Training departments in law firms spend a great deal of time and effort getting their training "right". We gather feedback from delegates, and constantly revisit the programme to get it as near perfect as possible.
Yet perhaps we shouldn't bother.
Over the past dozen years or so I've seen, delivered, read-the-course-notes-from and taken part in a huge quantity of training. Most of it was well designed and delivered, with a few exceptions. The subsequent impact, however, did not seem to be linked to the design or delivery of the training. Success depends on the willingness of the delegates to become participants.
In former days, when we had days rather than hours for training, a large part of the initial phase was spent "digging for pain" - drawing-out from the delegates the necessity for the training, their own personal journey, and how they would apply it. This phase prepared the ground for the seeds to be planted. Nowadays we move swiftly into the planting phase, throwing the seed out hoping that some will bed in.
This is not necessarily a bad strategy. The Darwinian process of the tough surviving means that those who are motivated and willing to really listen will succeed, and those who are just chair-fodder will fail. Capitalism at its finest. Yet we should not, in these circumstances, take the feedback from the non-participants too seriously. If delegates don't want to participate, modifying the training in line with their thoughts may be a big mistake.
It's not really a secret, is it? Business development planning doesn't work in a law firm.
Depending on your firm, the stated aims of business development planning will include:
- To enable the firm to accurately predict revenue, and hence match expenses
- To promote and facilitate "whole-firm" thinking
- To enable individual partners to be directed/encouraged before the year commences
- To encourage more creative thinking in client development
- To form part of the overall remuneration profile
- To allow sales to be tracked against predicted profile
- To enable marketing to allocate appropriate resources.
But even in firms where the aim of the bd planning process is stated, the plans aren't assessed against the aim. Do they really encourage creative thinking? Or facilitate whole-firm thinking, even if the "promoting" part could be considered a partial success? And who is really held accountable to whom?
Meanwhile, at the partnership level, the overall purpose of bd planning is a mystery to the partners, who complete tedious forms with initial gusto (the analystic part at the front, which can be cut-and-pasted from last years), and eventual imagination (the action-planning which forms the last few pages - often a collection of optimistic new contact meetings arrayed over the next few months). Don't even ask more junior lawyers the content of the plan.
Not that it matters. Once the plans have passed initial scrutiny we're already 3 months into the FY, and the plans aren't looked at until next year unless disaster strikes.
But something has changed. Disaster has struck. The "+10% fees" strategy, dressed up as a business plan, has come unstuck. Faced with declining revenues, stressed clients and empty diaries, partners are suddenly adrift. The very reason for the bd plan was to give structure to times such as these, yet the whole planning edifice has failed to give the point-of-need support which a partner needs.
If a business development plan can't help a partner faced with a empty diary, supported only by a telephone, e-mail and a slightly-neglected CRM system, it's useless. In fact it's worse than useless; it's like a parachute which you had for emergencies, which when unfurled is threadbare and useless.
So what's to be done?
Produce a real bd plan. One that's for you. One that actually engages with you, your clients, your network and your aspirations. One that you can scrawl on, update, and use for real direction.
If you want to see one, click here. It's not pretty. It's just very useful. And when you've completed it you can have a sensible discussion with others about who is doing what.