have it or you don't.

"Oftentimes leaders, especially in client teams, have had no training in leading a team outside of a litigation team," Coulter says.

Borgal Shunk says that with regard to leadership, the first step is recognizing there is a problem. "It's hard to get leaders to admit they could be better. Once we get to that point, it becomes easier."

A Other highlights of the survey include:

• Professional development heads rated their leadership development programs as a "4" on a scale of 1-10.
• Most firms spend less than $10,000 a year per attorney on professional development. None of the responding firms spent more than $20,000 per attorney per year.
• 27% of firms in the survey involved their business development teams in lawyer leadership training.
• Professional development declines with age: Associates with two or fewer years of experience received about 80 hours of training. Partners with three plus years in that role received an average of 27.3.
• Am Law 100 firms had about double the amount of business development professionals on the firm payroll as those in the Am Law Second Hundred. The ratio of BD professionals to attorneys remained consistent, however.

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Patrick Smith, based in New York, covers the business of law for ALM. He can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter at @nycpatrickd.