The short answer
You were built to litigate, and now the job is selling and managing. That's a real mismatch, not a personal failure. The fastest fix is to treat origination like a skill you can learn — start small, pick one relationship this week, and work it deliberately.
You spent years getting sharp at one thing — the actual litigation. Now the job is finding clients and running associates, and nobody handed you a manual. Research on professionals who move into business-partner roles shows this transition is genuinely hard: the identity shifts, the daily work shifts, and the old skills that got you here don't automatically transfer. That gap is normal. It's also closeable.
Marcus Aurelius wrote that what you're made of doesn't disappear — it can't be reduced to nothing just because the shape around it changed. Your litigation instincts, your ability to read a situation, your credibility — none of that evaporated when your title changed. It just needs a new outlet. Origination isn't schmoozing; it's building trust over time, which is exactly what good litigators do with juries and clients already.
This week, pick one former client or one referral source you genuinely like. Send them a short, direct note — no pitch, just a real observation about something relevant to their world. That's it. One real conversation beats ten polished lunches. Do that once a week and you're building a book of business the same way you built a trial record: one solid brick at a time.