BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT COACHING AND ROI.

• Author: Fitzgarrald, Jonathan

In order to source and secure a sufficient number of new clients and matters in today's business environment, most law firms offer business development coaching and training programs to their attorneys. In fact, a market-wide survey conducted by The Ackert Advisory in 2013 revealed that more than 71 percent of North American law firms provide coaching and training, mostly through their professional marketing staff. But the same study points to a wide gap between the coaching and ROI: Only 12 percent of the firms surveyed reported that their internal business development coaching and training programs yielded a positive return, which, in most cases, is inaccurately defined by firm management as "dollars in the door."

The problem is not that the coaching is ineffective, but rather that law firms apply little formal scrutiny to ensure that such initiatives yield meaningful results. Though internal coaching by in-house firm professionals may be the most cost-effective form of business development training for many firms, the survey results suggest that firms need to institute more processes and competencies for their considerable coaching investment to yield dividends.

For example, it is common for an in-house professional to provide coaching to a partner on an as-needed basis (e.g., in response to a plea to "help me improve the presentation I need to give next week") without any processes in place to measure the efficacy of that coaching. Even a structured program is typically assessed based on arbitrary indicators such as whether or not the lawyers "liked it" or "found it helpful."

The fact is that business development coaching for lawyers, even under the best circumstances, is a difficult undertaking. Not all participants are amenable, and without reliable technology to assign and track tangible metrics to an educational experience, there is little hope of translating a "helpful conversation" into a profitable business result. Rather than solve for these problems, most firms either ignore the gap, or they continue to administer various ad-hoc programs and resources with the assumption that doing something is better than nothing.

At the associate level, evaluating the effectiveness of business development coaching programs is particularly challenging given that associates typically do not originate many new matters. The most common approach taken by law firms is to capture anecdotal feedback from the associate-trainees themselves, as well as...