A story breaks about a governance failure at a large listed company, a regulator’s finding, and litigation commencing somewhere unexpected. A law firm partner reads it over coffee with a half-formed thought about whether there is anything in it for the firm.
The usual honest answer is no, and partners tend to reach that conclusion quickly and correctly. The company already has counsel and has had that counsel for twenty years. The number of other companies exposed to the same thing is smaller than the coverage suggests, and if you actually count them it is often a dozen rather than a market. The event itself recurs rarely enough that even a perfect programme aimed at it would be competing for a fraction of one instruction a year. Whatever appears to be an opportunity generally survives about four minutes of arithmetic. A partner who declines to spend money on said opportunity is not shirking effort, rather she is exercising judgement.
What interests me is that the thinking almost always stops there.
The Narrower of Two Available Questions
Is there a mandate in this asks: who now has a legal problem. It is the right first question and its answer is usually no.
But there is a second question underneath it, which is: who has just acquired a question they cannot answer. The population that has that query is frequently an order of magnitude larger than the one with a problem.
When a large national business story about a commercial dispute receives coverage, the number of companies facing the same claim might be six. The number of general counsel, audit committee chairs and company secretaries who read the coverage and privately wondered whether their own arrangements would look any better under the same examination runs into the hundreds. None of them has a problem. All of them have a question, and most of them cannot put a finger on the obvious expert to ask, because the question sits across two jurisdictions and their existing counsel is comfortable in one.
A question is not a mandate and does not convert into one directly, and so it becomes easy to dismiss. But paying attention to the question is what determines who gets called eighteen months later, when the question becomes a problem for one of those hundreds. The firm that answered it well and publicly, at the moment it was actually being asked, is the firm that comes to mind. There is no lead generation process to cover this ask within law firms. Because the process accounts for standing, which accumulates slowly and then pays out unpredictably.
Shelf Life of a Question
The reason this is worth acting on rather than merely noting is that it is time-limited. The question is live for perhaps six or eight weeks. After that the coverage moves on, the boards that were worried have either done something or stopped worrying, and a firm publishing carefully considered analysis in the fourth month is commenting on old news. The firm doing random cycles of its universe of generic outreach leads is going in without a hook. Timing is doing most of the work here, and it is the element that is hardest to recover if missed.
It is also cheap. I would particularly stress on the importance of this to anyone who has been burned by a business development programme. The response to a question of this kind is a piece of writing and a handful of conversations with people who are already thinking about it. It does not require a budget line, a twelve-month plan, or a supplier. Someone who notices the window is open and to act inside it can get it done, because this is a matter of attention rather than of spend. Attention is precisely what is scarce when everyone competent is billing.
Triage rather than Abstentation
I should be equally honest that most events contain neither a mandate nor a question. A great deal of what looks significant in the press is significant to the parties and inert for everyone else. The discipline is in running both filters quickly and being willing to conclude that there is nothing here, and coming up with that conclusion week after week. The failure mode is not scepticism. Scepticism about business development is well-earned and usually correct. The failure mode is scepticism that stops at the first question, because the first question is the one that almost always says no, and a firm that only ever asks it will correctly decline every opportunity including the occasional real one.
What that suggests to me is that the sceptical instinct is better spent on triage than on abstention. Read the news, ask whether there is a mandate, conclude that there is not, and then spend one more minute asking who has just been left with a question. If the answer is a group large enough to matter and reachable within a few weeks, that is the rare occasion on which doing something is cheaper than the alternative.
The rest of the time, the correct answer is nothing, arrived at faster than before.
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
