Let’s Talk Lateral Integration

I am really happy to see an uptick in discussions around Lateral Integration. Lateral hiring is a significant investment that is plagued with unacceptably low success rates—industry wide.  I have been working on this problem a lot over the past few months.  While each firm has a unique set of challenges, there are a few things that I find help universally:

• Prioritizing industry, client and product teams over practice groups in the integration process. This enables your lateral share their experience in a focused way, to address specific issues they can help with and to identify the roles/titles of the people who would hire them. Practice groups play an important role, but let’s face it, they offer a very broad audience that includes, and I’ll say the unspeakable, a lot of internal competitors.

• Supporting actionable, hyper-targeted messaging and presentations for each significant audience, internal and external. So, instead of, “I joined the firm because they are investing in their energy practice,” try, “my move is going to benefit you, client, because they have deep ties with key players in the Houston energy market where you are expanding. We’d love for you to join us and a few of our clients at the xx conference this year.”  This requires some business development acumen and resource, but it will pay dividends and your lateral will greatly appreciate the assist.

• Creating and tracking a short-term business plan that converts strategy into actionable tactics. This is obvious, but even as we all know that “get 2-3 new deals by Q4” is not a good goal, too many business plans are still not specific enough to be actionable or trackable. And, tracking and follow-up items often fall to the back burner. Here again, some business development resource is required, especially if you want to conserve the non-billable time of your new lateral. Fortunately, there are some technology solutions that can help, and if you pair a coordinator with the more senior BD resource who helps with the plan, that professional could shoulder the lion’s share of the tracking and reminding/nagging.

Does your firm’s integration plan have elements that your lateral’s find particularly helpful?

If you are working through your firm’s lateral integration process and want to talk about elements that work, I’d love to have a conversation.