Lawyers notoriously hate thinking of themselves as salespeople. How do you get your staff comfortable and confident in sales? What should you be tracking to help develop their skills and what actually helps them improve?

Brian Glass

Co-Owner and Trial Lawyer at BenGlassLaw

Lawyers hate thinking of themselves as salespeople because they have the wrong idea about what sales actually is. They hear “sales” and picture some guy trying to talk you into buying a timeshare. But that isn’t what we’re doing.

In a law firm, good sales means helping someone with a problem make a good decision about what to do next. If you genuinely believe your firm is the best place for that person to get help, you have an obligation to get good at communicating that. If you don’t genuinely believe this, you should work on being a better lawyer before you work on being a better salesperson.

Once you're comfortable with this mindset shift, try to track your conversion rate at every meaningful step: leads to appointments, appointments to consultations, consultations to signed clients. Break those numbers down by person and by lead source.

If one person converts qualified consultations at 70% and another converts at 35%, something is happening in those conversations. The owner’s job is to figure out what. And the answer usually isn’t a sales seminar; it’s listening to the calls and gentle coaching.

Conversion is usually less about following a script and more about actually listening to the answers, understanding the prospect’s problem, and confidently communicating why the firm is different from anyone else they might have found on Google.

Then coach one thing at a time. The worst thing you can do is hand somebody a 17-point scorecard. Find the one thing that would make them 5% better this week. Work on it. Listen again. Repeat.

Most law firms spend an enormous amount of time trying to generate more leads. But if you can move your conversion rate from 40% to 50%, that improvement can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars without spending an additional dollar on marketing.

Ryan McKeen

Co-Founder and Consultant at Best Era

‘Sales’ is a dirty word for lawyers, and it does clients and firms a disservice.

Great salespeople are great educators. They listen. They educate their clients. Clients want to be helped. Good salespeople open the doors to help.

A good sales process starts with knowing the problem, the product, and the people. There's no trick. No secret sauce.

When you sit beside someone instead of sitting across from them, you win. When you see them as a person instead of a metric, you win. You owe it to your clients, yourself, and your firm to win.

Lucine Aghajanyan

CEO and Founder at LT Global Practice Management

The first thing I tell law firms is to stop calling it “sales training”.

Most lawyers resist the word “sales” because they associate it with pressure, persuasion, or convincing someone to buy something. But a legal consultation shouldn’t feel like a pitch. It should be a structured conversation in which the lawyer listens, identifies the problem, clearly communicates value, and confidently guides the potential client toward a decision. That is a skill, and it can absolutely be taught.

One of the books I often reference is Phil M. Jones’s Exactly What to Say: The Magic Words for Influence and Impact. His premise is simple but powerful: the words we choose can completely change a conversation's direction. Lawyers don’t necessarily need more information to become better at consultations. Instead, they often need to learn how to communicate the information they already know.

I also encourage lawyers to study communication principles from Leil Lowndes’s How to Talk to Anyone. Listen first. Build rapport. Ask better questions. Understand who is sitting across from you before deciding how to communicate with them.

Then, measure the results. I track completed consultations, signed retainers, conversion rate, follow-up activity, and why qualified prospects did not retain. Depending on the practice and lead quality, I generally like attorneys working toward approximately a 30% conversion rate. But KPIs should diagnose, not punish.

If one lawyer converts at 15% and another at 35%, don’t simply tell the first lawyer to “sell harder.” Find out what the second lawyer is doing differently. Review consultations. Role-play objections. Coach the language around fees, hesitation, value, and next steps.

The biggest shift happens when lawyers stop asking, “How do I sell this person?” and start asking, “How do I help this person feel understood, see the value, and confidently make a decision?” That is where better communication becomes better business.