I’ve been very fortunate to work with law firm owners and managing partners from all corners of the legal practice as a fractional law firm CMO, and I can tell you that if I were to attribute successful firm transformations to the single most important thing, it wouldn’t be operations, marketing, or even the people. No, the key to taking an established firm with a long history to the next level is something else entirely: honesty.
I know you want to read about all the meaty metrics, tips, and tricks so you can get to work and apply them to your firm. And we’ll get there very soon, I promise. But let me tell you one thing first.
Pick a hundred law firms across all practice types and geographies that want to scale up or re-establish themselves to be more aligned with their mission, and they’ll all have different circumstances, issues, and challenges. However, the process of taking the firm from where it is to where the partners want it to be is surprisingly similar. And at the core of it is an honest evaluation of multiple aspects of the firm, which always requires complete, often humbling honesty.
You’d be surprised how many founding partners are struggling with this part, and yet, it’s a key to the entire transformation plan.
Key Insights
- A useful transformation plan starts with uncomfortable honesty. You and your partners need to be clear about the firm you want to build, your financial expectations, and the tradeoffs you’re willing to make.
- Evaluate the whole firm. Marketing results only tell part of the story. Intake, case handling, hiring, collections, and decisions that depend on the owner can all reveal what needs to change.
- Define the conditions before choosing the strategy. Your desired case mix, acquisition budget, preferred way of working, and pace of growth give the people building your plan the foundation they need.
- Find experienced people to help you build the plan. You don’t need to work out every answer yourself. Lean on people who have helped law firms transform and can help you assess what you don’t know, challenge your assumptions, and turn your goals into a workable plan.
The evaluation we’ll start with requires honest answers, and honest answers can’t be assumptions or preferences presented as facts. You either know the answers, i.e. know how to assess the questions and what data to draw from or are yourself the source of the answer, or you don’t. In the latter case, it’s crucial to admit it, especially since it’s not the end of the world but just a part of the exercise. If you don’t know something, in most cases the answers are out there and you just need to find them.
Up to this point, this might sound very theoretical and you might not know why I’m spending so much of your time on it. So let me give you some real-life examples from my own experience working with law firms where the inability to evaluate the firm honestly made things much harder than they needed to be:
- A managing partner had a clear preference for certain types of marketing. They decided those channels were working fine, even though the data we collected later told a different story.
- A managing partner didn’t want to admit that higher profit was a key goal for the transformation of the firm. Early conversations circled around the mission and other aspects, while honesty around profit expectations was key to designing a growth strategy.
- A founding partner wanted the firm to become less dependent on them but wasn’t willing to let others make decisions. Every meaningful change still needed their approval, making them the bottleneck.
- The partners believed they needed more leads, but nobody had looked closely at what happened to the inquiries already coming in. Missed calls, slow responses, and inconsistent follow-up were costing them good cases.
- The partners said they shared the same vision for the firm. When asked to define it individually, one wanted to expand into new markets, while another wanted a smaller practice with fewer, higher-value matters.
Armed with a panoply of warnings about the need for honesty, let’s now go together through a series of steps designed for you to build the foundation of your firm’s transformation.
1. What is your law firm about, in one sentence?
Forget everything your firm is right now for a second. What is the mission? Why does it exist? What cases is it supposed to handle? Who is it serving, and why?
I’m asking you to describe the firm you actually want to build. “We provide excellent legal services” won’t get you very far here. “We help families protect what they’ve built and make things easier for the next generation” gives an estate planning firm something to work with. It helps you decide which matters belong in the practice and what your marketing needs to communicate.
Then ask why someone with those needs would choose you. Perhaps your personal injury attorneys previously represented insurance companies and know the tactics insurers use to deny claims or push for lower settlements. That experience puts them in a strong position to anticipate those tactics and advise injured clients. Whatever the reason, it needs to be something the firm can actually deliver. If there are multiple partners, have each answer independently before comparing notes. You may discover that the mission you thought everyone shared needs a conversation.
2. What should the next stage of growth actually look like?
More cases? Better cases? More profit from the same caseload? A firm that can operate without you making every decision? Be specific about what you want to change and when you want it to happen.
For example, one immigration law firm owner might want to increase new family-based immigration matters from 20 to 30 a month within a year. Another might be perfectly happy with 20, provided more of them are employer-sponsored visa matters that fit the firm’s business immigration focus, and the owner can stop working every weekend. Those are very different assignments for the people building the growth strategy.
Write down the destination, your starting point, and the conditions you’re unwilling to sacrifice to get there. If higher profit is the priority, say so. If keeping your current working hours matters more than growing quickly, say that too. Your plan needs to reflect the tradeoffs you’re willing to make.
3. What does a cold-blooded look at your past performance tell you?
Look at the last two years. What did you, or your marketing vendors, do? What worked, and what case volume can you clearly attribute to it? At what cost? What didn’t work, and why? For the things that worked, why did they work?
Follow the marketing activity through to signed matters, the types of cases they brought in, and collected fees where those are available. For example, a mass tort marketing campaign might have generated hundreds of inquiries at an attractive cost per lead. But how many people met the firm’s exposure and injury criteria, signed a retainer, and provided records supporting their eligibility? If large numbers dropped out or couldn’t substantiate their claims, the initial lead volume tells only a small part of the story. Identify where that happened and what you know about why. Where tracking is missing, admit it. Matters still in progress may also need more time before you can assess their financial performance.
But marketing is only part of this evaluation. What happened during intake? How efficiently did cases move through the firm? Where did work get delayed, clients need to chase updates, or attorneys spend time fixing avoidable mistakes? Look at profitability, collections, staff turnover, and how easy or difficult it has been to hire great staff and attorneys.
Ask the people doing the work about known pain points across the firm. Perhaps you signed enough cases but struggled to handle them because an attorney position stayed vacant for six months. Perhaps bills went out late, or routine decisions sat on a partner’s desk while everyone waited. Those problems belong in the evaluation just as much as an underperforming campaign.
For now, the job is to establish what happened, what you can reasonably explain, and what still needs investigating. Be as honest about the things that worked as the things that didn’t. You’ll need both to build a transformation plan grounded in the firm’s actual performance.
4. What is your ideal case mix?
Based on the mission and goals you’ve just defined, list the case types you want to handle and split them into percentages. Be clear about what those percentages represent. A share of signed matters is different from a share of revenue or attorney workload.
For example, an employment firm representing employees might want 50% of new matters to be wrongful termination cases, 30% discrimination and harassment cases, and 20% wage and hour cases. Some matters will involve overlapping claims, so agree on how you’ll categorize them. That doesn’t mean each category will take the same proportion of the team’s time. A small number of wage and hour class actions could occupy a substantial part of the practice.
Compare the desired mix with what you’re signing today. Then consider local demand, competition, and your ability to do the work. If the cases you want are relatively scarce in your market, the plan must account for that. The percentages should give your targeting and budget a direction, with a realistic path from the current mix to the desired one.
5. How much are you willing to spend to acquire each case type?
I said “willing to,” not “need to,” because there’s a degree of freedom here. Different firm owners are comfortable with different margins. What you can sustain also depends on the cost of doing the work, when you expect to collect the fees, and how much uncertainty the firm can carry.
For example, a contingency fee firm litigating complex nursing home abuse cases needs to fund substantial work long before collecting a fee. A firm settling most soft tissue injury cases before litigation expects a shorter, more predictable collection cycle. The acquisition budget has to fit the firm’s circumstances.
Set a working acquisition ceiling for each case type using realistic collected fees, delivery costs, and your profit expectations. Include the marketing costs you’ve agreed to count, rather than quietly leaving out vendor fees. Your preferred ceiling still needs to be tested against what acquisition costs in your market, and an experienced legal marketing firm with their own acquisition benchmarks will be of great help here. Work through all this with your growth advisor and the person responsible for the firm’s finances before committing to the spend.
6. What’s your operational DNA?
Do you prefer working with people in your office and building an in-house team? Would you rather have a trusted marketing director coordinating outside vendors? Or do you want one external growth partner and as little additional administration as possible?
Be honest about the role you want to play and the time you’ll make available. For example, hiring separate specialists for your website, advertising, and content still leaves someone responsible for making their work fit together. If that person is you, the arrangement needs to fit your calendar. And an external growth partner will still need access to information and timely decisions from the firm.
The same honesty applies to pace. Do you want to move fast and put as much money and as many resources as possible behind the effort? Or would you rather find great talent and build steadily, relying primarily on their brainpower and skills to make a modest budget go further? Be honest about which approach suits you and how quickly you expect results. The people building your transformation plan need to know what they’ll have to work with.
7. Where are good opportunities being lost?
What happens when someone with a case you want contacts the firm? Who responds, how quickly, and what happens next? Look at inquiries and follow-up records, from first contact through consultation and signing.
Suppose a campaign produces 40 inquiries that appear to fit the practice, but only 10 people book a consultation. Before declaring the campaign a failure, find out what happened to the other 30. Were calls missed? Were appointments unavailable for weeks? Did anyone follow up? You may also find that the inquiries weren’t as relevant as they first appeared.
Separate people the firm appropriately declined from people it wanted to help but lost along the way. Record the reasons where you can, and give someone responsibility for addressing the recurring problems. That gives you a much more useful answer than “we need more leads,” and it tells you what must improve before you increase the volume.
Don’t wait until you feel ready
These are the things you need to know before working on a transformation plan with a fractional CMO, a growth advisor, or your own team. You don’t need to arrive with every answer. If you don’t know something and don’t know how to find out, rely on the expert you’re working with to help you. The honesty we started with includes knowing when you need that help.
There’s more minutiae to this process and the preparation it requires, but I’ve covered the basics. Putting the plan together, deciding what needs to happen in what order, and choosing the right marketing strategies and channels come next. Your answers give that work a foundation.
If you’ve been thinking seriously about the future of your firm and what it will take to move from where you are to where you want to be, and the philosophy I’ve described here speaks to you, book a consultation with me. We’ll discuss your goals, what needs to change, and how we can work together to get your firm there.
