Managing partners at independent disputes firms are, in my experience, already past the question of whether their marketing is working. Most have concluded it is not, or is working in ways they cannot trace, and they concluded it some time ago. What they are stuck on is different and more reasonable: none of the available shapes for fixing it fit a firm of their size.
It would be simplistic to call that “reluctance”, in my view, because the economics of a boutique make the standard answers genuinely unsuitable.
Why the usual arrangements do not fit
In a large firm, business development is absorbed. There is a marketing department, a budget measured against a very large revenue base, and enough associate leverage that partner time spent on origination does not show up as a hole in the accounts. The cost is real and it is diffuse.
A ten-partner disputes firm has none of that. Revenue is a direct function of partner hours and partner relationships, and there is little leverage underneath to absorb anything. Every hour a partner spends on a submission, a conference, an article or a pitch is an hour that was otherwise chargeable. In a practice where the partners are the product, that cost is much more visible than in a firm at scale.
Which means boutique managing partners are usually right to be sceptical about marketing spend. Their scepticism is not conservatism. It is an accurate reading of their own cost structure, where the expensive input is not the fee paid to a supplier but the partner time the supplier’s programme consumes.
I think this is where most conversations about the subject go wrong. They are conducted as though the question were how much to spend, when the real constraint is partner attention.
What the function would actually be for
If partner time is the scarce input, then the useful function in a firm of this size is not one that generates more activity. It is one that decides where that time goes and stops it going elsewhere.
That is a different job from the one most firms are picturing. Its main outputs are declines rather than deliverables: the submission not made this cycle, the sponsorship not renewed, the article not written, the pitch not chased. The value is in the hours returned to fee-earning or redirected to the two or three relationships that will actually produce instructions, and in knowing which those are.
But that process sounds good and staffs badly.
The staffing problem
An agency executes well and cannot decline. The instruction comes from the firm, and if the firm is unsure what to instruct, a good agency will produce a well-made version of the wrong thing.
A junior marketing hire ends up serving partners, because that is what the position invites. Every partner request is individually reasonable, and a person three levels junior to the the one requesting has no standing to say that fifteen hours of a partner’s time is not warranted. The outcome is a competently run programme that never gets interrogated.
The capability required is therefore senior. But the volume of it is not full-time. A firm of eight or twelve partners does not generate five days a week of decisions about where partner attention should go, and it cannot easily justify a senior salary with no billing attached against its profit per partner.
So the shape that fits is unusual: senior judgement, applied part of the time, with enough continuity to hold a position rather than deliver a project. That position does not exist in most boutiques, which is a large part of why the problem persists. It is not that firms have chosen the wrong answer. It is that the answer they need has no established form and no benchmark to price it against.
What determines whether it works
The appointment is the smaller half of this, and I would rather be direct about the larger half.
If the function does its job, things stop. Each stopped thing has a partner who has done it for years and did not ask for a review. Those partners do not go to the appointee. They go to the managing partner, individually, outside their cabinets and into the lobby.
What determines the outcome is therefore not the quality of the analysis but whether the managing partner has decided in advance which two or three of those conversations he is prepared to have. Not all of them. Choosing to fund one partner’s event for another year rather than argue about it is a sensible allocation of a finite thing, provided the choice is deliberate.
I have seen this work and I have seen it fail, and the difference has never been the capability of the person appointed.
The first months
The other thing worth settling early is what the answer will be when somebody asks, six months in, what the firm is paying for.
At that point the honest answer tends to be that three activities have stopped, that the firm now knows who actually chose the other firm on several lost matters, and that there is a list of people it should have known and did not. That is real progress and none of it speaks in the way a new website or a directory ranking shines.
A firm that has not thought about how to describe that will find the appointment difficult to defend at exactly the moment when nothing visible has happened yet. It is a solvable problem, but it is easier solved before it arises than after.
The decision that is already being made
The reason I think this is worth setting out rather than leaving as a supplier’s argument is that the underlying allocation happens either way.
Partner hours go somewhere every week. In the absence of anyone whose job it is to decide, they go to whoever asked most recently, to the event that is already booked, to the submission whose deadline has arrived, and to the client relationship that is most comfortable rather than most likely to produce work. That is a decision, made by default, about the firm’s most expensive asset.
The case for creating the position is not that firms are doing marketing badly. It is that the allocation of partner time is the single largest commercial decision a boutique makes.
Lawfinity Solutions advises international law firms on cross-border legal market positioning. If the India corridor is a live question for your firm, we would be interested in a conversation. Lawfinity works with one firm per jurisdiction. Engagements begin with a single conversation about your firm’s current position and where the corridor question is live for you. Write to Prachi Shrivastava
