SALES PROFESSIONALS IN LAW FIRMS--ARE WE FINALLY READY?

• Author: Fleischmann, Greg
• Position: Survey

We started with a simple question: "Are traditional law firms resistant to hiring client-facing business development (i.e. "sales") staff at a time when competition for and delivery of legal work continues to intensify?" And, "If so, why?" Based on our own experience and anecdotal feedback from many in the legal marketing community, our view is that firms remain resistant to using sales professionals for largely predictable but unconvincing reasons. We decided to test our hypothesis. Combining interviews of a small group of opinion leaders with an online survey conducted by the research arm of American Lawyer Media, we attempted to better understand the extent to which professional staff are being hired and deployed by law firms expressly to be out in the market and directly developing business. We do not suggest our findings set an industry benchmark, nor do they reflect research into newer organizations such as Axiom. Rather, we view our effort as a "finger in the wind" that offers some insight into where the profession stands and where it may be headed.

Moving Toward Sales ... But Slowly

Over the past few decades, law firms have delegated various administrative and management responsibilities--formerly handled by the managing partner--to professional staff. Liam Brown, founder and chairman of Elevate, a service provider to both corporate legal departments and law firms, referred to this as an "unbundling of responsibilities," noting recent additions to the list of delegated functions included pricing, project management and process improvement.

Brown is not surprised to see the emergence of sales as a delegated professional function as well, and his "unbundling" theory is supported by results from the ALM survey. An impressive 42 percent of respondents indicated that they had hired staff with primarily market-facing responsibilities. In addition, 93 percent of all respondents claimed to provide some form of business development training and/or coaching. Some industries and professions use sales teams to develop and maintain a pipeline of work. But lawyers view client relationships as both personal and proprietary, and delegating even part of the sales function to others can be viewed as a threat to a lawyer's standing in the firm. "That change will come slowly," Brown predicted.

The ALM study indicated two barriers to the successful introduction of sales professionals into law firms: (1) partner objections reflecting a culture adverse to...