The First 100 Days of a New BD Director at an IP Firm

A new BD director walking into an intellectual-property firm is walking into a particular set of conditions. The partners are technically trained, often skeptical of marketing language, and accustomed to a long-cycle relationship business where the lead time from first contact to first instruction can run into years. The temptation in the first week is to arrive with a strategy. The right move is the opposite.

Days 1-30: listen, and resist the urge to fix

The first month is for understanding what is already happening. Most IP firms have more BD activity than the BD function knows about — it is happening in partner offices, in client calls, at conferences — and almost none of it is documented anywhere a successor would find it.

The work in the first thirty days is interview-driven. Sit with every partner who will give you an hour. Ask three questions. Who are your three most important clients and why. Where did your last three matters come from. What is the BD work you wish someone would help you with that nobody currently does. Take notes. Do not propose anything.

Sit with the practice group leaders separately and ask a fourth question — what are the firm's two or three growth bets for the next three years, and what would have to be true for them to work. The answers will tell you where the partner-level energy actually is, which is different from what the strategy deck says.

Read the last two years of the firm's pitches, panel submissions, and directories submissions. They are the most honest record of how the firm describes itself when money is on the line.

Look at what is already in the CRM, the DMS, and the marketing systems. Not to judge it — to understand what data exists and what does not. A new director who arrives and immediately demands a CRM clean-up has made an enemy of the partners by week three.

Days 31-60: pick two or three immediate wins

By the second month, the listening will have surfaced two or three things that are obviously broken and obviously fixable. Not the strategic things — those wait. The mechanical things.

Common candidates. A pitch process where every partner reinvents the wheel and the win rate is unmeasured. A directories submission cycle that runs on a spreadsheet and three heroic associates. A client listening programme that exists in name only. A referrer network that nobody has mapped. A conference attendance pattern where the firm spends serious money and produces no follow-up.

Pick two. Three at most. Fix them visibly in the second month, with named partner sponsors and with clear before-and-after metrics. The point is not the metrics — the point is that by the end of month two, the partners can see that the new director has produced something tangible that they did not have before. Credibility from this point on becomes a different conversation.

Days 61-100: lay the foundation for the year

The third month is when the strategic work starts, on the foundation of the credibility built in the first two.

The foundation has three pieces. A BD operating rhythm that the firm will actually follow — what gets reviewed monthly, what gets reviewed quarterly, who owns what. A target client and prospect list that the partners have signed up to, not one the BD director has imposed. And a technology and data posture that the firm will live with for years — which probably means consolidating around a CRM that is treated as an operating system rather than a glorified address book.

This is also the moment to think about what AI and BD platforms the firm will adopt. The IP world has its own constraints — confidentiality, conflicts, data residency for European clients, the particular sensitivity of patent portfolios. A platform like LeadLex, which keeps data on EU-sovereign infrastructure and is built specifically for the BD function rather than for legal-substance work, fits the constraint set in a way that generic horizontal tools usually do not. Lexi, the AI agent inside LeadLex, sits alongside whatever research or drafting tools the lawyers are using — she does BD, not legal work, and that boundary is part of why partners accept her.

Three traps to avoid

The CRM trap. Do not promise the partners that you will clean up the CRM in the first hundred days. You will not, and the promise will define you.

The strategy-deck trap. Do not produce a fifty-page BD strategy in the first quarter. Produce a one-page operating rhythm and a target list. The deck can come later if anyone still wants it.

The hero trap. Do not try to do the BD yourself. Your job is to make the partners better at it, not to be the BD output of the firm. A director who becomes the single point of failure is a director who is doing the wrong job.

The first hundred days set the tone for the next three years. Listening, two visible wins, and a foundation worth building on — that is the whole brief.

Related: The Managing-Partner Adoption Playbook. Practice-Group Leader BD Ownership. BD Reporting That Managing Partners Actually Read.