The ability to maintain and grow client relationships hinges on law firms’ ability to match their technical, legal knowledge with sector-specific insights. And our research with clients shows that far fewer law firms are delivering that standard.

In the Am Law 200 law firm world, client teams are one of the drivers for retaining and expanding existing client work. As someone who has worked on a variety of client teams, I have experienced those that work extremely well and those that inevitably collapse under their weight. A lot of this has to do with leadership, of course, but an important point is that every team member plays a role in team dynamics.

The lateral market — attorneys moving from one firm to another — continues to be red hot. Widespread acceptance of remote working has opened up new possibilities for those candidates who are not physically in the major markets. Yet the hiring process is still fraught with danger, with red flags lurking behind the scenes; often not caught before the new partner joins the firm. As I wrote this time last year, the chance that your new partner will be with the firm in two years from the starting time is a coin flip — 50/50.

As if defending a marketing budget within the law firm was not already hard enough, now CMOs are doing it within a time of unprecedented uncertainty. How do you move forward with putting together a marketing budget — and defending it — in the current environment? It certainly will not be easy, but there are steps that you, as the head of marketing and business development, can take to answer the challenges of the triple whammy of the pandemic, recession, and financial uncertainty.

In-house counsel need advice from outside attorneys who generally have a broader view of the legal and business issues affecting particular industries—and they are rightfully demanding that the insights are tailored to their own, specific business needs. Now is a perfect time to bolster your firm’s sector leadership initiative so that client teams can provide customized expertise that help GCs navigate the business through this global health and economic crisis.

Remember when "client team" referred to just the attorney's billing to a particular client? With flat demand for legal services now and for the foreseeable future, law firms are in a race to increase market share with their existing clients.