The Meridian Perspective – Issue 6
Most Associates in professional services firms understand the importance of building client relationships. Ask them, and they’ll tell you it matters. Ask them again in six months, and the picture looks largely the same: a lot of understanding, not much action.
This was the tension at the centre of a recent roundtable bringing together senior practitioners from law, accountancy, real estate, and consulting. What emerged was a picture less about individual motivation and more about the structural conditions that make sustained BD behaviour almost impossible. The problem, it turns out, is not that associates lack ambition. It’s that the systems around them keep rewarding something else entirely.
Deep Dive: The BD Blind Spot
The roundtable drew on original survey and focus group research among lawyers from newly qualified through to around seven years PQE, carried out as part of Meridian West’s Client First Research (conducted May 2024 to September 2025, across more than 180 private practice and in-house lawyers). The findings were strikingly consistent.
Associates across practice areas and seniority levels reported similar things: they valued client relationships, they enjoyed networking when it happened, and they had a clear sense of what good BD looked like. Attendance at firm-organised networking events was reasonably strong, with around 70% attending at least quarterly. But the informal touchpoints that actually build relationships over time (the follow-up message between matters, the genuine curiosity about a client’s world) were almost entirely absent at junior levels.When focus groups explored why, a familiar pattern emerged. Writing thought leadership content was consistently cited as associates’ preferred BD activity, not because it was the most effective but because it was the most comfortable. It could be done alone, at their own desk, without the social exposure of a room full of people more senior than them. One participant put it plainly: “How many more articles do we need on websites, really?” The point was not that content has no value, but that it had become a way of ticking a box without taking any real risk.
The Client First Research also revealed two structural gaps that deserve serious attention. The first is commercial transparency. Associates in the case study firm had limited visibility of how fees were accruing against budget, and very little knowledge of their clients’ sectors beyond what was directly relevant to the matter at hand. Only 31% of associates surveyed regularly researched their clients online. That is the most basic first step, and most were not taking it. (Source: Meridian West Client First Research, 2025)
The second is recognition. BD almost never appears in appraisals in any meaningful way. Time codes exist for pro bono; they rarely exist for BD. The message this sends is clear: billable hours are what matter, and everything else is personal time. Several participants noted that associates were doing some BD activity, but it was entirely ad hoc, driven by individual initiative rather than any firm-wide expectation.
Perhaps the most consistent theme was the failure of the partner-as-coach model to materialise in practice. Partners are busy. Their incentive structures reward billing. Some were never coached themselves and are working from an outdated model of what BD looks like. One participant observed that the best form of BD, in their experience, is staying in touch with the peer group you trained alongside, watching them rise through their organisations, and being the adviser they call when something lands on their desk. That requires patience, consistency, and a long view. Very few firms currently reward any of those things
What actually works, the roundtable found, comes down to three things: structured internal networking to build the connectivity associates need to spot opportunities; transparent commercial information shared early in a matter so associates have something real to talk about; and formal BD competencies in appraisals, with genuine recognition. Above all, a shift in how partners understand their role makes the biggest difference.
The best partners in the room were the ones who brought associates into client meetings, gave them speaking parts, and gradually handed over the relationship.
What We’re Seeing
The data from Meridian West’s Client First Research reinforces what we heard in the room. Lawyers with limited client exposure report just 53% day-to-day career satisfaction. That figure rises to 92% for those with regular client interaction and stronger client-facing skills. (Source: Meridian West Client First Research, 2025)
Our research identifies three distinct professional personas: Technical Deliverers (34% of respondents), Relationship Builders (38%), and Client First Professionals (26%). The differences in career satisfaction between these groups are stark, with long-term satisfaction jumping from 37% among Technical Deliverers to 100% among Client First Professionals. The data also shows that client exposure does not increase automatically with seniority; it depends on deliberate opportunity and role design.
We’re also seeing the same dynamic play out beyond law. In accounting, AI is compressing the technical work that used to occupy junior years, which means the shift to relationship-driven advisory work needs to happen faster than ever. In real estate, firms with strong mentoring cultures produce noticeably more confident associates, but that culture depends on individuals, not systems, and it doesn’t survive when those individuals move on.
Resource: A Five-Question BD Diagnostic for Associates
Run this as a quick temperature check with your team, or use it as the basis for a development conversation.
- Can your associates name the top three commercial challenges facing each of their key clients right now?
- Do BD activities feature explicitly in appraisal objectives, with specific targets attached?
- In the past quarter, how many associates attended a client meeting that was not directly related to an active matter?
- Do associates have visibility of fee accruals and budget performance on their matters?
- When a client calls your firm, can they speak effectively with someone other than the partner who holds the relationship?
If the honest answer to most of these is “no” or “I’m not sure,” the conversation with your associates about BD is starting from the wrong place.
What’s Coming Up
On May 21st, we’ll be presenting the next chapter of our Client First research. We’ll explore what the data revealed, how it translated into action through our Cascade Workshops programme, and what other firms can take away from the experience. We’ll take a candid look at what works and what the challenges really look like in practice.
Event details
Date: Wednesday, 21 May 2026
Time: 18:00 – 20:00
Venue: Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London
Contact: [email protected] to reserve your place
If you’d like to join the conversation, get in touch.The Meridian Perspective is published bi-weekly for marketing, business development, and senior leaders in professional services. Each issue shares practical insights from our client intelligence work, roundtable discussions, and research.