Client Development
Best practices from 27 law firm experts
For Law Firm Leadership Teams
Custom-designed retreats and offsites (live, virtual, and hybrid), facilitated by the team that has helped law firms run their most consequential meetings for thirty years. Engineered to produce real decisions, deeper alignment, and the kind of follow-through that turns a great session into measurable results.
Facilitated by
David H. Freeman, JD
#1 BD Coach · NLJ Hall of Fame
Live + Virtual + Hybrid
Formats for every program
Designed for Law Firms
Audience-tuned facilitation
Hundreds Facilitated
Across firms of every size
Implementation-First
Built to drive action
Multi-day live retreats
Virtual & hybrid programs
Leadership & team offsites
We've spent thousands of hours studying and refining how to design and deliver retreats that engage, inspire, and drive implementation, across both live and virtual formats. What follows is what we've learned to do consistently well.
01
Cracked the code on virtual
“Online can be better than the room.”
Breakout rooms, spaced learning, cohort groups, flipped classrooms, polling, quizzes, and live simulations, used together so that virtual retreats often outperform a one-time live offsite.
02
Made for the legal profession
“We speak lawyer.”
Every session is tuned for the audience: partners, associates, leadership teams, marketing and BD professionals. A former lawyer himself, David designs programs that actually land with the people in the room.
03
Designed around implementation
“The fortune is in the follow-up.”
Retreats are designed as launch points, not one-off events. Every session ends with commitments, owners, and a clear path to measurable action in the weeks that follow.
04
Engagement by design
“If they're not participating, they're not learning.”
Interactivity, peer-to-peer connection, and structured accountability are built into every program, so participants leave energized, aligned, and personally invested in the next steps.
Every retreat is custom-designed around your audience and your objectives. The formats below are the engagements we run most often, each can be delivered live, virtually, or as a hybrid program.
Flagship offsite
Leadership Retreats
Multi-day retreats for managing partners, executive committees, and practice group leaders to set strategy, align priorities, and commit to the year ahead.
Pre-retreat planning with leadership
Custom theme and agenda
Strategic decisions and votes captured
Post-retreat implementation support
For top originators
Rainmaker Retreats
High-intensity retreats designed for the firm's most ambitious revenue generators, to sharpen strategy, accelerate plans, and build peer accountability.
Personal BD plans refined together
Peer coaching among rainmakers
Specific tactical priorities for Q+1
Ongoing accountability cadence
For groups & teams
Strategic Planning Workshops
Facilitated sessions for practice groups, industry teams, and offices to clarify goals, prioritize initiatives, and build a credible plan to execute against.
Goals, targets, and measures clarified
Initiative prioritization framework
Owners and timelines for each
Optional follow-up coaching cycle
Firm-wide or by group
Team Alignment Retreats
Sessions designed to surface what is working, what is not, and what needs to change, across practice groups, offices, or the whole firm.
Anonymous pre-retreat input
Issues surfaced and worked through live
Cross-group connections reinforced
Commitments captured for follow-through
Skill-building sessions
Business Development Workshops
Focused BD training sessions on cross-selling, client service, referral generation, personal branding, and rainmaking, delivered with David's signature style.
Topic tailored to your firm's priorities
Interactive, application-based
Worksheets and frameworks provided
Optional follow-up coaching
Online-first design
Virtual & Hybrid Programs
Hyper-targeted virtual programs by experience level, practice, office, or client team, built using modern remote facilitation techniques.
Spaced learning across weeks or months
Breakout rooms and cohort groups
Polling, quizzes, and simulations
Save travel, time, and billable hours
Executed with the right methods, a virtual retreat produces deeper learning, stronger connection, and more sustainable accountability than a one-time live event, at a fraction of the cost.
Save time & money
Firms can recover hundreds, even thousands of lost billable hours, and eliminate airfare, hotel, transportation, and food costs without sacrificing the quality of the experience.
Focused content
Rather than packing a generalist agenda for everyone, run independent, hyper-targeted sessions custom-designed for specific groups, by experience level, practice, office, or client team.
Better outcomes
Spaced learning over several weeks beats a single-day firehose, producing fuller understanding, time to practice, stronger connections, and more sustained accountability.
We work with retreat planning teams to develop overarching themes aligned to your most important goals, then build content around the specific topics and decisions you need to advance.
Speaking topics
01
Mastering the Art of Cross-Selling
02
The Five Habits of Successful Business Development
03
Activating More Referrals
04
Crafting Powerful Personal Brands
05
Turning Client Service into Client Matters
06
Developing Revenue-Focused Leaders
Facilitated planning sessions
Going from Good to Great.
Taking Control of Our Future.
Creating a Culture of Business Development.
These are starting points. Every theme is co-designed with your planning team to fit the moment your firm is in.
Our engagement model is built end-to-end, from design through facilitation through follow-through, so the work continues to produce results long after the room empties.
Phase 01
Discovery
We meet with the planning team to understand the audience, the moment, and the outcomes you need this retreat to produce.
Phase 02
Theme & Design
We develop an overarching theme and a session-by-session design tied directly to your most important goals.
Phase 03
Pre-Work
Anonymous input, pre-reads, and short prep exercises so participants arrive ready to contribute, not just listen.
Phase 04
Live Facilitation
David personally leads the program: energetic, candid, structured, with the right mix of teaching, breakouts, and live planning.
Phase 05
Commitments
Every participant leaves with specific action items, owners, and timelines. Decisions are captured and circulated to leadership.
Phase 06
Follow-Through
Post-retreat coaching, implementation task forces, and check-ins ensure the work actually happens in the months that follow.
“We couldn't have asked for more.”
David designed and ran an exceptional virtual meeting of our leadership team. He first presented very useful information on how our group leaders could become more effective as sales managers, and then they broke into virtual breakout rooms where they discussed their challenges and received peer coaching. The result was a deeper level of connection between our leaders, new ideas shared, and commitments for action from each of them.
Betsy Beorn Spellman
Former Chief Marketing Officer, Steptoe & Johnson PLLC
Three recent engagements, each different in audience, format, and goal, each ending with specific results captured in the room.
Am Law 200 firm
Two sessions on becoming revenue-focused leaders
Designed and led two seventy-five-minute sessions on how partners can lead like sales managers, combining live training, small-group peer brainstorming, and elicited commitments for action.
Result
Participants left with new leadership techniques, completed peer brainstorming exercises, and personal action steps designed to increase cross-selling and revenue.
Professional Development Consortium
Brainstorming best practices in remote training
Designed, facilitated, and co-led a one-hour brainstorming session with 81 attendees from leading law firms on how to deliver outstanding remote training programs.
Result
Nearly 100 best-practice suggestions captured and compiled into a published guide. An ongoing mastermind group was launched to support continued implementation.
Legal services provider
Strategic planning workshop & repositioning
Designed and facilitated a 90-minute strategic planning workshop for an entire team to reposition their organization and reflect their preeminent place in the market.
Result
Clarified goals, refined brand, identified target markets, prioritized products, and crafted a sales and service plan, with follow-up planning and coaching delivered after the workshop.
“David delivered a tailor-made and extremely motivating pitch training to our partners. The interactive nature of the training made it impossible not to get drawn into the dynamics of the event, everybody was really engaged. Worth every penny.”
Dr. Andreas von Falck
Practice Group Leader, IP, Media & Telecom, Hogan Lovells
“Bringing in David to augment the services our department provides has proved to not only be efficient, but has added to our standing within the firm. His emphasis on continued coaching results in attorneys actually applying their new-found skills and developing business.”
Sarah Fernandez
Director of Marketing & BD, Am Law 100 firm
“David's focus on the fundamentals and his ability to generate concrete action steps and follow through resonates well with our attorneys. Our partnership has resulted in re-energized lawyers generating successful results in relationship building.”
Charles McCallum
Firm leadership, Am Law 200 firm
The decisions made in the room are only the start. We offer ongoing support to make sure your retreat translates into the outcomes it was designed to produce.
01
Implementation task force
We help form and support a post-retreat task force charged with carrying out the decisions made in the room.
02
Coaching for initiative leaders
1:1 coaching for the partners and leaders responsible for the key initiatives launched at the retreat.
03
Leadership training
Additional leadership training and coaching for firm leaders to reinforce the methods introduced in the program.
04
Train-the-trainer
Equip your internal team to extend the work, building a culture of action and accountability that lives beyond any single event.
David's books are used by law firm leaders and lawyers across the profession. Practical guides grounded in decades of work inside the firms that hire Freeman.
16
Books published
2
National bestsellers
30+
Years in print
Client Development
Best practices from 27 law firm experts
Cross-Serving®
Maximize firmwide cross-selling
Leadership
Leading a culture of business development
Founder & Lead Facilitator · Freeman Retreats
A former New York lawyer turned business development expert, David has spent more than thirty years designing and facilitating retreats, planning sessions, and training programs for hundreds of the world's most respected law firms.
Voted the #1 business development coach in the United States by the National Law Journal and inducted into their Hall of Fame, David is the author of sixteen books on business development for lawyers, two of which are bestsellers, and has personally led hundreds of live, virtual, and hybrid retreats over the last three decades.
Tell us what your retreat needs to accomplish. We'll respond within two business days to scope the program, the format, and the right path to execution.
