Law Firm Business Development: Guide + 8 Tips
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Law Firm Business Development: Guide + 8 Tips

Leading a law firm to success isn’t a sprint.

It is a long, strategic marathon—separating the wheat from the chaff based on your commitment, patience, business acumen, and adaptability.

That’s why every law firm needs a detailed business development plan. This ensures that, no matter where you are now, your firm is positioned for massive success in the future.

Read on to learn more about law firm business development and how seasoned lawyers rise over its challenges.

What is Law Firm Business Development?

This strategy involves cultivating business relationships and determining strategic opportunities for your law firm. It involves an elaborate, strategic approach to research, leverage, and optimize new streams of income for your firm.

Finding these opportunities means more cases from new clients to work on and improved existing client relationships, all of which improve your bottom line and grow your business.

How Does Business Development Differ From Traditional Marketing for Law Firms?

Business development for law firms is an overarching plan for ongoing growth. Traditional marketing, on the other hand, is an area of business development that focuses on helping your firm reach a wider audience and acquire more leads.

What is a Law Firm Business Plan? 

A law firm business plan is a document that outlines your company objectives and the specific strategies you’ll use to achieve them. It also outlines important details about your firm, including your mission statement, service locations, legal structure, and organizational chart.

8 Business Development Tips for Lawyers

To get the ball rolling, let’s jump straight into the business development tips that successful attorneys and law firm owners use:

1. Build Roots in Your Local Community

Establishing a strong local presence is step number one for most—if not all—of the well-known law firms today.

That’s because, in the digital age, you have access to several powerful tools to connect with the local audience and get your reputation to a fast start. 

Optimizing your Google Business Profile, for instance, can be done in a day. In return, you unlock a slew of benefits like:

  • Increased visibility in local search results
  • Discoverability in search features (i.e., Local 3-Pack) and Google Maps
  • Passive generation of client reviews and ratings
GBP Local 3-Pack

Of course, you also need to get boots on the ground and become actively involved in your local community. This will have a much bigger impact on your local reputation than by focusing purely on local SEO.

Andy Gillin, managing partner at GJEL Accident Attorneys, recommends going beyond event sponsorships and being genuinely invested in local community groups:

2. Network in The Legal Community

Aside from a thriving local presence, you should also focus on your legal network for long-term growth.

Networking with other attorneys will not only enhance your law firm’s reputation. It can also lead to profitable referral marketing partnerships that will create an ongoing stream of high-quality leads over time.

Some of the best ways to grow your legal network are:

  • Participating in legal groups on Meetup
  • Attending bar association events
  • Getting to know attorneys in person at the courthouse
  • Consider becoming a volunteer mentor on platforms like LEAP
  • Joining social media groups for legal professionals

A tried-and-tested strategy is to collaborate with a local business to help get the word out on your firm. The key is to choose a business that shares a similar audience with your firm.

For your reference, J&Y Law co-founder Jason Javaheri shares the following strategy:

3. Run Legal Workshops or Pop-Up Legal Tents

Speaking of networking, you can’t forget about hosting your own events to draw a crowd. This can expand your sphere of influence as well as build your reputation as an expert source of information in your legal practice.

For example, hosting legal workshops is a popular tactic that law firms use to gain exposure, reach potential clients, as well as showcase their knowledge and expertise.

Business lawyer Giselle Ayala, owner of G.A.M. Law Office, shares her firm’s experience with this tactic:

Just remember to not shy away from out-of-the-box ideas when planning workshops or experiential learning activities.

For example, Hirsch Law Group founder Gordon Hirsch used to set up “pop-up legal tents” at public events:

4. Relentlessly Focus on Client Service and Relationships

Nobody sells your legal services better than past clients who had a positive experience with your firm. As such, you need to go beyond providing exceptional service and actually put an effort into maintaining long-term relationships.

Here’s a quick checklist of practices you should observe to foster better connections with your clients:

  • Always be available and promptly respond to requests
  • Be upfront about fees and timelines
  • Avoid any implication that you offer “guaranteed results”
  • Actively seek, accept, and act upon feedback

These will pay dividends in the form of positive customer reviews, direct referrals, and increased engagement across touchpoints.

Remember, every law firm can cite statistics and facts to prove a point. But not everybody can show a verifiable track record of success through testimonials, case studies, and other types of social proof.

5. Crack Referral Marketing

By now, you should already a couple of referral marketing pipelines to your firm.

Expanding your legal network and committing to exemplary client service are just the tip of the iceberg. You should also consider partnering up with businesses and professionals in relevant industries, automating referral requests, and offering incentives.

Remember, you can easily restructure a referral program for surefire returns.

C.L. Mike Schmidt, trial lawyer and partner at Schmidt & Clark, unveils how they created a referral program that benefitted them from day one:

Need an even bigger referral network?

You can take a page out of law firm owner Andrew Pickett’s book and collaborate with professionals in other fields:

6.  Host Free Legal Clinics

A legal clinic is a specific type of program hosted by law firms and schools—providing free (or low-cost) legal consultation, document preparation, and other services.

The community gets answers to their legal questions. In exchange, the firm gets exposure, trust, and an influx of potential, high-quality leads.

Hosting a legal clinic often involves a long checklist of planning steps, including:

  • Define your goals. Start with a clear purpose by determining who you want to help, what services you’ll offer, and which objectives are you aiming for.
  • Decide your venue. Choose the best venue for your event in terms of accessibility, costs, and proximity with your audience.
  • Get the support you need. Consult with your bar association and local leaders to get assistance with planning.
  • Build a team. Confirm who will be available to run and manage your legal clinic, possibly including volunteer attorneys and law school students.
  • Promote your legal clinic. Explore ways to promote your clinic, like preparing a press release and launching a promotion campaign on social media.

As for your legal clinic’s structure, feel free to borrow ideas from other lawyers who’ve already done it—like C.L. Mike Schmidt:

7. Get Creative in Offering Value to Your Audience

When it comes to growing a law firm, you have a lot of legroom for creative ideas that can capture your audience’s attention.

One particularly creative example is to offer free software designed to address your prospective clients’ needs.

Alex Freeburg, owner of Freeburg Law, successfully put this into practice:

8. Focus on Digital Marketing

Finally, it’s no secret that holistic digital marketing is the key to sustainable growth for law firms.

Digital marketing for law firms involves multiple branches, including SEO, paid advertising, social media, and content marketing. By implementing a well-rounded strategy, digital marketing yields numerous benefits:

  • Enable online lead generation
  • Boost your law firm’s authority
  • Spread brand awareness
  • Establish customer trust and loyalty

While each aspect warrants its own full-length guide, there’s one particular type of digital marketing that forward-thinking firms lean toward: webinars.

Here’s how Andrew Pickett talking about the basics of successful webinars and event marketing:

How to Integrate AI Business Development Tools to Scale Your Law Firm’s Productivity

Growing a law firm requires a comprehensive software stack to streamline specific facets of your legal business—from client intake to analytics.

Incorporating AI into your tech infrastructure will give you a massive competitive advantage.

In most applications, AI supercharges your efficiency, productivity, and decision-making.

Here’s how:

1. CRM Platform

As your legal clientele grows, consider investing in a CRM solution that streamlines communication and reporting. It also serves as a centralized customer information repository, making it easier for teams to track interactions, implement personalization, and collaborate on key tasks.

AI improves the benefits of CRM tools two-fold.

HubSpot, for example, incorporates its AI companion “Breeze” to enhance client communications, generate actionable insights, and more.

HubSpot Breeze

Here are other CRM tools with built-in AI enhancements:

  • Salesforce
  • Zoho
  • Pipedrive

2. Calendar 

A law firm’s day-to-day can be encapsulated in a single calendar app.

It allows you to make sense of the mountain of work on your plate—identifying priorities, making adjustments, and getting things done accordingly.

Google Calendar is a popular choice for law firms of all sizes. Not only does it make scheduling and collaborative time management easier, it also supports a ton of integrations that add useful functionalities.

Reclaim AI, for example, is a powerful extension that will help you navigate time management challenges through automation. It can find the perfect time for meetings, set focus times for each team member, and generate data visualizations for performance tracking.

Reclaim AI

Bear in mind that other law firm management apps include a calendar system right out of the box. However, free solutions like Google Calendar will suffice for law firms without a considerable software budget.

3. Messaging Tool

For law firms, messaging tools can be used both internally and externally.

Slack, for instance, can be used for talking with team members as well as clients and leads. It also comes with a bunch of perks that make it a clear industry leader in the messaging space—from drag-and-drop workspaces to third-party integrations.

In terms of AI, Slack uses generative AI to help you answer questions, summarize discussions, and refine messages before they reach clients. Ths will not only help you save time, but also ensure a consistent polish to your client communications.

Slack AI

If you’d like to explore other options, check out these business messaging apps with AI features:

  • Mei
  • Zoom
  • Smith.ai

4. Project Management System

Project management systems are a versatile breed of software. They can be configured for content marketing tasks, manage team productivity, track business development milestones, or a little bit of everything.

Asana is a leading platform for this software category. In addition to the user-friendly, drag-and-drop dashboard, it also uses AI to accelerate your law firm’s task management workflows.

Asana AI Feature

A well-known alternative to Asana would be ClickUp, which also comes with AI tools. Its main advantage over Asana is the sheer number of third-party integrations it supports.

5. Case Management System 

Case management tools share similarities with a full-blown project management system.

The only difference is, case management systems are specifically developed for law firms.

MyCase, for instance, has everything you need to move the tedious aspects of your case management forward. This includes document management, scheduling, case analytics, and workflow automation.

As far as AI goes, case management systems can take advantage of generative AI for text editing, enhancing, and summarizing. It can also automatically identify and sort tasks based on text-based information—be it from messages or internal team notes.

MyCase

Other AI-powered case management solutions include:

  • Clio Duo
  • SmartAdvocate
  • Smokeball

Set Business Development KPIs and Iterate Your Strategy

With the core elements of your growth strategy and software stack in place, it’s time for the last and perhaps the most important part of law firm business development.

Tracking law firm KPIs allow you to gauge the efficiency and performance of your law firm. It lets you evaluate how close you are to your business development goals, which strategies are driving growth, and where you need improvements.

Some of the most important KPIs you should track are:

  • Client inquiries
  • New client acquisitions
  • Client Acquisition Cost (CAC)
  • Conversion rate
  • Engagement rate
  • Utilization rate
  • Keyword rankings
  • Monthly traffic
  • Average case resolution time

To track your digital marketing KPIs, a must-have tool for any law firm is Google Analytics.

Once connected to your site, Google Analytics will automatically gather, process, and visualize website traffic data. This reveals important metrics and KPIs like page views, bounce rate, and goal completion rate.

Google Analytics

Related reading: Google Analytics for Law Firms

Other types of data like Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score and billable hours can be tracked with a corresponding tool, like HubSpot for CRM-related data and Clio for case management.

Remember, you don’t need to worry about getting stellar numbers ASAP. What you need to do is keep tracking the numbers over time to see if they’re improving or not.

This will help you determine if your business development initiatives are working as intended. But if there’s a downward trend, dig deep for possible inadequacies before things get out of control.

Final Thoughts

Business development for law firms isn’t just about tactics to get more clients.

It also takes into account your law firm’s authority, network, client satisfaction, and operational efficiency.

The guide above should help you set a well-defined course to your law firm business’s goals.

Just remember it’s not about big wins or huge leaps—it’s about steady and consistent improvement toward the best version of your firm.

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