In the ordinary course of a week, a law firm managing partner will work out things about a client’s business that the client has not articulated clearly itself. Questions on the practice head’s list might sound like: Where the revenue actually comes from? Who has authority to commit money and at what threshold? Which event triggers the spending? Which dependency, if it broke, would take the whole model with it? This is what commercial lawyers do, and doing it well is most of the job.
Law firms often fail to apply that discipline to themselves when it comes to self-interrogation.
I do not think this is a failure of ability, and I am fairly sure it is not a failure of interest. It is a classification problem. Business development sits in a category marked relational or creative, and it is discussed in a vocabulary made up of profile, visibility, brand and presence. Those words cannot be interrogated. You cannot ask who signs off on profile, or what budget line visibility comes out of, or what event causes a client to need brand. The vocabulary forecloses the analysis before it starts, and the analysis is the part that would have been useful.
What the questions look like
Asked of a law firm, the ordinary commercial questions are not complicated. They are just unfamiliar in this setting.
- Who actually decides, at the moment the instruction is given, and is that the person the firm has been cultivating. These are frequently different people, and the gap widens as the value of the matter rises, because authority moves upward as the stakes become material.
- Which budget does this come out of, and does that budget already exist. Work that requires a client to create a new line item competes with everything else the client might do with money it has not yet allocated. Work that fits an existing cycle does not.
- What has to happen before a client needs this, and is that event visible in advance. Some work has a date on it that can be seen years ahead. Some has none, and pipelines built on it are wishful.
- Who else is in the chain. Consultants, funders, insolvency practitioners, other firms. Some of them own scope the firm imagines is available. Some of them decide who gets instructed. Neither is obvious from inside the practice.
None of these is a marketing question. They are the questions any competent adviser asks about somebody else’s business, applied to the one business the adviser is inside.
Why they get avoided
There is a straightforward reason firms do not ask them, and it is not ignorance.
The answers tend to be inconvenient. They point at activities the firm is already committed to, has budgeted for, and which have internal sponsors. A partner who has chaired the conference programme for six years is not neutral about a finding that the conference reaches no relevant decisionmaker. Directory submissions have a season and a person responsible for them. Published output has an implicit promise attached to it that somebody in the firm made.
So the analysis is not merely unfamiliar. It is politically expensive, and it is easier to keep the vocabulary that does not permit it.
I would rather state that plainly than pretend firms are simply unaware. Most senior lawyers I speak to know roughly where their effort is going unrewarded. What they lack is a way of raising it that does not read as an attack on a colleague’s project.
What the firms get right
The instinct that this work comes from relationships is correct, and any analysis that concludes otherwise has gone wrong somewhere. Partners who say the practice was built on people who trusted them are describing the mechanism accurately.
The commercial questions do not displace that. They tell you which relationships. A firm with limited partner time is choosing, whether it admits it or not, between the general counsel who has the problem and the lender who will choose counsel when it becomes serious, or between the client and the firm that will need conflict-free co-counsel. Those are different people and both cannot be prioritised. The relational instinct is right about how work arrives and silent on who to spend the time with, which is the decision that actually gets made every week by default.
What this is not
It is not an argument for firms to become marketing organisations, and it usually produces less activity rather than more. In my experience the first consequence of asking these questions properly is that several existing programmes stop, because not one partner can identify the decision they were meant to influence.
It also does not touch the practice of law. Nothing here concerns judgement, or quality, or how a matter is run. It concerns how work arrives, which is a commercial process that firms happen to have inherited a professional vocabulary for.
A test
If any of this is worth acting on, it can be tested cheaply. Take the three largest lines in the firm’s marketing budget. For each, write down the specific decision it is intended to influence, and the name or role of the person who makes that decision.
Where an answer comes readily, the spending is probably sound. Where the honest answer is general awareness, the firm has funded an activity whose success cannot be defined, which is a position it would not accept from a client and should not accept from itself.
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
