Many lawyers approach business development the way a squirrel crosses a road: darting forward, freezing, second-guessing, turning back, and lurching forward again with no clear plan.
Steve Fretzin, a business development coach who works exclusively with attorneys, uses this image to diagnose one of the most persistent problems in legal careers today.
Fretzin, a five-time bestselling author and host of the BE THAT LAWYER and Future Rainmakers podcasts, has spent more than 18 years helping lawyers build stronger books of business.
His central argument is straightforward: the biggest obstacle for most attorneys is not a lack of talent, but a dangerous dependency on others for work.
Service partners and senior associates often find themselves beholden to multiple partners above them, juggling 5, 10, or even 15 clients across different matters simultaneously.
“In some ways, it can feel like having 20 bosses and very little control,” Fretzin writes, describing a career structure that leaves lawyers exposed and without genuine independence.
The lawyers he works with consistently report the same desires: more freedom, more control over their time and income, and greater authority over the direction of their careers.
Fretzin argues those outcomes rarely come from doing excellent legal work alone, and instead flow from relationships, reputation, and a sustainable book of business built over time.
The squirrel analogy extends beyond indecision to the broader problem of misdirected energy, where attorneys attend random lunches, events, conferences, and online conversations without a coherent strategy behind any of it.
“That is how lawyers waste years,” Fretzin writes, warning that activity without direction produces nothing measurable and erodes the time lawyers could spend building genuine professional relationships.
His prescription involves three clear decisions that any attorney can make regardless of their current seniority, firm size, or practice area specialism.
The first is to decide that building a personal book of business genuinely matters, not because a firm mandates it, but because ownership of client relationships creates real career freedom.
The second decision is to become a student of business development itself, studying how rainmakers think, how they build visibility, how they generate referrals, and how they convert trust into actual opportunities.
The third is to find a repeatable system and commit to it fully, since, as Fretzin puts it, “random action creates random results” while a consistent process builds genuine momentum over time.
Fretzin developed his own methodology, which he calls Sales-Free Selling, and runs the BE THAT LAWYER Community to give attorneys a structured environment for developing skills that law school never teaches.
For lawyers whose goal is equity partnership, a million-dollar book, or simply greater security in their current role, Fretzin is clear that the path forward will not appear by accident.