Meridian West Breakfast Roundtable, March 2026

Commerciality is the single biggest differentiator between a good lawyer and a great one. Yet across the profession it remains inconsistently developed, rarely prioritised until it is too late, and almost never embedded in the structures that would make it stick.

In March 2026, Meridian West brought together lawyers, BD and client relations professionals, academics, and consultants to examine why, and what firms can realistically do about it.

As AI erodes the efficiency advantages that once separated strong firms from average ones, technical competence is becoming table stakes. What clients are paying a premium for now is the quality of the relationship and the depth of commercial understanding behind it. The pressure on firms to develop that capability, earlier and more deliberately than before, has never been greater.

What underdeveloped commerciality actually costs

The consequences of underdeveloped commerciality tend to accumulate quietly rather than arriving as a single visible failure. Client relationships suffer when associates lack the awareness to read the room, carry context, or offer insight unprompted.

Retention takes a hit too. Associates kept at arm’s length from clients, with no visibility of whether their work landed and no development in the skills that matter for progression, disengage. Benchmarking data discussed at the roundtable showed a sharp drop-off at six to seven years PQE, where lawyers without developed BD instincts find themselves unable to make a credible case for partnership. The firm absorbs years of development cost and loses the return at precisely the point it should arrive.

Business development suffers in ways that rarely get attributed to their true source. Missed cross-selling opportunities, slow billing, unchallenged write-offs: these are not sales problems. They are commerciality problems, rooted in the same gaps in confidence, curiosity, and client understanding that show up everywhere else.

What actually works

Despite the breadth of the problem, the roundtable surfaced a clear set of practical directions. The firms making genuine progress tend to be doing several of these in combination.

Start early

Commercial behaviours need to be built in, not bolted on. Waiting until associates are approaching partnership is too late. Habits have formed, instincts have calcified, and the scope for change has narrowed. Engaging lawyers at trainee or graduate level, and treating commercial skills with the same rigour as technical training, is where the window is widest. Several participants pointed to universities as an underused lever: law schools produce technically precise lawyers but rarely equip them to translate advice into commercially actionable guidance. Closer firm and university partnerships could shift the baseline before talent even arrives.

Introduce the fifth seat

Client secondments generated the strongest consensus in the room. Formalising a structured period of client, BD, finance, or legal technology exposure builds the kind of commercial instinct no training course can replicate.

“You can tell an associate who’s been on secondment at some point in their earlier career just straight away. The financial case is equally compelling. Research shared on the day found that third-year undergraduates on placement were, after a short settling period, performing at trainee level on paralegal salaries. Please go talk to your finance directors about that. It’s just an utter no-brainer.”

Create real client exposure

Associates need to be in the room with clients more deliberately and more often: pitches, kick-off meetings, matter reviews. Firms that bring the whole team consistently report better outcomes. Clients respond to meeting the people who will actually do their work, and associates who are part of those conversations arrive on the matter already invested in the relationship.

Over-reliance on a single relationship partner also creates structural risk. Distributing relationship capital across the team is both better for clients and more resilient for the firm. As one participant put it: “This is our client. It’s our responsibility.”

Teach firm economics

A thread running through the whole discussion was how little most associates understand about the commercial model of their own firm.

“When you join a business, you’ve got to understand the commercial model. What does our cost structure look like? What is a healthy profit margin? Once you understand that, you can apply it. That’s a fundamental skill.”

Associates without that knowledge cannot have honest fee conversations, cannot push back on scope creep, and cannot connect their work to the health of the business. A basic grounding in firm economics, not complex financial modelling but enough to close that loop, is a practical and underused addition to early training.

Embed it in objectives and culture

None of the above will stick without structural backing. Culture follows incentives, and at most firms those incentives still point almost entirely towards billable hours. If commercial activity does not appear in objectives and progression criteria, it will always be treated as optional. In a profession where time pressure is constant, optional means last.

“In my industry, commerciality is in your objectives at every single level. Associates need to know what they’re working towards. If it’s part of your framework and part of the succession to partnership, it’s part of building those stones.”

Partners carry particular responsibility here. Firms that recognise and reward partners for developing their teams, not only for their own billings, are building a fundamentally different set of incentives. As one BD leader said plainly: “It’s not about what BD can do. It’s about us as partners taking accountability. They own the business. They need to hold each other to account.”

The bottom line

The solutions are knowable. What separates the firms closing this gap from those still talking about it is the willingness to treat commerciality as a strategic priority rather than a cultural aspiration: diagnosing where the gaps actually are, intervening early and deliberately, and holding the right people accountable for making it happen.