Business development has become one of the defining strategic issues for IP firms. Clients have moved from seeking specialists in intellectual property, to firms offering differentiators in the areas of commercial and strategic expertise, along with international connections and filing skills.
The market for IP services remains strong, but it is also more competitive, more fragmented and more demanding than it was a generation ago. Newer competitors to IP firms now encompass alternative legal service providers and organisations increasingly dependent on AI who may offer keener pricing.
Firms can no longer rely solely on reputation, inherited client relationships or technical excellence to attract new clients. They must be deliberate about how they build visibility, deepen trust, train their people and convert market opportunities into long-term client relationships.
That challenge looks different depending on the size of the firm:
- A small boutique may experience business development as an immediate and personal necessity.
- A mid-sized firm may need to translate founder-led growth into an institutional habit.
- A large firm may need to reinvent itself through structure, data and a more disciplined approach to execution.
Yet across all three, the same underlying questions arise: who should do business development (BD), how should attorneys be trained for it, what systems support it, and how can firms ensure that strategy turns into action?
This is a topic under scrutiny in FICPI’s Business Development & Marketing Group, part of FICPI’s Practice Management Committee which provides guidance on how IP attorneys do business as IP firms or sole traders.
In these five connected articles, we draw perspectives from experienced professionals in the IP sector from Australia, India and Israel, which tell a story across accounts from a small, medium and large firm. Smaller firms will likely find in the larger-firm accounts a clear preview of the challenges ahead, whilst larger firms will find lessons that individual partners may apply to their practices.
Why business development now matters more than ever
Phil Cox brings an external perspective to this question. As a business development coach and consultant who works exclusively with IP firms, he has observed the full range of BD challenges across firm sizes and uses that vantage point to frame the journey ahead. Having spent more than two decades advising firms in this niche, his observations focus on how the market has evolved and why firms now need to be more proactive than before.
His central observation is that the IP market has changed significantly over the past twenty years:
“While demand for IP services remains robust, firms now operate in a more crowded environment, with greater pricing pressure, more alternatives for clients and less certainty that existing work will continue to flow by inertia. In this context, firms cannot simply rely on serving current clients well and hoping that growth will follow. They need to be visible, intentional and consistent in how they pursue new opportunities.”
Consistency is key
One of Phil’s most actionable points is that business development often fails not because firms lack ideas, but because they fail to execute consistently. Attorneys are busy, client work takes priority and business development is easily postponed. For that reason, he frames effective BD not as a dramatic or occasional effort, but as disciplined repetition: a little bit of business development, done regularly over time.
That regular approach shifts the focus away from grand plans and towards more attainable habits. A firm may have an excellent strategy on paper, but unless attorneys and leaders create structures that make BD activity part of a regular routine, little will change in practice.
In this sense, business development is not just a strategic question. It is also an operational and cultural one.
Read on
- In part two, read the small-firm viewpoint
- Part three brings the medium-firm perspective
- Part four reveals the larger-firm experience
- Part five brings the essential lessons and takeaways every firm should master
(links become live as pieces are published)
Next steps
Find out more about FICPI’s PMC Committee and how to get involved at: https://ficpi.org/organisation/committees/practice-management-committee