By: Toni Jaeger-Fine
In my book, Becoming a Lawyer: Discovering and Defining Your Professional Persona, I develop the concept of a professional persona and explain how it contributes to our role as legal professionals.
The legal professional persona, as I frame it, is premised on three principal elements: fundamentals, self-management, and relationships. Fundamentals include competence development, the importance of habit formation and internalization, social and emotional intelligence, and leadership as a mindset. Self-management (professionalism from within) embraces mindset and dispositions, a commitment to excellence, character, and wellbeing and sustainability. Finally, relationships (professionalism as expressed externally) include working with others, talent management, development and retention, and the public professional persona.
This article argues that a lawyer’s professional persona is no longer merely an aspect of professionalism but has become a significant competitive differentiator in the legal services market, particularly when it comes to client development. In an environment in which technical expertise is increasingly expected and legal services are becoming more transparent, sophisticated clients often distinguish among lawyers based not only on what they know, but on how they engage. A strong professional persona fosters trust, strengthens relationships, enhances client retention, generates referrals, and ultimately contributes to business development. Developing a sustainable professional persona is therefore not separate from client development – it is an essential component of it.
What Is Client Development?
Client development consists of three distinct but interrelated elements: marketing, business development, and branding.
Marketing focuses on communicating and creating broad-based awareness of a lawyer’s services and capabilities to the right audiences. This enlarges brand recognition, which in turn generates qualified leads that ultimately can be converted into clients.
Business development is more targeted and is fundamentally relational. Building on the awareness and interest in the firm or attorney created by marketing, business development converts that awareness into relationships and ultimately revenue. Business development activities may include networking, thought leadership, cross-selling, and constructing client-specific strategies.
Marketing and business development must rely on and reinforce an attorney’s brand, a consistent image and reputation that reflects a lawyer’s values, strengths, and expertise. In all of these activities, an individual’s professional persona has great currency and becomes a significant personal asset and an integral element of market positioning.
Why Client Development?
Client development is increasingly important for attorneys and firms of all sizes. In many law firms, client and matter origination is a major component of compensation, and in all cases the ability to develop business is a signal of respect, both internally and externally.
Client development is also essential for professional sustainability. In recent years, competition for legal services has intensified, a function of increasing competition among law firms, the rise of unbundling and alternative service providers, technological advancements that promote transparency and enable greater self-help, and the rise of increasingly sophisticated and capable in-house legal departments.
With pressure on in-house counsel to do more with less, repeat business is not assured, even following successful engagements. Accordingly, it is crucial that each attorney have a disciplined approach to client development.
What About Technical Expertise?
Technical expertise remains necessary but is insufficient. Today’s consumers of legal services are more sophisticated and discerning than ever. Technical competence and subject-matter expertise are baseline expectations, what one colleague of mine calls “table stakes.”
Clients retain lawyers not only for their legal expertise. There are plenty of lawyers with those skills in abundance. What clients really look for is a lawyer with whom they feel comfortable, someone they trust, and someone who genuinely understands their concerns, priorities, pain points, risk tolerance, and the larger commercial environments in which they operate.
The Legal Professional Persona as Key Differentiator
All this brings me to a point that should by now be obvious: tomorrow’s lawyers will continue to differentiate themselves through outstanding expertise, exceptional judgment, and creative problem-solving capability, but these differentiators may increasingly be found only at the margins.
While it is too soon to be certain, there is evidence to suggest that the growing use of generative artificial intelligence in law practice will lead to a further convergence of much legal work.
This suggests that differentiators will be found less and less in work product and more and more in the personal qualities that define each of us – our professional persona. These elements of professional identity will increasingly be the features that define an attorney’s ability to attract and retain business.
The Relational Lawyer
We now understand that legal services are fundamentally relational. Clients evaluate lawyers not only on the quality of the legal advice they provide, but also on the strength of the relationship they build. Successful and enduring client relationships are built through trust, responsiveness, dedication, candor, and a host of other attributes associated with a strong and sustainable professional persona.
The most successful firms and attorneys recognize that legal services are not simply products delivered to clients, but client-centered relationships cultivated over time.
A clear and coherent professional identity results in reputational clarity and helps clients remember the lawyer, describe the lawyer to others, and understand what working with that lawyer feels like.
Authenticity
In today’s market for legal services, there is much greater room than before for individual differences and personalities. Clients increasingly respond positively to lawyers who appear human, grounded, and genuine rather than overly performative or excessively corporate. Particularly in long-term client relationships, trust often depends on whether the lawyer feels real.
A strong professional persona is not a manufactured brand detached from the individual. The most effective personas are extensions of genuine strengths, values, and ways of engaging. Attempts to project a style that is not our own generally feel artificial, are unsustainable, and may lead to persona fragmentation – having an external identity that is misaligned with internal identity or multiple external identities that are not aligned with one another.
This requires performative professionalism, which can lead to exhaustion. Ultimately, it will undermine efforts to be authentic. Clients and others can often detect inconsistency or a persona that feels overly calculated or unstable.
The most sustainable professional personas are integrated rather than constructed. They allow lawyers to remain recognizably themselves across contexts while still adapting appropriately to professional demands and contexts.
Professional Persona as Relationship Capital
As the poet Maya Angelou famously wrote, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Clients, too, remember how a lawyer made them feel, whether the lawyer inspired confidence, felt like a partner in addressing the client’s challenges, communicated effectively, and demonstrated trustworthiness. These relational impressions accumulate over time and develop enduring commercial value.
The Internal Market for Business Development
Your professional persona can also influence your ability to generate business within the firm.
Internal business development may sound like an oxymoron, but it is not. Lawyers who develop strong internal reputations for collaboration, mentorship, responsiveness, leadership, or innovation are often more likely to receive referrals from colleagues. Internal trust is a major driver of cross-selling and institutional business development.
A robust professional persona can therefore significantly influence a lawyer’s access to major matters, leadership roles, mentorship and sponsorship opportunities, introductions to clients, and overall long-term career advancement.
Conclusion
Technical expertise, sound judgment, and the ability to deliver excellent legal work remain essential. They are, however, increasingly expected. In a competitive legal market, clients frequently distinguish among lawyers based on factors that are less tangible but no less important: trust, responsiveness, authenticity, empathy, reliability, and the quality of the relationship itself.
Your professional persona is therefore not peripheral to business development, nor is it simply an aspect of professionalism. It is a key strategic asset. It influences how clients experience legal services, whether they return with future matters, whether they recommend you to others, and whether colleagues entrust you with opportunities. As legal expertise becomes more widely available and increasingly difficult to distinguish, the lawyer’s professional persona may become one of the most important and enduring differentiators in the legal services market.
Senior Counselor, Fordham Law School; Principal, Jaeger-Fine Consulting. Toni has written numerous articles and books, including Becoming a lawyer: Discovering and Defining Your Professional Persona (2d. ed. 2023) and Next Gen Law Firm Management (forthcoming 2026) (with Amadeu Ribero).