We’re thrilled to feature a preview from Matt Plavnick, Chief Inspiration Officer at Axis Marketing Strategies — and one of our featured speakers at LSSO RainDance 2026.
Knowledge, Empathy + Confidence: A Three-Ingredient Recipe for Client Service Success
Law firm business development professionals face an uphill client service battle: their clients are lawyers.
Accurate or not, most lawyers believe they provide excellent service to their clients. That in turn is the standard by which they judge client service delivered by in-house BD professionals.
Law firms don’t typically train on client service, let alone how to deliver excellent client service to lawyers. While many talented BD professionals figure out what works for them, too many others find success targets subjective, fickle, and impossible to reach.
In the absence of clear standards regarding what internal client service should look like, many supervisors offer guidance by feel. They share insights about lawyers or approaches, words of wisdom from past interactions, and anecdotes about what worked for them. “Try that,” they say.
Yet a simple framework can improve client service delivery and accelerate outcomes for law firm BD professionals. It’s a recipe for client service success. The ingredients are simple.
Ingredient 1: Knowledge
Lawyers are conditioned to seek out authority. They consistently point to existing law, precedent, and expert opinion across practices and industries. Even when innovating, they build on tested foundations. They want to work with experts.
To present as an expert, a BD professional must show knowledge that a lawyer doesn’t have. This doesn’t mean your direct report should try to tell lawyers something. We all know how often that doesn’t work, especially when lawyers already have an answer in mind (see ingredient 2, empathy).
Supervisor Skill: Encourage direct reports to highlight what they know by asking lawyers the questions they have not thought of themselves. This can be a BD professional’s greatest superpower.
There’s often a tell when a BD professional asks a lawyer a question that provokes new thinking. There is a sudden pause, followed by the word, “Actually . . . .” It doesn’t matter what comes next. The pause is the admission. There is something worth looking at differently.
As a supervisor, ask a question yourself to help your report tackle a challenge or opportunity:
“What question(s) could you ask to make a lawyer pause and consider things differently?” Then brainstorm to identify the questions that will demonstrate expertise and move a conversation forward.
Lawyers are stressed. In addition to massive workloads, high stakes, and ever-changing expectations, they are also merely human. Like anyone else, they have bad days, troubled relationships, sick children, financial pressures, and so on.
When BD professionals remember this, we create space for compassion. This space is so important because, like lawyers, we are also stressed, often playing defense and reprioritizing every activity, every day.
Now, add two nuances that affect interpersonal dynamics:
It should be no surprise, then, that when lawyers ask for BD help, they frequently believe they’ve already solved a problem. Very often, they contact BD professionals for implementation, not consultation.
Here’s why it matters: It’s our job to ask questions, consider possibilities, expose potential weaknesses, identify desired outcomes, and propose stronger ways to create those outcomes.
Yet lawyers see this review as a burden rather than a service. Once a sense of burden arises, conversations that are meant collaboratively can slide into conflict.
Supervisor’s Skill: Alert BD professionals to this oppositional dynamic between stressed, fast-moving problem-solvers (lawyers) and thoughtful, critical-thinking reviewers (BD professionals). Ask teammates to lead with empathy. For example:
Empathy helps sidestep conflict before it starts. A supervisor might encourage a BD professional as follows:
In this way, supervisors identify and reframe the dynamic a BD professional may feel. They arm direct reports with awareness, information, and specific suggestions to practice with a lawyer. Rather than resort to “Try this, it worked for me,” supervisors offer a framework to understand and a skill set to address a challenging situation.
It’s nearly impossible to inspire confidence when we don’t project confidence ourselves. To lead lawyers, we must give them reasons to feel optimistic. Confidence starts with the language of service.
Science supports this: “Habits often follow a three-part cycle: cue, routine, and reward. Words can serve as the cue that kicks off the cycle.” By changing the words we use, we change how we feel—and the reward we anticipate—and in turn make it easier to lead lawyers to stronger outcomes.
Supervisor Skill: An easy way to help BD professionals lead with confidence involves a simple exercise, “Say This, Not That.”
Consider a common email opener: “Sorry for the delay.”
It shows up frequently and suggests that the sender has already disappointed the recipient.
Instead, try “Thanks for your patience.” It’s a subtle yet assertive shift that signals—and inspires—confidence. It does not apologize unnecessarily, and it recognizes that a lawyer’s time is valuable.
Below are common phrases heard daily in law firm BD departments, followed by more confident formulations:
“Sorry to bother you, but . . . ”
“Can we take a moment to clarify something?”
“Hopefully this works.”
“What do you think we should do?”
“I recommend ____. Here’s why. [Share reasons.] Can we discuss the pros and cons?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m not sure, but I’ll find out. Can I get back to you on Thursday?”
“Talk to [______]—that’s their job.”
“Michael handles that for our team. Let me copy him in and put you in his good hands.”
“Say This, Not That” demonstrates the language of service. It alerts BD professionals to habits that may undermine their credibility and obstruct both their confidence and a lawyer’s. Taken together, knowledge, empathy, and confidence create a powerful framework to inform how BD professionals and lawyers experience working together. As a supervisor, align concrete skills like those here within a framework of client service to help your direct reports succeed with lawyers.
Matt Plavnick is Chief Inspiration Officer at Axis Marketing Strategies and a trusted advisor to legal sales and business development teams. He helps law firms win work by closing the gap between client expectations and lawyer behavior, combining curiosity, critical thinking, and creativity to unlock growth across firms of all sizes. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
You can hear more from Matt at LSSO’s RainDance Conference 2026, June 3–4 at the Palmer House in Chicago.