The Thinking Behind the World's Best Professional Firms. Now Yours to Learn
For decades, the most successful law firms, consulting practices, accounting firms, and advisory businesses have been shaped by one person's ideas. Now, with David Maister's permission, those ideas are available to you in a learning experience built for the way professionals actually work today.
The Authority Behind the Course
David Maister isn't just an academic voice. As a former Harvard Business School professor who spent decades consulting to professional partnerships across six continents, he built his frameworks inside real firms facing real challenges — growth, culture, client trust, profitability, and the relentless pressure to perform.
His books — Managing the Professional Service Firm, True Professionalism, and The Trusted Advisor — aren't just well-regarded. They're dog-eared, underlined, and sitting on the desks of partners and leaders who built careers around his thinking.
Who This Is For
If your work lives at the intersection of expertise and relationships, you'll find this course immediately useful. That means fee earners like lawyers, accountants, consultants, engineers, architects, financial advisors, and bankers — but equally, the business development managers, marketers, client relationship leads, and growth strategists who make professional firms competitive.
Great BD and marketing in professional services isn't just campaigns and collateral. It's trust, positioning, and understanding how clients buy expertise. Maister understood this better than anyone.
You can register for the complete eleven-module series, or choose the individual modules most relevant to you. The modules can be taken at any point within 12 months of purchase.
in partnership with
The BD to Bottom Line Series is built on a single, practical insight: most damage to profitability does not come from poor work or bad decisions. It comes from good work that quietly drifts beyond what was agreed, from habits that were never examined, and from economics that were never fully explained. Together, these courses give professionals a clear understanding of how firms actually make money, what sits between the hours recorded and the fees collected, and why everyday choices around scope, time, billing, and client communication have a far greater impact on margin than most people realise. Rather than focusing on theory, the series develops the commercial language, habits, and judgment that professionals can apply immediately — helping them spot problems earlier, respond more confidently to client and partner pressure, protect realization, and start thinking and acting like someone who understands the business behind the work.
Module 1: The Commercial Mindset — From Hours Recorded to Value Created
Many lawyers are taught to measure their contribution in hours, but clients and firms care most about outcomes, value, and profit. This course helps lawyers develop a genuine commercial mindset: understanding how realisation and margin work, seeing how everyday behaviours create or destroy value, and knowing when and how to raise commercial questions with partners and clients.
Through practical concepts and adaptable scenarios, it shows how to think and act more like an owner while still delivering excellent legal work.
Module 2: Law Firm Economics — From Hours to Realisation and Margin
Many lawyers are taught to judge their performance by hours recorded, but firms only earn money from fees that are billed, collected, and aligned with what clients value. This course demystifies the economics that sit between the timesheet and the firm’s profit and loss. Using simple numbers and practical examples, it shows how realisation and margin work, why write-offs and discounts matter so much, and how lawyers can influence commercial outcomes in everyday work.
Module 3: The Real Cost of Write-Offs, Discounting, and Billing Leakage
Write-offs, discounts, and billing leakage often feel like small, routine decisions, but together they can have a major impact on profitability.
This course helps lawyers understand how margin works in practice, why seemingly minor fee reductions have an outsized financial effect, and how better billing habits can protect both matter economics and firm performance.
These modules can be taken at any point within 12 months of purchase.
Why do this and how to take the first steps, guided by behavioural science
We know that nothing truly impactful happens in CX without the endorsement, buy-in and role modelling from senior leaders.
Skillful 1-1 client conversations, seeking and acting on client feedback to drive relentless improvement, highly responsive and reliable client practices - these things (ideally!) start with senior leaders showing others how it's done.
But many firms leave CX leadership capability to chance.
During this fast-paced and interactive talk, we'll explore why leaving CX leadership capability to chance causes significant issues, and what some firms are doing to resolve these issues.
We'll then outline the steps firms can take to put a CX leadership capability plan in place to achieve lasting CX behavioural change, via the influential attitudes, habits, practices and behaviours of its senior leaders.
During the session we'll also share:
Speakers:
Peter Johnson Consultant
PJ is a client transformation and leadership specialist, helping founders, CEO's and senior client leaders differentiate through well defined, innovative and ambitious client leadership. PJ was recently a judge for the global ICON Client Experience awards, and has published with Oxford University Press on leadership, motivation, culture and behavioural change. He partners with tier 1 universities to advise on leadership curriculum, and to develop and deliver Master's level courses on leadership, critical thinking, collaboration and problem solving in the age of AI.
Event Details:
Date: Thursday, 15 October 2026
Time: 7:30 am – 9:00 am
Location: Beca, 124 Halsey Street, Auckland CBD, Auckland 1010
Price: Members: $40.00 | Non‑members: $90.00
Firms spend heavily on getting client insight right, identifying opportunities and giving partners the information they need to act. Then, too often, the last step doesn’t happen: nobody picks up the phone. For BD professionals, the challenge is not simply identifying the opportunity. It’s influencing the partner to act when you don’t have the authority to make that decision yourself.
At the ICON Conference, you’ll hear directly from clients about what they value and what they look for from their firms. Two weeks later, we’ll turn the lens inwards and look at the partners you need to influence to act on that insight.
Help shape the conversation by sharing your experience of turning client insight into partner action in this short, anonymous survey. Please note, the survey closes on Wednesday 7 October. After submitting, you can separately provide your email address to receive a summary of the findings after the webinar.
Drawing on original research using modelled partner profiles, this session will explore how partners think about business development, how they assess opportunities, the objections they raise and what may actually be holding them back. Members will hear the arguments they’re up against in the language partners use, understand what sits behind those objections, and learn practical ways to respond, influence decisions and turn good client insight into action.
Speaker:
Steven Lewis Taleist Agency
Steven Lewis is the founder of Taleist, an intelligence agency for professional services firms. He researches how clients choose firms, and what stops firms from acting on what clients tell them.
He has seen the partner problem from both sides of the desk. After reading law at Oxford, he instructed international law firms as a client, edited legal journals for Sweet & Maxwell, wrote for the Financial Times and Esquire, and worked in business development inside a top-tier Australian law firm.
Date: Wednesday, 18 November 2026
Time: 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm
Price: Members: Free | Non‑members: $90.00