BD Reporting That Managing Partners Actually Read
January 25, 2027 · 4 min read · LeadLex Editorial
The standard monthly BD report at most IP firms is an activity report. Number of calls logged. Number of meetings booked. Number of pitches sent. The managing partner reads the first page, recognises that none of it tells her whether the firm is winning, and stops opening the email.
The fix is not more data. It is different data, on one page.
What activity reports get wrong
Activity is an input. The managing partner does not need an input report — she has a calendar full of them. She needs an outcome report, framed in the terms that the partnership actually argues about: where is the firm exposed, where is it growing, where is it underperforming relative to the investment.
The activity report answers "what did the BD function do." The right report answers "what does the partnership need to decide."
The one-page monthly
Four sections, no more.
1. Pipeline health. Total active pipeline value, weighted and unweighted. Movement since last month — additions, conversions, losses, ageing. Concentration: what percentage of the pipeline sits with the top five accounts. A healthy pipeline is not just large; it is moving and distributed.
2. Account-level risk. The top twenty clients by revenue, with two flags per client: relationship depth (how many partners hold the relationship, how recently it has been touched) and signal status (any external change — GC departure, M&A, in-house build-out — that should be on the partnership's radar). This is the section that prevents the surprise loss of a client the firm thought was secure.
3. Origination diversity. Revenue and pipeline broken down by origination source: direct relationship, referral in, foreign associate, intermediary, marketing-led, conference-led. A firm with 70% of its origination coming from three partners has a succession problem, whether or not anyone has named it yet. The report makes the pattern visible. The argument about what to do about it belongs to the partnership.
4. Conference and event ROI. The events the firm attended in the period, the conversations logged against each, the matters traceable to each over a rolling twelve-month window. Most firms spend serious money on conferences and have no honest read on which ones return. The report does not need to be perfect to be more useful than the current zero.
What does not belong on the page
Things to leave out of the monthly: vanity activity counts, BD team headcount or workload, individual partner league tables (those belong in a different conversation), unweighted lead counts, marketing campaign open rates. None of these change what the managing partner decides this month.
We have written separately on the four functions of legal BD and on how practice-group leaders should own BD inside their group — those frames sit underneath this report and explain why the four sections are what they are.
Why one page
The one-page constraint is not a stylistic preference. It is the only way to force the report to make choices. A twelve-page report is a report that the author has not finished thinking about. A one-page report is one that has been reduced to what actually informs a decision.
Managing partners read one-page reports. They skim ten-page reports. They ignore fifty-page reports. The format is the discipline.
What the system has to do to produce it
The report is straightforward to write when the underlying CRM is structured to produce it. Pipeline stages have to match the actual work (we covered this in pipeline stages that match how IP firms actually win work). Origination has to be attributable. Conference attendance has to be logged against the relationships it produced. Signal data has to flow into the account view.
If any of those layers are missing, the report becomes a manual exercise every month, the BD team burns out producing it, and the quality degrades until the partnership stops reading it again. The system is what makes the report sustainable. The report is what makes the partnership care about the system.
Related: Practice-Group Leader BD Ownership. The Four Functions of Legal BD. The Best CRM for IP Law Firms in 2026.