Insights

A partner has a dilemma. Spend an hour on a client at 35% off, or on another client at full rate. What would you do? When a large client demands an aggressive volume discount, growth can erode margins and strain the relationship. By the time a client is spending $25 million a year, the discount really adds up, especially in the fifth year of a fixed-rate panel term. Even with excellent, high-profile work and close friendships on both sides, lawyers start prioritizing clients

In 2009, I had an unforgettable conversation with the chair of a well-known Wall Street law firm who wanted to talk about client teams. Law firms were struggling in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and keeping key clients close mattered more than ever. The chair could see value in starting a program, but had one question: what happens when the economy comes back? I told him that his firm would have collaborative client teams in place, ready to grow those relationships.

When I led business development inside a large law firm, once we had made the case for building a team around a client (a topic for another day), every new team started the same way. I would go to Joy, our lead business and client intelligence researcher, and ask for "a Joy brief." I have worked at firms where lawyers receive binders of client intelligence that sit on the backs of desks, never to be used again. But Joy and I built our template so it was brief, skimmable and a

Years ago, I was working with an IP practice on its annual business plan. The prior year's plan had 20 goals. A year later, there had been no measurable progress on any of them. I made the case for something different: three clear, actionable goals. All of them were goals we could assign responsibility for, measure, discuss at quarterly meetings, and adjust as needed. At the next meeting, the practice leader announced the new approach. He then divided the practice into nine g

One in four corporate legal buyers say they have never experienced a law firm that delivered excellent value. That alarming statistic from the Thomson Reuters 2026 Report on the State of the US Legal Market is one that law firms should make a top priority to investigate. According to the report, clients are actively reallocating spend toward firms that can demonstrate real business impact, not just legal expertise. That means firms doing work that actually moves the client's

"We're client-centric." Many firms say it. Few can point to something that proves it. I've watched this play out up close. A firm announces growth, with a statement like, "We're expanding our Florida presence to better serve clients with a multi-disciplinary team." In reality, that's a business decision, reframed as a client benefit. Now consider firms building specific solutions for their clients: International trade solutions that track currency and tariff shifts as they ha

Where does your firm, practice, or team stand on the goals you set at the beginning of the year? I know this is not the question you want to see in the waning days of summer. The end of summer is hard enough to accept, but when you add the realization that year-end is closing in fast, it's a double whammy. It's not unexpected — it happens every year — but still. If you're like most firms, you had ideas of what you wanted to accomplish, but you didn't build specific targets in

Practice silos are the #1 structural issue that needs to be fixed at law firms. According to the 2026 Blickstein Group Law Firm COO Survey, 38.1% of COOs at a broad cross section of North American law firms named practice silos as the top structural issue they would fix, well ahead of operational authority, partner incentives, and decentralized operations. These findings do not surprise me. Firms build themselves around practice groups. Training, budgets and compensation run

Government lawyers who move into private practice hit two learning curves. They are used to people coming to them. Now they have to sell, internally and externally. They are used to being the decision maker on a matter. Now they take direction from senior lawyers. Most firms respond by asking these laterals to join a traditional practice group, and compete for work the same way everyone else does. An approach I find more effective is to package what they already know into som

This month, Hogan Lovells and Cadwalader completed one of the largest law firm mergers in history. The combined firm, Hogan Lovells Cadwalader, now ranks among the largest corporate law firms, with more than 3,200 lawyers across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC. Having worked on a Hogan integration before, I am optimistic that this combined firm will be delivering integrated solutions to clients in short order. In 2002, I joined Hogan through its merger with my firm at the time,

When I entered legal marketing in the mid-1990s, one thing stood out immediately. The matters making headlines never fit inside one practice group. A major acquisition touched corporate, tax, employment, IP, environmental, and litigation — often all at once. The client was not buying a practice. They were buying a solution. Thirty years later, we are better at encouraging collaboration. Client teams, industry teams, and cross-practice initiatives are far more common than they

Thomson Reuters is predicting a possible contraction in the legal market by mid-2026. At the same time, law firm revenues have reached record highs. Those seem like conflicting signals. They may not be. Demand isn't disappearing. It's moving into places firms didn't anticipate. And the firms capturing that work are often the ones that organized around emerging client problems before clients came asking. COVID was a clear example. When lockdowns began, many firms expected dema

Clients are starting to ask law firms to put a dollar amount on how much they are saving by using AI. It's a reasonable question. But it may not be the right one. We've seen this pattern before. Clients ask firms to measure and report on something they care about. Firms invest heavily in tracking, reporting, and benchmarking. New positions are created. Entire industries emerge to produce the numbers. A few years later, the reporting requirements evolve, priorities shift, and