If you've been putting real time into business development for your law firm—attending networking events, sending targeted emails, spending time with those who can refer business—and the work you want still isn't coming in, the instinct is usually to do more of it. That instinct is wrong, and acting on it makes the problem harder to fix.
People have a picture of who you are, and it's probably not the picture that attracts the clients or matters you actually want.
Over the course of a legal career, your reputation builds around the work you've done, not necessarily the work you want to be doing. Your bio summarizes your history. Your LinkedIn reflects the clients and cases you’ve handled. When you introduce yourself at events, you’re likely saying the same thing you’ve said for years. None of that is wrong—but if your practice has evolved and your positioning hasn't, every conversation you have is building visibility for the wrong version of your practice. You receive referrals for what you’ve been doing rather than what you want to be doing. Prospective clients don’t connect your name to the problems they need to solve. More activity doesn’t fix that. It compounds it.
Consider the managing partner at a Chicago firm with decades of experience and a strong reputation. She’s done substantial trust and estates work with strong results and has always wanted to do more of it, but her practice has been weighted toward corporate matters, which is what she’s known for. She has a clear sense of where she wants the practice to go, but her bio reads like a career summary of a corporate attorney. Her LinkedIn is dated and doesn’t even mention trust or estates. When she introduces herself, she leads with a description of the firm, and they’re generalists.
The result: prospective clients and referral sources don’t see the right picture of her. They move on to someone whose positioning matches what they're looking for—even if her actual expertise is the stronger fit.
Accurate positioning means being clear on the clients you want, then working backward through every place those clients —or their referral sources—might encounter you. For that managing partner, her LinkedIn should lead with the work she wants more of rather than summarizing everything she's done. Her bio should reflect where the practice is going, not where it's been. And when someone asks what she's focused on, she needs a specific enough answer that a referral source can actually use when making an introduction.
Partners who work through this recognize they're not starting over. They're focusing on what's already there—real expertise, a strong track record and a genuine interest in a specific kind of work. The narrative just needs to catch up.
This is the personal branding and executive coaching work Point Road Group does with attorneys—clarifying your positioning, then making sure your bio, LinkedIn and how you introduce yourself all reflect the practice you want. If your business development efforts aren't attracting the clients and work you want, contact us to talk about what's getting in the way.
