Digital transformation was largely a buzzword until I saw what David accomplished during the pandemic.
For this week’s feature post (342), Legal Evolution is pleased to welcome guest contributor David Freeman, a renowned business development consultant who has trained and coached well over 10,000 lawyers in over 200 law firms worldwide.
I have known David for several years. After reconnecting this summer, David walked me through some of the key features of his Lawyer Bookbuilder® online course. Much to my delight, it was a fully productized version of 30 years of David’s best-in-class business development training condensed down to 4+ hours of video content, excluding exercises, homework, quizzes, worksheets, and many other downloadable practice aids.
Although David’s course is worthy of promotion, it’s equally noteworthy how a seasoned consultant who graduated from law school in the 1980s successfully engineered his own digital transformation. Prior to the pandemic, David Freeman was the legal profession’s most successful “bespoke” BD consultant. Now, two years later, he has a fully polished online course that arguably delivers better, more cost-effective results than David Freeman live. How, exactly, did this happen?
As David discusses in today’s feature, “A better way to teach business development (342),” the pandemic brought live business development training (retreats, onsite sessions, one-on-one coaching) to a halt. Thus, David finally had the mental white space to consider broader changes affecting lawyers and the modern office environment—trends that pre-dated the pandemic but were now likely to accelerate.
David goes on to tell the story of how Lawyer BookBuilder® got built. One of the key data points is that the full course soup to nuts required approximately 1,000 hours of David’s focused attention—a relatively large investment of time but also the only viable way to scale David’s business development know-how and bring it to a larger audience.
On this front, David’s business is far from unique. Like me, David is a member of the College of Law Practice Management. I hope that all our COLPM colleagues get inspired by David’s essay. To all the practice masters out there, it’s never too late to scale.