A Note from Shireen
I wrote this article because I’ve seen how often strategy sessions produce smart ideas that never make their way into the way the firm actually runs. It puts firms in a terrible spot: do we just not plan, or plan and know the plan will never be executed?
In the article, I focus on three ways firms can build have a strategic lens into their business and execute with precision:
- Stop treating strategy like an annual event: A once-a-year plan can be useful, but it can’t be the whole process. Firms need a way to notice market shifts, client needs, service issues, and internal friction as they happen, then adjust before the plan becomes irrelevant.
- Look to clients before competitors: Too many firms build around what their peers are launching, hiring for, or talking about. Better strategy comes from addressing your teams’ pain points, fixing inconsistent client service, and building around the issues that keep your clients up at night before they ever issue an RFP.
- Make the strategy stick inside the firm: Client insight only matters if it changes how the firm runs. Assign ownership, address client feedback in partner meetings, track service issues and responsiveness gaps alongside hours and revenue, train teams to spot client issues early, and reinforce the behaviors that are working.
Maior helps law firm leaders understand their target market and stand out in it by building stronger growth and operating strategies. If your firm has good ideas but struggles to follow through, or if your annual plan keeps getting overtaken by the market, I’m happy to be a sounding board. Meanwhile, the full Law360 article is below.
As Published in Law360
Year-end planning is in full swing, but the market won't wait for your partner retreat. Most firms already know this, and that's why the same strategic plans that take weeks to draft are often ignored by spring.
Once things shift, instinct takes over. Firms ditch the plan, look sideways and chase what their competitors are doing. The impulse is understandable, but it creates a vicious cycle: rigid planning followed by reactive decision-making.
What's missing is a better system for making strategic decisions all year long. Instead of lurching between planning season and panic mode, firms need a framework that helps them identify what clients and the market need, and then actually adjust course.
This article covers how your firm can build that system, including:
- Why you can't look to your peers for a resonant and profitable strategy;
- How to get better data and market signals to drive your decisions;
- Where to build, refine, or even stop practice and service investments based on real demand; and
- How to turn direction into execution.
The goal isn't to completely ditch planning — it's to build an approach that helps leadership make better decisions when things don't go as planned.
Why Competitor-Driven Strategy Can Tank Your Profitability and Positioning
Lawyers are trained to follow precedent, so watching competitors for strategic moves is a natural instinct and feels productive in the moment. But if you build your strategy around what peer firms are doing, by definition, you're not being a leader.
Even if you have no desire to be on the cutting edge, copying others often means launching initiatives your clients didn't ask for, hiring people reactively and racking up overhead in the process. In practice, this means less resonance with your clients and a team that's chasing multiple ideas with no North Star to follow.
Here's how this plays out at most firms:
- You chase surface wins — launching newsletters, opening new office locations, or adopting new technology without a real need or plan.
- You confuse movement with progress — chasing site traffic or lateral headcount instead of deepening service expertise or client relationships and increasing revenue.
- You spread your firm thin — offering too much, chasing requests for proposal and building capability decks around things you barely do.
- You launch underpowered initiatives — building programs without buy-in, execution authority or budgets, e.g., diversity, equity and inclusion committees; cross-sell programs; etc.
Great firms aren't built on borrowed blueprints. They're hyperfocused on their clients, not their competition, and are deep in the thick of their businesses: shaping services around real pain points, not imagined ones; changing how they work based on client feedback, not what they saw in a conference exhibition hall; and positioned in the right rooms before an RFP ever goes out.
The antidote isn't more brainstorming. It's getting closer to your clients. That's where real strategy begins.
Gathering Better Data to Drive Your Strategy
It is almost always easier to meet demand than create it. The firms that pull ahead don't make assumptions or scramble to keep up with their peers; they have a real-time view into what their clients need now and where they're headed next. Here's how to start gathering the right inputs.
During the Work: Midstream Insight
Capture feedback during the work to improve the client experience. Instead of waiting until the closing call or invoice to find out what went sideways, use midmatter check-ins and create practice-specific issue logs to track what's working — and what isn't — while the engagement is still live.
Then, review those logs for patterns. That's how you fix friction and improve delivery, both in real time and systemically.
Outside the Work: Strategic Interviews
Run strategic diagnostic interviews — done by someone removed from the matter — to surface the quiet truths your teams often miss. They reveal what clients actually care about, where your team creates unnecessary drag and which problems clients are still hiring other firms to solve.
That's your road map for evolving your offerings — e.g., sharpening core services, identifying capability gaps, and building adjacent or recurring solutions clients already need.
Zooming Out: Patterns Across Clients
Track service friction at the front lines. Most recurring frustrations show up in account management, delivery or billing, but firms rarely collect that intel systematically. Where are clients confused? Where are you renegotiating scope midstream? Where is silence creeping into renewals? These signals are valuable if someone's listening.
And, use industry insights to see around corners. Look at your clients' sectors with the same curiosity you bring to your own. Read their industry conference agendas, review analyst reports and talk to adjacent service providers. What's disrupting their space? What's keeping their executives up at night? If you don't know the answer, it's time to start getting up to speed.
Beyond the Work: Royalty-to-Royalty Conversations
One of the most underused but highest-yield activities is structured conversations between your senior leaders and your clients' senior leaders. When your managing partner talks to a client's CEO or general counsel, they'll hear about what's changing inside the business, the risks that are top of mind and where their investments are going.
These conversations often reveal needs long before an RFP hits the street and let you shape how the client thinks about solving them. They also tell you where your clients are investing — meaning, where you should be investing.
As an example, a full-service firm might conduct check-ins with clients that reveal multiple general counsel are planning systemwide policy updates in response to new state privacy laws. The firm could spin up a short-term advisory offering within weeks, capturing work that likely would have gone to a specialized boutique instead.
Strong strategies don't come from guesswork or gut feeling. They come from systems that collect insight across the client journey: direct conversations, industry signals, service delivery friction and structured interviews. Listen closely, and clients will tell you exactly where to invest next.
Using Client Data to Drive Your Next Moves
Once you've gathered insights — from service glitches to emerging client needs — the next step is turning that information into strategic decisions.
That might mean spotting patterns that shape how you deliver work, reevaluating who you hire or promote, or launching new services in response to emerging client priorities. Insight becomes your road map, and here's how you build it.
Client Delivery
As noted in the section above, use feedback and themes to rethink how you work. Are clients asking the same status questions over and over? Add those check-ins to your workflow proactively.
Are matters dragging because clients can't get internal alignment? Build in structured guidance — e.g., decision memos or quick-reference summaries — to help them keep things moving on their side.
Are clients frustrated by vague or confusing invoices? Tighten time entries to reflect value and offer budget pacing alerts.
Lateral Hiring Strategy
Bring in laterals because their expertise addresses emerging client needs, not simply because they come with a contact list. For example, if your general counsel clients are spending more on artificial intelligence risk, look for a lateral with real depth there. Anchor the business case to how they'll help you deepen relevance with key accounts and then win new matters, not just grow headcount.
Firms too often get excited over any lateral with a decent book of business to prop up those without, but that's a mistake. You wind up with mismatched practices, compensation tension, and laterals who can't integrate or grow.
Practice Area Development
Don't expand into a practice area just because your peers are. Expand because your clients are signaling new needs. For example, if several physician group clients are launching virtual care offerings and struggling to navigate compliance, you'll probably have success with a new digital health group.
If you're asking the right questions, you'll see the signals early and own the space before others catch up.
Training and Knowledge-Building
Your professional development budget should track to where your clients are headed. For example, if your clients are anticipating more government scrutiny, train your litigators on investigative processes. If they're restructuring or spinning off business units, train your teams to recognize when to involve tax or employment counsel. Be a problem-solver, not a task-executor.
Marketing and Business Development
Your efforts should meet your clients where they are and reflect what they actually care about. That starts with thought leadership. Most firms churn out legal alerts and hope for impact. Instead, create content that's resonant with your clients' struggles and tie alerts to business consequences. For instance, if you're giving a tax update on amortization changes, explain the consequences for cash flow, funding research and development, etc.
Events are another missed opportunity. Skip the giant, expensive sponsorships and host small, curated dinners or salons around industry flash points — e.g., invite 10 general counsel or chief financial officers from the same sector to talk about real challenges they're facing.
As an example, a firm serving emerging tech companies might see a spike in clients struggling with commercial contract delays during funding rounds, and then build a streamlined contract review package with faster turnaround for service level agreements and precleared fallback language, solving a client pain point and turning an operational burden into a profitable and repeatable service.
Being easier to work with is a growth strategy, and being more insightful is a marketing advantage.
Embedding Your Client-Centered Strategy in the Day-to-Day
You've made smart decisions based on what clients need. Now comes the harder part: making sure those decisions shape how your firm runs in the day-to-day.
Here's how to operationalize your strategy.
Assigning Ownership
One person or team should be responsible for capturing each type of client insight you gather.
Bringing Those Insights Into Decision-Making
Develop a cadence for using that feedback in partner meetings, pricing reviews, marketing planning and lateral recruiting. A client theme is more useful than a gut feeling or another generic report.
For example, if clients keep flagging billing clarity, bring that into your next pricing review instead of defaulting to last year's rate card.
Rethinking Your Internal Dashboards
Don't just track revenue and origination. Track matter delays, repeat client complaints, responsiveness gaps and postengagement feedback. Those are the red flags that cost you trust and work.
Infusing It Into Training
Teach your team how to recognize client friction in real time and escalate it. Create pathways for feedback to be addressed, not buried.
Reinforcing It in Hiring
Look for professionals who don't just deliver great work, but also anticipate needs, communicate proactively and understand the business of their clients, not just the law.
Talking About What's Working
Highlight client wins in internal meetings. Share examples of how you've changed delivery, communication, or processes in your town halls or all-hands calls. That's how you reinforce the right instincts and help them spread.
As one example, your firm might create a "client clarity" spotlight at your monthly partner meetings. Each month, you would highlight a small change made based on client input, such as adding budget pacing alerts or changing onboarding formats, to turn what could be an abstract idea into repeatable behavior across your teams.
Take it low and slow. Sustainable change stays alive with simplicity and repeatability.
Conclusion: Building Your Strategy Forward, Not Sideways
The firms that outperform create strategies based on relevance by looking straight at their clients. That means looking at what's changing in your clients' industries, what's keeping them up at night and what has them engaged. Then, those firms let that information shape what they offer, how to price it and their next investments.
The market doesn't need another firm that looks like everyone else. It needs firms that listen better and build smarter.
If you have feedback or are identifying trends or challenges you'd like to see addressed next quarter, I'd love to hear from you.
Shireen Hilal is the CEO at Maior Strategic Consulting.
The opinions expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of their employer, its clients, or Portfolio Media Inc., or any of its or their respective affiliates. This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal advice.
