Built for Law Firm Business Development

The CRM law firm BD professionals originate matters out of.

Business Development professionals at law firms carry a number against new matter origination, lateral partner books, cross-practice referrals, and institutional client expansion where the sales cycle runs 6 to 18 months and the pipeline is held together by relationship maps, pitch decks, RFP responses, conflict checks, and engagement letters. The CRM has to hold the pitch, the matter scope, the fee arrangement, the conflict clearance, and the engagement letter on one record.

Start free trial See pricing
Why buyers are here

Law Firms Business Development: the daily pains.

The law firm BD job runs on a different clock than any other B2B sales motion. A matter origination opportunity has no price list, no seat count, and no MSA template that fits across clients. It has a general counsel who was referred by a sitting partner, a practice group lead who needs to approve the pitch, a conflict check that can kill the deal in week two, a fee arrangement that may be hourly, flat, hybrid, success-based, or an alternative fee the firm has never run before, and an engagement letter that Risk Management reviews line by line. The BD professional at a 50 to 2,000 lawyer firm is almost always running a shared pipeline with multiple originating partners, each with their own book, their own practice group bias, their own view of what "qualified" means, and their own objection to logging activity in a CRM. The common stack is InterAction, LexisNexis InterAction, Foundation, OnePlace, or ContactEase for the firm-wide CRM, Excel for the matter forecast, SharePoint for pitch decks and RFPs, and the conflict system (Intapp, Elite, Aderant) running in parallel with no handshake to the CRM. The sections below show how Strkr collapses that into one workspace with the Products module holding matter scope and fee arrangement natively, DocuSign and Adobe Sign as engagement letter integrations, conflict-aware intake routing, and partner-level forecast across every practice group.

Partner-logged activity drought

Partners will not log anything in a CRM.

Every law firm BD team has the same problem. Originating partners refuse to log calls, meetings, pitches, and client intel into the firm CRM because the system is slow, the mobile experience is broken, and the fields do not match how a partner thinks about a client. The result is a pipeline that lives in the partner head, a forecast that is a monthly guessing game, and a BD team doing archaeology after every pitch. Strkr ships native Gmail and Microsoft 365 sync that auto-logs email and calendar on every account without a partner touching the CRM, mobile-first capture with voice-note dictation for the partner walking out of a client dinner, and role-aware views so a partner sees the three fields that matter instead of the 40 fields the admin shipped.

Matter scope ambiguity

The pitch promises everything, the engagement letter promises nothing.

A law firm BD pitch moves from a referral conversation to a scope conversation across six months, with the practice group lead revising scope twice, the client general counsel asking three fee structure questions, and the Risk team flagging a conflict in week eight. The CRM has nowhere to hold the current matter scope version, the current fee arrangement, or the current engagement letter draft. Strkr holds matter scope on the Products module with scope components, fee basis (hourly, flat, hybrid, success, AFA), rate per timekeeper role, retainer, and estimated matter value visible to the originating partner, the practice group lead, and the Risk reviewer before signature.

Conflict check as a dead end

Half my pipeline dies on a conflict check I did not see coming.

A matter opportunity moves to Proposal, the partner spends 20 hours on a pitch, the client is ready to engage, and the conflict system flags a positional conflict against a sitting client that nobody caught in Qualification. The matter dies, the partner is angry, and the BD team never saw it on the pipeline. Strkr fires a Flow at Qualification stage entry that pulls the client and adverse-party names from the deal record, runs a pre-check against Intapp Open or the firm conflict system, and surfaces the result on the deal record before the partner spends another hour on the pitch.

Cross-practice referral invisibility

I never know when my client needs another practice group.

The highest-leverage origination at a full-service firm is cross-practice referral. A litigation partner should be able to see that the corporate team is pitching an M and A deal to a shared client, a trusts and estates partner should flag the real estate team into a succession planning conversation, and the entire firm should map the relationship graph across every practice. Legacy CRMs render that as a static org chart that nobody updates. Strkr renders cross-practice coverage on the account record with live matter history, open opportunities across every practice group, and the originating partner for each engagement.

RFP response treadmill

Every RFP is a cold rebuild from pitch deck archaeology.

A law firm BD professional spends 30 percent of a quarter responding to RFPs and panel submissions. Every response starts with a SharePoint hunt for the most recent version of the firm overview, the practice group experience statement, the diversity statistics, the matter list for the practice area, and the biography slides for the proposed matter team. Strkr holds pitch artifacts, matter history, timekeeper bios, and firm boilerplate on the account record and the practice group template, with Strkr AI drafting the first pass of the RFP response from the discovery notes and historical pricing.

Lateral partner book integration

A lateral partner joins and the book stays in a Rolodex.

A lateral partner joins the firm with a book of 80 institutional clients, 300 active matters, and a 15 year relationship history. The firm CRM has no path to onboard that book without a 3 month manual import. Strkr ships a lateral integration workflow with native import for contacts, accounts, matter history, and timekeeper time entries, plus a conflict-reconciliation layer that merges the lateral book against the firm existing client base before the partner week one. The lateral is productive from day one instead of month four.

How Strkr fits the law firm BD day

The primitives law firm BD professionals actually run origination on.

Strkr for law firm Business Development ships the same CRM every other role at the firm runs, with role-aware views shaped around matter origination motion. The primitives below line up with the BD weekly motion on a 6 to 18 month origination cycle: lead qualification from referral through client discovery, pitch and RFP drafting with partner review, conflict check at Qualification entry, fee arrangement on the Products module, engagement letter through DocuSign or Adobe Sign, and the post-close hand-off into matter intake and the firm practice management system.

Pipeline board

Matter origination deals on one board.

Column-per-stage board grouped by originating partner, practice group, matter type, fee basis, or close month. Drag a deal between stages and the flow runs entry criteria for the required conflict pre-check, surfaces the missing pitch artifact, and prompts the next-step date. The BD team builds the view that matches today, not the view the admin shipped a quarter ago.

Account record

One record holds the whole client relationship.

The account record pulls in client contacts, outside counsel panel positions, matter history across every practice group, open opportunities, pitch artifacts, Slack threads, engagement letter versions, and conflict clearances. A role-aware sidebar renders origination fields for the BD team, practice fields for the partner, and risk fields for the Conflicts and Risk teams on the same record without a tab switch.

Products module

Matter scope and fee arrangement on the deal, native.

The native Products module holds every matter component on the deal record with fee basis (hourly, flat, hybrid, success, AFA), hours per timekeeper role, blended rate, retainer, discount, and estimated matter value. The BD professional builds the scope on the deal, the practice group lead reviews timekeeper roles and rates, the Risk team confirms the fee arrangement is approved, and the signed engagement letter carries the exact scope into matter intake at Closed Won.

Engagement letter integrations

DocuSign and Adobe Sign on every matter.

Draft the engagement letter from the Products scope and fee arrangement on the deal, route through DocuSign or Adobe Sign, and the signed PDF returns to the deal with the stage auto-bumping to Closed Won. The firm keeps the signature tool it already pays for and the BD team stops shuttling signed engagement letters between email, SharePoint, and the practice management system.

Call and meeting capture

Pitch meetings and client calls on the record.

Click-to-join every client meeting on the deal, auto-record where client consent is captured, and Strkr AI drafts the summary with scope answers, objection themes, and partner commitments extracted. The BD professional edits the draft in 90 seconds and the record is live. The follow-up email template pre-fills with the next step the meeting captured. Partners get the summary in their inbox 15 minutes after the pitch.

Email and calendar

Thread sync and auto-logging on every account.

Native Gmail and Microsoft 365 sync. Every email, meeting, and calendar event lands on the account and deal timeline with role-aware visibility and ethical-wall respect. Partners never touch the CRM to see their client thread history show up on the record. The BD team sees the full relationship context without ever asking the partner for a Monday morning dump.

Sequence and mobile

Cadences and offline edit on the phone.

Native sequencing covers referral follow-up, panel-submission outreach, and client-event invitations with reply detection that pauses on response. Strkr mobile is first-class with offline queue, voice-note capture, and pipeline edit for the partner walking out of a client dinner. The BD team captures the color of the dinner conversation on the account record before the partner has returned to the hotel.

Matter scope and pitch workflow built for law firms

The pitch conversation lives on the deal, not in SharePoint.

The pitch conversation is the deal for a law firm BD professional. BD moves a matter opportunity from Qualification to Proposal with a line-by-line scope that the practice group lead can staff, the pricing committee can margin, the Risk reviewer can clear for fee arrangement, and the client general counsel can approve inside a specific engagement letter version. Strkr holds every piece of that conversation on the deal with the Products module as the backbone, DocuSign and Adobe Sign as the signature integrations, and Strkr AI as the drafting assistant for the first-pass pitch deck, RFP response, and engagement letter.

Matter scope components

Scope, phases, and bolt-ons on one deal.

The Products module carries matter scope as phased deliverables (discovery, drafting, negotiation, closing, post-closing), each with timekeeper role, hours, blended rate, markup, and estimated value. Flip a phase from hourly to flat fee or add an AFA structure and the forecast math is instant. The practice group lead reviews the staffing and rate assumptions on the deal, not in a parallel Excel.

Pitch versions tracked

Every pitch iteration is on the deal, not in email.

Draft the pitch v1, send to the client, revise to v2 after the scope call, add a comparable matter list in v3. Each version lives on the deal with timestamp, author, and the client comment that triggered the change. The originating partner reviews the version the client is actually seeing, not the version the associate sent two weeks ago.

Internal review routing

Practice group, Pricing, and Risk on the same record.

A deal moving from Proposal to Closed Won routes a scope review to the practice group lead, a pricing review to the firm pricing committee for non-standard fee arrangements, and an engagement letter review to Risk Management where required. Each reviewer sees the role-aware view of the record and comments inline on the Products matter components instead of three separate meetings and a chain of PDF redlines.

Strkr AI pitch draft

A first draft of the pitch off the discovery notes.

Strkr AI reads the discovery call summary, the client public filings, the matter history on comparable accounts, and the firm practice group boilerplate, and drafts a first-pass pitch deck with the recommended fee structure, timekeeper team, matter approach, and comparable experience statement. The BD professional edits the draft in 20 minutes and routes to the originating partner the same day instead of the normal 5 day pitch build.

RFP response acceleration

Panel submissions and RFPs draft from the account record.

An RFP arrives from a Fortune 500 general counsel office. Strkr AI pulls the firm boilerplate, the practice group experience statement, the diversity and inclusion statistics, the matter list for the relevant practice, and the biography slides for the proposed matter team, and drafts a first-pass response. The BD team edits for client fit instead of hunting SharePoint for the most recent version of every component.

Fee arrangement library

The firm fee structures are one source of truth.

The Products module holds the firm fee arrangement library (standard hourly rates by timekeeper role, approved flat fee templates by matter type, standard retainer sizes, approved AFA structures, discount bands) as a template library the BD team pulls from on every pitch. A new BD professional builds a scope on day one with the same math every senior originator uses.

Approval thresholds

Non-standard fee arrangements route automatically.

A fee arrangement outside the standard rate card, a retainer past a size threshold, an AFA structure the firm has not run before, a discount past the approved band, or a matter type outside the practice group standard offering fires a Strkr Flow that routes the deal to the practice group lead, the pricing committee, or the firm managing partner for sign-off. The firm never finds a non-standard commitment in a signed engagement letter after the fact.

Audit trail on every scope move

Who changed what, and when.

Every matter component added, every rate adjustment, every fee structure flip, and every engagement letter markup lives on the audit log with timestamp, author, and reason code where required. The BD team answers the client question about pitch version 2 versus version 3 from the record, not from a SharePoint revision history scroll. Risk Management traces every fee-structure change back to the person who approved it.

Flows for the law firm BD motion

Automations across qualification, conflict, pitch, close, and matter intake.

The best law firm BD teams automate the administrative drag between stages and spend their hours on the three origination conversations where partner judgment matters most. Strkr Flows cover the automations every law firm BD team should run as native triggers with no webhook plumbing. The pattern below compounds into a cleaner matter origination pipeline, a faster pitch turnaround, a conflict check that fires before the partner invests the week, and a matter intake hand-off that does not drop the context the BD team spent 9 months building.

Stage entry criteria

A deal cannot move without the required artifact.

A deal moving from Lead to Qualification needs a referral source, a decision-maker, a practice group tag, and an initial conflict pre-check. Qualification to Proposal needs a Products matter scope, a close date estimate, a staffing confirmation from the practice group lead, and a cleared conflict check. Strkr enforces entry criteria at the stage transition with inline prompts for the missing field.

Conflict pre-check at Qualification

Conflict runs before the pitch, not after.

A deal moving to Qualification fires a flow that pulls the client name, adverse-party names, and matter type from the deal record, runs a pre-check against the firm conflict system (Intapp Open, Elite, Aderant), and surfaces the result on the deal record. A positional conflict, a direct conflict, or a prior adverse representation flags on the deal before the partner invests another hour on the pitch.

Pitch staleness nudge

Stale pitches surface before the partner review.

Daily flow checks the pitch versions on every open deal. If no new version has landed in 10 days on an active Proposal stage deal, the record surfaces on the BD triage view. The BD professional nudges the client, routes to the originating partner for a check-in call, or confirms the matter is dead instead of letting it rot through two forecast cycles.

Approval auto-route

Non-standard scope and fees route before the client sees it.

A fee arrangement outside the standard rate card, a retainer past the size threshold, an AFA structure the firm has not run before, a discount past the approved band, or a matter type outside the standard offering fires a flow that routes the deal to the practice group lead, pricing committee, or managing partner for sign-off before the BD team sends the pitch. The BD professional never guesses who to ping.

Pitch sent

Pitch fires the DocuSign draft and schedules follow-up.

Move the deal to Proposal and the flow drafts the engagement letter from the Products scope and fee arrangement, stages it in DocuSign or Adobe Sign for client signature review, routes to the originating partner for the final review, and schedules a 72 hour follow-up task on the deal. The BD team never forgets to chase the signature.

Engagement letter markup return

Client markup returns and the record shows the diff.

The client general counsel returns a redlined engagement letter. The flow stores the artifact, pings the firm Risk Management reviewer for sign-off on the client-requested changes, and surfaces the diff on the deal timeline. The engagement letter review cycle shrinks from a week of email ping-pong to a 48 hour turnaround.

Signature returned

Signed engagement letter bumps the stage and fires matter intake.

DocuSign or Adobe Sign returns the signed engagement letter. The flow stores the artifact, flips the stage to Closed Won, pings the firm new matter intake team, pushes the matter components to the practice management system (Elite, Aderant, Centerbase), and notifies the originating partner. The BD team moves on to the next origination without a status email thread.

Closed Won hand-off

Matter opens in the firm practice system with context carried over.

At Closed Won, a flow creates a new matter in the practice management system, maps the Products scope components to the matter budget, auto-generates the matter number and billing codes, assigns the matter team per the staffing plan, and surfaces the matter on the account record. The hand-off is a status change, not a 30 minute rebuild between BD, intake, and the practice group.

Head-to-head

Strkr for law firm BD vs the InterAction + SharePoint + Excel stack.

A typical law firm BD stack runs InterAction, Foundation, OnePlace, or ContactEase for the firm-wide CRM, Excel for the matter forecast, SharePoint for pitch decks and RFP responses, DocuSign or Adobe Sign for engagement letters, and the conflict system (Intapp, Elite, Aderant) running in parallel with no handshake. Strkr collapses that into one workspace with the Products module holding matter scope and fee arrangement natively, DocuSign and Adobe Sign as native integrations, conflict pre-check at Qualification stage entry, and partner-level forecast across every practice group.

What matters Strkr InterAction + SharePoint + Excel + conflict system
Number of tools law firm BD opens daily 1 (Strkr) 5 to 7 (CRM, SharePoint, Excel, signature tool, conflict system, practice management, Outlook)
Matter scope and fee arrangement on the deal Native Products module with phased scope, timekeeper roles, and fee basis per component Separate pitch deck in SharePoint, Excel for forecast math, no CRM record of fee structure
Partner activity logging Auto-logged via native Gmail and Microsoft 365 sync, mobile voice-note capture Partners refuse to log, pipeline lives in partner head, BD does archaeology after pitches
Conflict check timing Pre-check fires at Qualification stage entry, result on the deal before week one Conflict runs at engagement letter stage, 20 hours of partner time already invested
Pitch and RFP drafting Strkr AI drafts first-pass pitch and RFP response from account record and practice group boilerplate Manual SharePoint hunt, 5 day pitch build, no reuse across similar matters
Engagement letter signature DocuSign and Adobe Sign native with signed artifacts stored on the deal SharePoint for drafts, DocuSign bolted on, signed engagement letter emailed to intake
Cross-practice referral visibility Live account record with every open opportunity and matter history across every practice group Static org chart nobody updates, cross-practice referrals missed structurally
Approval routing on non-standard fees Strkr Flow routes practice group lead, pricing committee, or managing partner before client sees pitch Manual email chain, non-standard commitment found in signed engagement letter after the fact
Lateral partner book onboarding Native import with conflict reconciliation, lateral productive from week one Three month manual import, lateral book stays in a Rolodex until month four
Admin changes to pipeline Self-serve for BD team and practice group lead inside the permission matrix InterAction admin queue, firm IT prioritization, 4 to 8 week lead time on a new field

See the CRM law firm BD professionals actually originate matters in.

Start a 14 day trial with the full law firm BD stack enabled: pipeline board for matter origination deals, Products module for matter scope and fee arrangement, DocuSign and Adobe Sign for engagement letter signature, Strkr AI for first-pass pitch and RFP drafts, Flows for referral through Closed Won, conflict pre-check at Qualification stage entry, and the post-close hand-off into the firm practice management system. The pricing page lays out the per-seat line in full, and the sales-forecast feature page shows the forecast surface for matter revenue across practice groups if that is the piece to pressure-test first.

See pricing Explore the forecast
Common questions

Law Firms Business Development buyer FAQ.

Does Strkr work for a 150 lawyer regional firm, or is this built for BigLaw?

Strkr is built for law firms in the 50 to 2,000 lawyer range running matter origination motion. The sales-first primitives (pipeline board, account record, Products module for matter scope, self-serve custom fields and Flows) do not need a dedicated CRM admin to run. A 150 lawyer regional firm gets the same workspace a 1,500 lawyer BigLaw practice runs, with role-aware views so the BD team sees origination mode, the practice group lead sees staffing mode, and the Risk team sees fee-structure mode on the same account record. The firm picks the practice groups, fee arrangement library, and conflict system handshake that fit the firm, not a template built for a competitor.

How does the Products module handle hourly, flat, hybrid, success, and alternative fee arrangements?

The Products module carries matter scope on the deal with fee basis per phase (hourly, flat, hybrid, success, AFA), timekeeper role per component (partner, counsel, senior associate, mid-level associate, junior associate, paralegal), hours per role, blended rate, retainer, discount, and estimated matter value. The forecast report pulls hourly matter revenue, flat-fee matter revenue, and AFA realization off the same deal record without a parallel Excel. The practice group lead reviews the staffing and rate assumptions before signature, the pricing committee confirms margin on non-standard AFAs, and the signed engagement letter carries the exact scope into matter intake at Closed Won so the matter team is staffing against the fee arrangement the client actually signed.

Can Strkr replace InterAction, Foundation, OnePlace, or ContactEase?

Strkr replaces the fragmented firm-wide CRM that lives across InterAction or ContactEase, the SharePoint pitch archive, the Excel matter forecast, and the parallel conflict system. The Products module on the deal is the single source of truth for matter scope and fee arrangement. DocuSign and Adobe Sign are the native signature integrations. The conflict system (Intapp Open, Elite, Aderant) integrates for the Qualification stage pre-check. The firm keeps the practice management system (Elite, Aderant, Centerbase) for billing and matter accounting, and Strkr pushes the signed matter components into it at Closed Won through a native handshake. The firm consolidates five tools into one with a cleaner audit trail and a partner experience that actually drives activity logging.

How does the conflict pre-check work at Qualification stage?

A deal moving to Qualification fires a Strkr Flow that pulls the client name, adverse-party names, practice group, and matter type from the deal record, runs a pre-check against the firm conflict system (Intapp Open, Elite, or Aderant), and surfaces the result on the deal record within minutes. A positional conflict against a sitting client, a direct adverse representation, or an ethical-wall requirement flags on the deal before the originating partner invests another hour on the pitch. The pre-check is advisory, not a replacement for the formal conflict clearance that runs at matter intake, but it kills the obvious dead-ends before week one instead of week eight.

How does the post-close hand-off work when the matter opens in the practice management system?

At Closed Won, a Strkr Flow creates a new matter in the practice management system (Elite, Aderant, Centerbase, or Clio Manage for smaller firms), maps the Products matter components to the matter budget, auto-generates the matter number and billing codes per the firm matter-opening policy, assigns the matter team per the staffing plan the practice group lead approved, and surfaces the matter on the account record. The originating partner, the matter billing attorney, the matter team, the firm intake team, and the Risk Management reviewer all see the same matter context without a 30 minute rebuild between BD, intake, and the practice group. The context the BD team spent 9 months building compounds into the matter delivery relationship instead of resetting at the engagement letter signature.

Why not just use HubSpot, Salesforce, or Microsoft Dynamics for a law firm pipeline?

HubSpot and Salesforce were built for SaaS and B2B sales motion with primitives (lifecycle stages, lead score, nurture emails, MQL to SQL funnel) that do not match matter origination. Microsoft Dynamics is closer but still requires 6 to 12 months of implementation to layer a law-firm-shaped data model on top. A 50 to 2,000 lawyer firm does not have the admin bandwidth or the willingness to run a 12 month Salesforce implementation against a partner population that will not log activity in a non-native CRM. Strkr is sales-first with the Products module built for matter scope and fee arrangement, Flows self-serve for the BD team and practice group lead, conflict-aware intake, and native integrations for DocuSign, Adobe Sign, Intapp Open, Elite, Aderant, and Centerbase. The firm ships a working BD workspace in weeks, not quarters.

Also considering

Related combinations.

Professional Services Account Executives Professional Services Sales Managers Professional Services Account Managers Professional Services Founders Consulting Firm Account Executives Consulting Firm Managing Partners

Try it free. Bring your team next week.

No sales call, no migration consultant, no four-month implementation. Enter your card, get 14 days of the full Pro tier, cancel any time before day 14 with zero charge. Spin up a workspace, import your CSV, and have something useful before lunch.

Start free trial See pricing