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A Note from Shireen

I wrote this article to expose the gap between the work product law firms often train lawyers to produce and the advice clients actually need.

As settled law and basic regulatory analyses are easier to navigate, in-house counsel are increasingly frustrated by technically correct legal advice that isn’t useful in practice: it too long, costs too much, comes in the wrong format, or leaves the client to translate the answer into a business decision.

So how do you get your firm’s lawyers to understand what your clients need and rethink how they staff, deliver, or price the work? In the article, I focus on three overarching ways firms can get started: 

• Understand what clients need: Your lawyers need to learn how to read the room, including understanding whether the client needs a quick call or a forwardable email, a deep analysis or a practical risk call, and a same-day answer or a fuller view next week.
• Match the work to the client and the matter: A bet-the-company issue, a routine contract review, and a quick regulatory question should not be staffed, scoped, priced, or delivered the same way. Lawyers need to learn how to adjust based on risk tolerance, budget, timing, client sophistication, and the form of advice the client can actually use.
• Make client judgment part of how the firm develops lawyers: This can’t live in one-off trainings. Partners need to explain their judgment in real time to the team, client feedback needs to be gathered and discussed, and the firm should reflect their expectations in onboarding, reviews, lateral hiring, and recognition.

Knowing the law is table stakes. Your real value is helping clients apply it inside businesses with limited budgets, competing pressures, internal politics, and decisions to make in real time.

We help law firm leaders build stronger client service, talent, and operating models, including how they train lawyers to deliver more practical, business-minded advice. If your firm is trying to improve client satisfaction (and profitability), I’m happy to be a sounding board. And if there are questions you’d like me to ask in-house counsel in future installments, I’d love to hear them.

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

Law firms spend a time and money on marketing and business development and rarely know exactly what’s working, so most keep funding the same activities because everyone else does them: publishing legal updates, sponsoring familiar events, sending kitchen-sink proposals, etc.

I wrote this article because firms need a better strategy and make the case that the better test for marketing is usefulness: Does it help a client understand something, make a decision, solve a problem, or trust how your firm thinks?

A few ways that shows up in practice:

• Strong thought leadership leads the conversation: Legal summaries are readily available. Go further. Explain what the change means for their business, where you think the risks or opportunities are, what may come next, and what they should do about it.
• Make it easy for clients to know what it will look like to work with you: Most firms still send pages of bios, awards, firm history, and rates, then leave the client wondering how work will get done. Instead, cut the fluff and lay out your approach, what they’ll receive, who will do what, realistic budget, and where the unknowns are. 
• Create conversations instead of buying exposure: A logo on a conference coffee cup doesn’t move a relationship forward. Curate your own intimate settings focused on conversation with the right people.

Bottom line, be relevant - be useful now so clients remember who helped them think better when they do need you.

We help law firm leaders build stronger growth strategies, including how they sharpen marketing, business development, proposals, and client outreach. If your firm is burning time and money but not sure you’re getting a payoff, I’m happy to brainstorm ways we’ve helped firms like yours get better ROI. Meanwhile, the full Law360 article is below.

A Note from Shireen Hilal

Law firms are focused on how to better use AI, but their clients are using it too. I interviewed in-house leaders for this article to understand what’s changing about their needs, and learned that a few things have changed: 

• They need judgment, not summaries on settled law: Clients can get pretty far on the basics themselves. They need outside counsel the most when the answer requires experience, specialization, nuance, or someone willing to stand behind a path forward in the grey.
• They need you to move at their speed: Know when to send an email today instead of a lengthy memo next week, and cut the fluff - e.g., redlining terms that you know they’ll never send to a counterparty just to check the box. 
• Understand the business and the client’s risk appetite: Know enough about how the company operates, what it is trying to accomplish, and how much risk it is willing to take so your advice comes with a practical path forward so in-house counsel doesn’t have to translate your legal advice into something the business can use. 

It’s an exciting time to be in private practice: the work clients are asking firms to do is closer to the work many lawyers want to be doing. Junior lawyers have long spent too much of their early careers doing monotonous work: cobbling together the current state of the law, reviewing endless documents, and producing first drafts. If AI can take on more of that work, lawyers can spend more time understanding the client’s business, exercising judgment, building arguments, and helping solve harder problems. 

Maior helps law firm leaders figure out what AI should mean for the business, from how they serve clients to pricing and staffing the work. If you’re trying to move past the adoption and tool selection conversation and figure out your AI strategy, I’m happy to brainstorm.

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.

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.

People ask me all the time what trends I’m seeing in the legal market. It comes up in client conversations, on podcasts, and even in regular cocktail conversation.

I love writing these pieces because they force me to test what I think I’m seeing. Before I write them, I spend time asking law firm leaders and people around the industry what they’re noticing too, so the article isn’t just a list of predictions.

For 2026, the biggest theme is that the market many firms were built for doesn’t really exist anymore. Clients have more options, AI is changing how work gets done, traditional firm categories are blurring, and talent remains one of the biggest drivers of both growth and risk.

In the article, I focus on five trends that I think law firm leaders should be paying attention to:

• AI creating efficiency gains along with questions around governance, price, and client-facing value. 
• Client pressure increasing around fees, value, speed, and senior-level judgment. 
• Traditional categories blurring across BigLaw, midsized firms, boutiques, ALSPs, and legal tech. 
• Talent getting more expensive while weak vetting, integration, and staffing make returns harder to capture. 
• Operating models falling behind as work becomes faster, more tech-enabled, and less tied to traditional staffing assumptions. 

The point of this report was to help leaders decide where to invest, what to fix before clients force the issue, and where the firm has a real opening to compete differently.

We help law firm leaders build stronger growth, profitability, and operating strategies, including how they respond to market shifts like AI adoption and client pressure. If you’re looking at your own strategy and trying to decide what your firm should prioritize, I’m happy to be a sounding board.

Meanwhile, the full Law360 article is below.

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.

When professional services firms start to scale, the instincts are understandable: add systems, expand services, bring in senior hires, borrow from what big firms do. But without a clear framework, those moves pile on complexity instead of creating clarity. The firm becomes harder to navigate, more difficult to manage, and less differentiated in the market.

Most of the issues don’t show up as big red flags. They show up as slow drags: bloated operations, diluted culture, client experience that feels less personal, and investments that sound good in theory but don’t deliver in practice. The firm is growing, but your leaders are burned out and clients are noticing more handoffs.

This article breaks down the five most common (and avoidable) mistakes firms make as they grow along with tactical fixes and real examples:

     - Overengineering operations: Adding process without purpose.

     - Losing your personal touch: Diluting the client experience.

     - Mistaking hiring for leverage: Creating bloat, not scale.

     - Falling into corporate mimicry: Adopting playbooks that don’t match size or stage.

     - Defaulting to updates instead of alignment: Losing rhythm with your team.

I wrote this article because I kept hearing some version of the same frustration from law firm leaders: they know hourly billing has problems, but most of the advice around alternative fees is either too abstract or threatens profitability.

Hourly billing has survived this long because it lets firms move quickly without forcing harder conversations about scope, expectations, value, staffing, and risk. But that ease costs firms and clients alike: vague engagement letters, discounts, and write-offs.

In the article, I walk through how firms can identify what clients are really paying for beyond time - e.g., speed, a clearer process, better reporting, more predictability, etc. From there, I share several ways to turn those strengths into pricing models clients can understand.

One takeaway no matter what model you try: don’t start with the most complicated matter or the most skeptical client. Pick a proving ground where your team already knows the work, the client trusts you, and the scope is clear enough to price with confidence. Then define what’s included, explain why the structure fits the work, track profitability, and debrief before you expand it.

We help law firm leaders with increasing revenue and profitability, including revamping pricing models and proposals. If you are rethinking your pricing model, testing alternative fees, or trying to understand why clients keep pushing back on bills, I’m happy to be a sounding board.

Meanwhile, the full Law360 article is below.

Professional services firms keep burning energy in the wrong places: offering bigger signing bonuses, investing in half-hearted mentorship programs, or trying to sell “culture” with cold brew and wellness stipends.

But attracting and keeping top talent has less to do with perks and more to do with clarity and consistency. Smart firms know this. They’ve stopped chasing gimmicks and started designing environments where the best people want to stay because they can grow, earn, and see a future. They also aren't trying to win everyone—they're building the right environment for the right people, and reinforcing it through real operational discipline.

This article breaks down a framework for building a talent strategy for firms:

- Understand why firms struggle with retention, and what to do instead.

- How to attract the right candidates from the start (without overpromising or overpaying).

- What a strong onboarding and integration process actually looks like.

- How to build a culture that keeps high performers engaged (and, equally important, under-performers uncomfortable).

- How your managers and systems either reinforce or quietly sabotage your retention goals.

The result is a firm that performs better, keeps its talent, and has a competitive advantage.

I love this topic because so much of what happens inside a law firm comes back to the people. These are people businesses. Your workforce is your biggest cost, asset, and risk, and a lot of the issues that show up in profitability, client service, retention, and execution start there.

I wrote this article because firms usually respond to performance pressure with short-term pushes (e.g., bill more, collect faster, etc.), but those efforts only go so far if the culture underneath doesn’t support the behavior leaders want to see.

In the article, I focus on a few ways firms can make culture more concrete:

• Move from values to promises: Vague values like “excellence,” “integrity,” or “client service” don’t tell people what to do differently on a busy Tuesday. Promises are more specific. They explain what the firm expects, what clients and colleagues can count on, and which behaviors should show up in hiring, onboarding, reviews, incentives, and daily decisions.
• Give people context, don’t control them: Firms don’t need to micromanage every decision, but they do need to be clear about what requires strict compliance, then give people enough information to use judgment everywhere else.
• Use transparency to create accountability: People can’t support firm priorities (e.g., better profitability)  if they don’t understand how the business works. Sharing the right context helps them connect daily choices to the firm’s performance.
• Let culture be co-created: Culture isn’t built through leadership memos. But leaders can help create the right culture by involving others and then rewarding the right behaviors.

We help law firm leaders build more successful firms, and one piece of that is strengthening culture and accountability. If your firm is looking to level up and not sure how to get there, I’m happy to be a sounding board.

Meanwhile, the full Law360 article is below.

I wrote this article because I see too many firms trying to stand out by copying what everyone else is doing. Their websites sound the same, their proposals are too long, and their pitches lean on generic claims about excellence, responsiveness, and client service.

That might feel safe, especially for firms that assume they need to sound more like BigLaw to win serious work. But sounding like everyone else makes it harder for clients to understand why they should choose you, pay your rates, or trust that your firm is the better fit.

In the article, I focus on a few ways firms can make their value easier to see:

• Pass the logo test: If your website, pitch, or proposal could belong to any peer firm once the logo is removed, it isn’t doing enough. 
• Make proposals easier to buy from: Clients shouldn’t have to dig through long, generic proposals to understand the team, the price, the process, or the proof. 
• Offer options instead of discounts: Budget pressure is real, but cutting rates shouldn’t be the default.
• Help clients justify the choice: Many buyers need to explain the decision internally. Give them a clear story they can repeat to the CEO or CFO, or for smaller clients, to their business partner or spouse. 
• Reinforce value after the sale: The first 30 to 45 days should make clients feel confident through proactive communication, early wins, and check-ins before concerns become billing disputes.

We help law firm leaders stand out in a crowded market and win more work, including how to sharpen their messaging, proposals, pricing, and client experience. If your firm is looking to win more work without racing to the bottom on fees, I’m happy to be a sounding board.

Meanwhile, the full Law360 article is below.

Most firms still rely on gut instinct and assume data is too far out of reach to easily use, missing out on the potential to increase client satisfaction, improve profitability, and drive growth. But you don’t need a massive budget, fancy software, or an in-house tech expert to build a practical data strategy for your firm. There are simple, affordable strategies that even the smallest firms can use to get started and deliver more value to clients.

This article unpacks the insights that most firms already have at their fingertips, along with straightforward, practical ways to use them to enhance client relationships, boost profitability, and stay ahead of the competition.

I see a lot of law firms with ambitious ideas that never quite make it into action: new technology, better pricing models, different staffing structures, stronger career paths, more efficient ways to serve clients. But the fear of change and struggle with adoption holds them back. 

That’s understandable. Most people don’t love change, and lawyers are trained to spot risk and rely on precedent. Add heavy workloads and decision-making that’s bifurcated among a partnership, and even small ideas are hard to get off the ground. 

This is also a topic I care about personally. I’ve spent more than 20 years in professional services practicing law, leading a law firm as COO, and working on change management inside enterprise professional services firms like BDO and KPMG. The lesson I’ve seen over and over is that change doesn’t need to be reckless to work. It needs to be designed in a way people can understand, test, and adopt.

In the article, I focus on several ways firms can make innovation easier to execute, including: 

• Make change less risky: Don’t flip the switch firmwide and hope it works. Use focus groups, pilot programs, staged rollouts, and clear "kill"criteria so the firm can learn what works before scaling it.
• Bring people into the change early: The people expected to live with the change should help shape it. They’ll spot practical issues leadership may miss, ask the questions others are thinking, and become stronger champions once the rollout begins.
• Design around how the firm really works: Tailor communication by role, repeat messages through managers people trust, use strengths already inside the team, and don’t build a change program that depends on habits the firm hasn’t developed yet.

Maior helps law firm leaders turn big ideas into grounded plans, including innovation, process improvement, change management, and new ways to serve clients. If your firm has ambitious ideas but struggles to move them forward, I’m happy to be a sounding board.

Meanwhile, the full Law360 article is below.

The scaffolding put up to support scale—more process, layers of leadership, and bifurcated responsibilities—often comes at the expense of agility and personal touch. A stark example: I was recently speaking with a top ten accounting firm leader about a new pricing tool that their firm is hoping to launch… in the next 18 months. Not exactly nimble.

For professional services firms, where the ability to move quickly, adjust to client needs, and maintain deep relationships is crucial, it’s no wonder corporate buyers have been migrating to smaller, boutique firms; what they lack in brand name recognition is made up in white glove service, bespoke solutioning, and more reasonable rates.

Elite firms thrive on the capabilities and commitment of their employees, making an engaged workforce the cornerstone of client service excellence. But, as any leader of a services firm or agency knows, achieving an engaged workforce is easier said than done.

Midsized and boutique firms have their own version of this challenge – they often try to emulate industry giants who set market compensation and have expansive training and cultural programs, but employee engagement numbers nationwide (less than 30% according to Gallup) reveal the truth; those programs rarely work in companies of any size. But in the effort to keep up, firms adopt low-calorie versions of their larger counterparts’ strategies without considering whether these hefty structures support the firm or its employees. As a result, they end up with a lukewarm value proposition along with draconian handbooks and stringent policies because “that’s what firms are supposed to have,” inhibiting flexible and creative client solutions. So what’s the solution?

Winning a client pitch means making the decision a no-brainer for your clients. To do this, you need to put yourself in their shoes: clients should clearly understand what they’ll get and the required investment, be able to easily communicate your services internally, and feel confident about the real-life outcomes of the engagement. Here are four strategies, complete with tips and examples, to help your firm achieve this:

1. Easy to Understand Pricing. Straightforward questions (“What will this cost?”) require straightforward answers. Offer pricing models that are easy to understand and, where possible, use flat fees or value-based pricing to reduce the cognitive load on your clients. They shouldn't have to use formulas to decipher how a blend of hours from various personnel might play out on a future bill and then wait for impact. Make it straightforward and stress-free to choose your firm. 

We have seen a real corporate culture erosion since the pandemic, and firms continue to struggle with how to maintain it without dragging everyone into the office. My answer to most of my clients is that you can make almost any model work, but the question is how much work you’re willing to put into making that happen.

Pizza parties don’t guarantee great cultures, but being physically together can make connection, mentoring, and information-sharing easier. That said, any firm benefits from focusing on better communication standards, training, management, and knowledge-sharing. 

In the article, I focus on two areas firms need to stop leaving to chance: how people stay connected to the firm and each other, and how they learn, grow, and find the knowledge they need to do good work.

To build better culture and connection:

• Share substantive information: Better town halls, transparent survey follow-up, and regular communication help people understand where the firm is going instead of relying on rumor, hallway conversations, or word of mouth.
• Let people help build the culture: Give associates and staff ownership over events, internal CLEs, innovation ideas, and practical improvements so they feel like participants, not just recipients.

To build better development and knowledge-sharing:

• Manage and train people more deliberately: Remote and hybrid teams need clearer reporting lines, more frequent feedback, practical bite-size trainings, and mentoring that goes beyond a check-the-box assignment.
• Make knowledge easier to find and pass on: Better onboarding, practice guides, knowledge hubs, and communication standards help institutional knowledge survive beyond hallway osmosis.

We help law firm leaders build stronger teams for better results. If your firm is looking to understand how to better engage your workforce, I’m happy to be a sounding board.

Meanwhile, the full Law360 article is below.

When it comes to winning more work, I tell law firm leaders to spend less time watching their competitors and more time understanding their clients. The firms that stand out are usually the ones that understand what their clients are under pressure to solve, the pushback they’re getting internally, and the type of support that would make their lives easier.

That’s why I went directly to in-house counsel and compliance executives in my own network for this article. I wanted to understand what law firms could do better from the people buying, managing, and defending the spend.

Their answers were candid, practical, and pretty consistent: stop making clients work so hard to get useful advice, manage budgets, and explain the value of outside counsel internally.

A few of their practical takeaways:

• Read the room: Rate increases and generic legal updates land differently when your client has a smaller team, a tighter budget, and more work sitting in-house. Show that you understand their business reality before asking for more attention or money.
• Customize the advice: Not every issue requires the same level of lawyering. Understand your client’s risk appetite, don’t over-redline points they’ll never send over, and know when they need a quick call or practical email instead of a formal memo.
• Help stretch their budget: Look for practical ways to share the work and pass on savings instead of assuming your team should do all of it or pad every pass-along cost.
• Act like a true partner: Tailored training, practical tools, and visibility opportunities can make the relationship feel like a real partnership instead of another vendor.

I’m grateful to the in-house leaders who shared their perspective so candidly for this piece. Their feedback is exactly why I like this work: better growth and client retention strategies start with empathy. If you’re trying to better understand what in-house teams need now and how your firm can respond, I’m happy to be a sounding board.

Meanwhile, the full Law360 article is below.

The scarcity of truly outstanding client service enables the firms that deliver to stand out sharply from the competition, charge more for their services, and keep client attrition down—key ingredients in creating a client centric firm. It seems obvious, so why don't all service firms do it? 

Most firms actually do profess a client-centric ethos... but when asked about the tangible actions they take—be it in their hiring practices, established programs, or workforce incentives for client-centric behavior—the answer is usually silence. And that silence signifies well-meaning intentions that lack substance. 

Given the pivotal role of client relationships in business success, leaving client satisfaction to chance is a missed opportunity.

Clients can’t “try on” or “taste test” a service. Only the largest firms can rely on brand gravitas to do the heavy lifting on business development... and even they struggle to stand out as the clear choice among equally qualified peers. So how can professional services firms win new business more effectively in a crowded market?   

Creating traction with client prospects hinges on building trust and showing a track record of understanding and solving similar pain points. This article delves into essential go-to-market strategies for professional services firms that don’t just push a service, but foster genuine connections, understand deep-seated client needs, and ultimately deliver transformations that bring superior value.

For boutique and professional services firms, growth can feel like a double-edged sword: the systems you add to keep up with demand can squeeze the very essence of what makes you successful. The good news is you don’t have to sacrifice your best qualities to scale a boutique firm.

This article provides a starting point for scaling with intention, covering how to: (1) Leverage your boutique strengths—agility, connection, and culture—to stay ahead. (2) Borrow what works from big firms without inheriting their bureaucracy. (3) Recognize the processes and programs that don’t add value so you don’t waste time and resources.

We recently published an article outlining a simple (yet effective) approach to business planning for firms which starts with goal setting. We emphasized the need for goals that are both ambitious and attainable by using data points from market realities (what is possible for firms like yours) along with your own historical performance (what is realistic for your firm). 

Expanding on this, our latest article dives into performance review for business growth, outlining more specifically how the past year should serve as guidance for setting goals and executing against them in a way that aligns with your capabilities, speed, culture, and market strengths.

Your firm is probably leaving money on the table.

It happens in different ways: clients who expect more without paying for it, partners who cut time off the bill before a client even complains, teams who work past scope but never flag the extra effort, invoices that sit unpaid for months, marketing budgets that are rolled over from last year with no thought… the list goes on.

Historically, professional services firms have relied on intuition over structure, expecting their professionals to craft on-the-fly strategies to manage the business, from the top of the revenue funnel (e.g., business development efforts) to the bottom (e.g., handling write-offs). But your teams are stretched thin and this probably isn’t their core competency, so unsurprisingly, profitability suffers.

In this article, we first walk through a practical checklist of “baseline” programs you should have in place as a starting point, which form the foundation of effective talent engagement strategies, and then explore some examples of unique programs that well-known companies have adopted to differentiate themselves, engage employees, and reinforce their culture to inspire you to think about how you can enhance your culture beyond baseline programs.

Baseline Program Checklist

1. A Meaningful Performance Review Process. Performance reviews provide valuable opportunities for feedback, development, and alignment of goals. However, traditional performance reviews often fall short in providing meaningful insights and actionable steps for improvement. Make sure your review process includes the employee’s own feedback; they are often aware of their own shortcomings and it is helpful for managers to understand how an employee views their own contributions so they can approach the conversation accordingly. And, don’t use cookie cutter forms for every single role across departments and levels; customize the review process to be specific to each role and so there is parity for multiple employees in the same role.

Black Friday retail campaigns are known for driving massive attention—but the strategies behind them can be applied across industries to help businesses stand out and grow. Here are some of the most successful customer engagement strategies and how to utilize them in diverse business contexts:

1. Prioritize Personalized Experiences. Personalization is a powerful approach that can enhance customer engagement and loyalty in any industry. By leveraging customer data and implementing segmentation strategies, businesses can tailor their offerings to meet individual needs and preferences. Retailers use customer data to tailor shopping experiences. Any industry can apply this by using client or customer information to provide more relevant services or communications.

In most professional services firms, business planning is more checkbox than strategy—endless meetings, bloated paperwork, and a final product that’s forgotten until next year. The firms that get it right treat business planning as a tool, not a formality. It’s how they clarify priorities, adapt to challenges, and drive results.

The goal isn’t perfection—it’s precision. A solid plan sets a clear growth target, breaks it into actionable steps, and builds buy-in across teams so execution isn’t optional. A good plan flexes when needed but stays focused on results.

This article outlines how your firm can improve business planning strategies and turn planning into action: creating plans your team believes in, implementing them effectively, and keeping them adaptable for what’s next.

Change can feel daunting and bring out your team’s inner skeptic, or it can be exciting and present opportunities for growth, innovation, and improved performance. So how do you bring needed change through effective change management strategies that energizes your workforce (or even external stakeholders)?

1. Utilize Pilot Programs Where Possible. By selecting a small group or department to test new initiatives, you can gather valuable feedback and make iterative adjustments before rolling out changes organization-wide. Pilot programs allow the testing population to feel empowered and actively contribute to shaping the transformation. Furthermore, it instills confidence in the rest of the organization that the changes have already been tested with their colleagues and refined, increasing overall buy-in and reducing resistance.

In this context, Shireen Hilal (CEO of Maior, a consulting firm specializing in revenue generation, strategies for success, and process optimization) and John Bertoli (CEO of Bertoli Marketing, known for its fractional CMO, demand generation, and AI-powered website optimization services) share practical tips and give real-world examples of how to put “more with less” into action. As the strategies and examples below show, having limited resources can often lead to a team that’s more focused and deliberate—a clear advantage in any economy.

In this article, we will explore common challenges facing boutique firms and actionable strategies you can use for overcoming them: 

1. Lack of Time. Time is a precious commodity, with owners and employees often wearing multiple hats. The key to tackling this challenge is effective time management, streamlining your operations, and delegating down or out. Streamline your processes by giving employees clear lines of authority and creating written processes for repeatable tasks or events; evaluate your calendar to ensure you are spending time on the issues that matter most to your success (for example, 40% of your time shouldn’t be spent on something that brings in 5% of your revenue unless you see this as a rapidly growing area); and hire slowly and carefully, using consulting or staffing services as a first step where you need help but not full time, your budget won’t support the level of expertise needed for a full-time hire, or you aren't sure the function you're filling will be needed in the long term but want to test it out. Importantly, make sure the business is serving you and not the other way around.  

This article explores strategies that businesses can adopt to navigate uncertainty and build resilience, enabling them to adapt, grow, and seize opportunities even in the face of adversity, using real examples from coffee behemoth Starbucks, including innovation, cost management, customer loyalty, market diversification, and technological advancement:

1. Product Innovation – Pivot to Your Customer's Needs. During the 2008 financial downturn, Starbucks recognized the need to provide different value to its customers. They introduced new products and offerings, such as the “Starbucks VIA” instant coffee line, which appealed to cost-conscious consumers seeking affordable coffee options. This product innovation allowed Starbucks to reach a broader customer base and maintain its market share.

This article was written a few years ago, but profitability matters in any economy. It’s one of the fastest ways to make more money because firms don’t necessarily need to win more work to improve profits per partner. 

Profitability erodes in small ways before anyone feels the full impact: a discount here, unbilled time there, poorly worded time entries cut during bill review, a write-off after the client pushes back, and invoices that sit too long before anyone follows up. Leaky buckets are an expensive way to gather water.

In the article, I focus on several ways firms can protect more of the revenue they already have, but a few quick hits: 

• Make client expectations clearer earlier: Have a consistent intake and onboarding process. Budget conversations, clear scopes, billing thresholds, and feedback loops reduce surprises and help clients see value before invoices become disputes.
• Treat timekeeping as value communication: Unrecorded time is lost revenue, and vague time entries make it harder for clients to understand what they received. Train people on what good entries look like, make daily time entry easier, and help timekeepers understand how their habits affect realization.
• Put structure around invoicing and collections: Invoice on time, use retainers thoughtfully, create escalation paths, and give teams scripts for difficult collection conversations so payment issues aren’t handled awkwardly or inconsistently.

If your firm is growing revenue but it still feels like too much is slipping through the cracks, I’m happy to be a sounding board.

Meanwhile, the full Law360 article is below.

In this article, we will explore what a bias for action means, why it is (usually) preferable, the valuable lessons organizations can learn from Amazon’s relentless pursuit of action-oriented decision-making, and how to temper action bias for optimal results.

1. Understanding Bias for Action A bias for action refers to a proactive mindset that prioritizes taking swift and decisive steps to address challenges, seize opportunities, and drive progress. It involves a sense of urgency, initiative, and a willingness to experiment and learn from failures. Instead of succumbing to “analysis paralysis” or excessive planning, organizations with a bias for action empower their teams to make decisions and execute quickly, accelerating innovation and growth.