Our Advice

I wrote this piece about how law firms can win more outside counsel work because the answer keeps changing. When Today’s Managing Partner invited me to write a column interviewing in-house counsel, I knew I wanted to start by updating the conversation I had opened about a year earlier for Law360 about client expectations. 

The pressure on in-house teams hasn’t gone away, and they wanted firms to share more of the burden with them (not just lower the bill), so for this article I focused on concrete ways firms can do that.

Three of those ways: 

• Shared definition of value: Clients want firms to help manage both spend and risk. That means smarter staffing, better upfront conversations about scope and budget, and pricing models that create more certainty.
• Shared tools: Firms can build loyalty by sharing resources they already have, from templates and frameworks to short trainings or quick tool-enabled reviews. Those small investments help clients stretch their teams and often lead to higher-value work later.
• Shared expectations: Clients want advice in the form they need, not the form the lawyer prefers to deliver. Sometimes that means a quick call or short email instead of a long memo, and sometimes it means tailoring the advice to the client’s risk appetite rather than overworking points they’ll never use.

If you’re a law firm leader trying to understand what your clients need now and how your firm can respond, I’m happy to be a sounding board. And if there are questions you’d like me to ask in future installments, I’d love to hear them.

Meanwhile, the full Today’s Managing Partner article is below.

I interviewed in-house counsel for this article about how they assess value in outside counsel fees. While firms often focus on whether to use flat fees or other alternative models, the in-house lawyers I spoke with cared more about the basics: predictability, clear scoping, smart staffing, and fees that match the work’s importance and complexity.

That was the most interesting part of writing this piece. The model matters, but it isn’t the whole answer. A flat fee can still miss the mark if the scope is vague, the staffing feels wrong, or the client doesn’t understand what risk they’re paying you to manage. Hourly billing can still work when the matter is volatile, but only if the client has enough visibility to avoid being surprised.

There are plenty of great tips and quotes in the article, but here’s a few of my favorite points: 

• Make pricing defensible: Clients need to explain legal spend internally, whether to a C-suite team, board, investor, business partner, or spouse. Firms make that easier when price is tied clearly to scope, risk, likely outcome, and the alternatives available.
• Price for judgment and usability, not activity: Clients don’t want to pay for information they can get elsewhere. They want commercially useful advice, calibrated to the decision they need to make and delivered in a form they can use.
• Build trust around the model: The best pricing conversations still depend on clear scoping, smart staffing, realistic budgets, scenario-planning, and not nickel-and-diming the relationship.

We help law firm leaders with a number of initiatives that increase revenue and profitability, including better pricing, proposals, and pitches. If you’re rethinking your pricing model or trying to reduce billing friction with clients, I’m happy to be a sounding board. 

Meanwhile, the full Today’s Managing Partner article is below.

I’m being asked about lateral partner hiring more often, and the market reflects that. Partner moves recently hit a five-year high, up roughly 10% year over year.

I’m not surprised. Lateral hiring can be one of the clearest ways for a law firm to grow, especially when organic growth is harder and clients are pushing back on rate increases.

But it can also become an expensive distraction when firms do not pressure-test the business case before making the hire, so I focused on how firms can get these hires right more often for this article.

The problem I see most often is that firms are relying too heavily on the headline number: the book of business. They don’t usually ask enough about how much of that work is truly portable, who owns the client relationship, how the work is currently staffed, whether the client depends on other lawyers at the current firm, or what it will take to keep and grow that revenue on a new platform.

A few questions matter a lot:

• How much of the book was personally sourced by the partner, versus coming through the firm, a department, another partner, or an institutional relationship?
• Who else currently services the client, and what work may stay behind?
• Are the top clients recurring relationships, one-off matters, or work tied to a specific team?
• Can your firm realistically serve the work at the level, speed, rate structure, and staffing model the client expects?
• What support will the partner need in the first 30, 60, and 90 days to move the work over and start building momentum?
• Are the supposed cross-sell opportunities real if you look at the lateral partner’s top ten clients? Who could credibly land an introduction? Who could serve the work? Does your firm already cross-sell well, or are you assuming this partner will create a behavior the firm has not built yet?

Maior helps law firm leaders build better growth strategies, including high-stakes talent decisions like lateral hiring and partner integration. If you are ramping up lateral partner hiring, know your integration process could use an upgrade, or trying to understand why past hires didn’t deliver as expected, I’m happy to be a sounding board.

Meanwhile, the full Law360 article is below.