Industry playbooks
Legal sales call playbooks
Your buyers are partners who answer to a compensation committee, a risk committee, and clients who now refuse to pay associate rates for first-level review — and any one of them can stall a decision for a quarter by saying nothing at all. Practising against a buyer like that teaches you to survive the confidentiality veto, find the one practice group in enough pain to sponsor you, and stop losing deals to a technology committee you never got into the room with.
Every call type for Legal
Scripts, sample dialogue, objection handling and a live AI buyer for each one.
Cold Call
You dialled someone who was mid-something-else — reviewing a P&L, walking between meetings, about to eat lunch — and they picked up without knowing your name, your company, or why their phone rang. There is no prior email, no referral, no webinar download to reference. The first three to five seconds decide whether you get thirty more, and the first thirty decide whether you get a meeting. Your job on this call is not to sell the product, qualify thoroughly, or run discovery — it's to earn a next conversation by naming a problem so specifically that the prospect thinks 'how do they know that about us?' You will be interrupted, you will hear a reflex brush-off before they've processed a word you said, and you have to stay conversational through it without sounding like you're reading. Success is a calendar hold, not a good chat.
Read the playbook →Demo Call
A scheduled demo with someone who has already had the pitch conversation and said yes to seeing it — which means they are not here to learn what it does, they're here to find out where it breaks. They arrive with a mental list: how it hooks into the systems they already run, who on their team owns it once you're gone, what happens at 2am when it falls over, and how long before it's actually doing something useful. They will interrupt. Every interruption is either a buying question or a disqualification test, and your job is to answer it in their environment, not in your sandbox. If you run the standard tour — click here, then here, notice this dashboard — they go quiet, you hear typing, and you've lost the room without them ever saying no. The demo you rehearsed is a resource, not a script; the call is won by how well you handle the detours.
Read the playbook →Discovery Call
A 25-minute scheduled discovery call with a prospect who took your first touch seriously, cleared time, and showed up expecting to be diagnosed — not sold to. They already know your one-liner, so repeating it burns credibility. They have a real, layered problem: a surface symptom they'll hand over in the first two minutes, a mechanism underneath it they'll explain if you ask a decent follow-up, and a cost or political consequence they'll only name once you've proven you can hold the conversation without reaching for a demo. Your job is to earn each layer with open questions, quantify what you find, understand how a decision like this actually gets made in their shop, and leave with a specific, dated next step that both sides agreed to out loud. Pitch early, monologue, or run a BANT checklist and they will answer politely, in short sentences, and never take the next meeting.
Read the playbook →Manager Coaching Call
This is the 1:1 nobody sleeps well before. You manage a rep who has missed two quarters in a row — not catastrophically, but consistently — and you've got 30 to 45 minutes to find out whether this is a fixable skill problem, a fixable effort problem, or the start of an exit. They walk in with the excuses pre-loaded: the leads are garbage, the territory got carved up, we're 20% over on price against the challenger. Some of that is even partly true, which is what makes it hard. Underneath it, they know their discovery calls are shallow and they stopped prospecting sometime around week three of last quarter when they got busy 'working' two deals that were never going to close. They will not volunteer that. They'll only get there if you stay curious longer than they expect, look at actual numbers instead of arguing about feelings, and make it clear that admitting the real problem is safer than defending the fake one. Your job is not to win the argument, deliver a motivational speech, or put them on a PIP by minute ten. It's to get to one true root cause and leave with one changed behaviour they actually agreed to.
Read the playbook →Pricing Negotiation Call
This is the call after the technical win. They've run the eval, they've told their VP your product is the pick, and the only thing left is the number. They are not trying to talk themselves out of buying — they're trying to buy the same thing for less, and they will use every lever they have to do it: a low anchor ("honestly, we budgeted about half that"), a competitor's quote they may or may not still be considering, a case study or logo trade dangled as if it's currency, a threat to push the PO into next quarter, and long, deliberate silence after they name a figure. The trap is that they're pleasant about all of it, so it doesn't feel like a fight — it feels like a friendly conversation in which you keep making small, reasonable-sounding concessions until you've given away 30 points and gotten nothing. Your job is not to win the negotiation; it's to hold price by trading, keep the relationship warm enough that they still want to sign with you, and leave the call with a dated path to signature.
Read the playbook →Renewal Call
This is a save call, not a renewal call — the paperwork is the last five minutes, not the first five. The contract ends in six weeks, the customer has already half-decided to leave, and they're taking the meeting partly to say out loud what went wrong this year. Adoption never got past the first team, support tickets went quiet for days in Q2 during their busiest stretch, and a competitor rep has been in their inbox with a number that's 20-30% lower. They still like one or two things — usually the thing their power user built a workflow around — but they need those failures acknowledged specifically and unflinchingly before they'll entertain another twelve months. Lead with the order form, the discount, or 'so what would it take to get this done,' and you confirm every suspicion they have that you only show up when money is due. Lead with the ticket numbers, the dates, what actually broke internally on your side, what changed, and a named-owner plan for the next 90 days, and the same person will start negotiating with you instead of against you.
Read the playbook →Upsell Call
You're calling a customer who is already paying you, already reasonably happy, and has no idea you're about to ask for more money. They picked up expecting a check-in. Your job is to convert an account review into an expansion conversation without burning the goodwill that made the account healthy in the first place. The buyer's default posture is defensive on three fronts: the budget for your category is already spent for the year, their team is underwater and can't absorb another rollout, and they suspect they aren't even getting full value from what they bought last time — a suspicion you must address before they'll hear anything new. This call is won or lost in the prep: if you can open with their actual usage numbers and the specific result they've already gotten, you get a real conversation. If you open with "I wanted to tell you about our new module," you get a polite ten minutes and a "send me something."
Read the playbook →Warm Call
A warm call is one where somebody else's credibility got you the answer. A peer downloaded your guide and said "you should call Dani", or a mutual contact fired off a three-line intro that the prospect skimmed on their phone and archived. They pick up expecting you, but expecting is not the same as knowing — they can usually name the referrer and almost never name what you sell. You start with maybe ninety seconds of borrowed goodwill and a very specific obligation: prove the referrer wasn't wasting their time. Warmth is a loan, not a grant. Two generic sentences — "So, just to give you a bit of background on us" — and you've converted a warm call into a cold call the prospect now feels mildly embarrassed to be on, which is worse than cold. The job is to cash the referral fast, convert it into one specific, testable reason you're relevant to *them* rather than to the referrer, and get out with a real second meeting.
Read the playbook →
Who you're calling
In Legal, the people who pick up are Law firm partners and legal operations leaders. The titles you will actually reach:
- Managing Partner
- Chief Operating Officer (law firm)
- Director of Legal Operations
- Practice Group Leader / Litigation Chair
- General Counsel of the Firm / Loss Prevention Partner
- Chief Information Officer / Director of Legal Technology
- Director of Knowledge Management
What keeps them up at night
Name one of these in your first thirty seconds and you have earned the rest of the call.
First- and second-years are eating the doc review, and leaving
A mid-size commercial firm running a document-heavy matter has associates coding privilege calls at 1am to hit 1,950 hours. The partner knows most of that review is low-value and will get written down anyway, but the alternative is missing a production deadline. Associate attrition runs 18-25% and the exit interviews all say the same thing: 'I did nothing but review for eight months.' Replacing a third-year costs the firm roughly $400K in recruiting and lost productivity.
Client write-downs on work the client never agreed to pay for
Outside counsel guidelines increasingly say the client won't pay for first-level review at associate rates, won't pay for more than one lawyer at a deposition, and won't pay for internal conferencing. The billing partner discovers this at write-off time, not at intake. Realization drops into the low 80s and nobody wants to be the one who calls the GC to argue about a $60K invoice.
Conflicts and intake take days when the client wants an answer today
New matter intake runs through a manual conflicts search, a name-variant problem nobody has solved, a partner email chain for waivers, and an engagement letter that sits in someone's drafts. Three to five days is normal. Meanwhile the client has already called two other firms. Firms lose engagements to intake speed and never find out that's why.
Fixed fees and AFAs priced on gut feel
Clients want a flat fee per matter or a phased budget with caps. The firm has ten years of time entries but no reliable way to say what a Rule 26 production on a $40M breach-of-contract case actually costs. So the partner prices it from memory, and either leaves money on the table or blows the cap and eats the overage.
Nothing changes without partner consensus
There is no single buyer. There is a technology committee, a risk committee, an executive committee, and a practice group chair who bills 2,200 hours and has no interest in a pilot. A decision that would take a corporate buyer six weeks takes a firm three partner meetings across two quarters, and any one senior partner can stall it indefinitely by saying 'I'd want to look at that more closely.'
Privilege and confidentiality are existential, not IT concerns
The firm holds client data under Rule 1.6 and under client OCGs that often prohibit third-party processing without written consent. A breach isn't a compliance fine, it's malpractice exposure, bar complaints, and a client relationship worth $3M a year gone. The risk committee's default answer to any vendor holding data is no.
What they'll push back with
The objections that come up on nearly every call, and a response that keeps the conversation alive.
- “Client confidentiality — our risk committee will veto anything cloud-y.”
- Then don't take it to them as a cloud product. Ask what their outside counsel guidelines actually require — most say notice and consent for third-party processing, not prohibition. Find out whether they've already got a hosted e-discovery platform or a cloud DMS, because most firms do and that reframes the conversation from 'first cloud vendor' to 'another vendor under an existing standard.' Then offer the on-prem or single-tenant option and get the security questionnaire in front of IT early, because it's a four-week document, not a call.
- “Partners have practiced the same way for 30 years. Change here is glacial.”
- Agreed, and that's why I'm not asking for a firm-wide rollout. Which practice group has the most painful matter right now — usually litigation on a big production? Give me one matter, one partner who's already complaining about write-downs, and a defined scope. Firms adopt sideways: one group makes it work, the results show up in realization, and the executive committee follows the numbers rather than leading them.
- “Our associates need those hours. If you cut review time you cut billables.”
- You're not cutting billables, you're cutting write-offs. What's your realization on first-level review right now? If clients are knocking 30% off that line item, those hours were never revenue. And if you're doing fixed-fee or capped work, every hour you don't spend on review is margin. The real question is whether those associates have higher-value work to move into — if they don't, that's a demand problem, not a technology problem.
- “We tried predictive coding a few years ago. The court fight over the protocol wasn't worth it.”
- Fair — TAR validation disputes with opposing counsel are a real cost. Tell me what happened. Most of the pain was around disclosing the seed set and negotiating the protocol, and the case law has moved considerably since then. It's also worth separating first-pass relevance from privilege review — the workflow burden and the defensibility questions are different, and firms who got burned on one often haven't looked at the other.
- “Send me something and I'll circulate it to the technology committee.”
- Happy to. So it lands right — who sits on that committee, and who on it has actually felt this problem on a matter? A one-pager to a committee dies. What works is a short memo addressed to the concern each of them will raise: security for the GC, cost-per-document for the COO, and defensibility for the litigation chair. Can I get fifteen minutes with the litigation chair first so the memo has a sponsor in the room?
- “We already use an ALSP for first-level review at $28 an hour. You can't beat that.”
- That's the right comparison, so let's run it properly. What's the total cost per document including your associates' QC pass and the privilege log? And what's the turnaround when a production date moves up two weeks — can they scale in three days? Most firms find the ALSP handles volume fine and the cost sits in the supervision and the second-pass privilege work that stays with your people.
- “Our clients' outside counsel guidelines don't allow us to pass technology costs through.”
- Then it's a margin conversation, not a disbursement one — which is a better conversation for you anyway. If you're on hourly, this is realization. If you're bidding AFAs, it's how you win the panel spot and still make money. Which of your top ten clients are pushing hardest on fixed fees? That's where this pays for itself first.
Their language
Use these the way they do. Getting one wrong costs more credibility than getting none of them right.
Jargon
- matter (not project, not account — everything is billed and conflicted at the matter level)
- realization rate (share of standard-rate time actually collected; distinct from collection realization)
- lockup / WIP days (unbilled work in progress plus AR — the firm's cash problem)
- conflicts check and the ethical screen (the 'Chinese wall' — walling a lawyer off from a matter)
- engagement letter (the signed scope; no engagement letter, no matter, no billing)
- outside counsel guidelines (OCGs — the client's rules on staffing, rates, expenses, technology)
- alternative fee arrangement (AFA — flat fee, capped fee, collar, success fee; anything not pure hourly)
- privilege log (itemized list of withheld documents; the most expensive part of review)
- TAR / predictive coding / continuous active learning (technology-assisted review, and the protocol fight that comes with it)
- clawback and FRE 502(d) order (protection when privileged material is produced by mistake)
- origination credit (which partner gets credited for the client — drives compensation and drives who blocks you)
- PEP and leverage (profits per equity partner; associates-per-partner ratio that generates it)
- write-down vs write-off (reducing time before the bill goes out vs after the client refuses to pay)
- docketing (court deadline calendaring — a malpractice function, not an admin one)
Metrics they are measured on
Annual billable hour target per associate (1,800–2,000; NY-market firms 2,000+), Standard realization rate (target 90%+; commercial mid-market firms often 83–88%), Utilization rate (billable hours as % of available capacity), Lockup — WIP days plus AR days (90–120 days is common, and hated), Profits per equity partner (PEP) and revenue per lawyer (RPL), Associate attrition, particularly first-through-third year (15–25%), Cost per document reviewed and documents-per-reviewer-hour on active matters, Conflicts clearance and new matter open turnaround (target under 24 hours, reality 3–5 days)
Related industries
Buyers with adjacent pressures, and the same call types against them.
Practise against a Legal buyer
A live AI prospect with Legal context — their pressures, their jargon, their objections. They talk back, they interrupt, and they can hang up on you. You get a scored breakdown when the call ends.
Start a roleplay