Best Practices for Business Planning at Law Firms

In order to effectively win new business in an increasingly competitive and uncertain environment, many law firms have begun to sharpen their focus by creating actionable business plans that focus on proactive revenue generation. Firms who are leaving it to individual rainmakers or passively waiting for work to come to them will find their competitors are taking market share from them.

Business planning is an essential aspect of any law firm's operations. It involves setting high level, firm-wide goals, tracking progress, and allocating resources across functional areas to achieve those goals. For legal marketing, alignment with the firm-wide business plans often starts with key clients. Drafting effective key client plans involves understanding the business challenges and priorities of each client and developing a strategy to expand work in a way that aligns the firm's practice offerings and the client's needs.

Intermediate Level: At the intermediate level, the law firm has plans for key clients, practices, industries and geographies. Processes have been adopted across the firm to capture goals and targets.

At this level, the key client team often has a few dashboards and tools that combine data and has integrated the financial, CRM and ERM platforms. Progress is being made in developing a single view of the client and most firms at this level have full understanding of the work currently being done, the internal relationships, and opportunities for expansion by practice area.

Firm leadership regularly reviews progress against goals on a regular cadence and drives accountability ensuring the goals:

• align with the firm's overall business goals

• are challenging but achievable

• focus on the right mix of clients

• facilitate collaboration across clients, practices, and individual lawyers

• included measures for revenue generation and profitability

• identify specific activities and expected outcomes
  
  

If you are charged with starting or supporting a key client program or developing practice revenue generation plans, here are some best practices to get you started.

Basic Level: The law firm has identified a set of key clients and developed ideal client profiles based on various factors such as size, industry, and geography. Key client teams of lawyers and business development professionals have been charged with gaining a deep understanding of the client's industry, business drivers and current legal opportunities and challenges.

Often the key client team will have to gather and organize data from many different systems to gain a full understanding of the work currently being done, the internal relationships, and opportunities for expansion. For firms at the basic level this is a time consuming process of combining spreadsheets of data with matter information from the financial system, contact relationships from an ERM system, recent pitches and meetings from CRM system, and recent experience from an experience database to gain a clear picture of the work being done, the work being pitched, and the opportunities for expansion.

A key client plan should include the following sections:

• Internal Team - lawyers, marketing, business development, pricing

• Key Client Contacts - decision makers, relationships with firm's lawyers, notes

• Whitespace

• Succession Plans

• DEI

• Business Development and Marketing Goals - specific, clear and measurable, and achievable. It's essential to understand the clients' business goals, challenges, and opportunities, and align the law firm's services to meet those goals.

For firms at the basic level, the next step should be to create a single view of the client which incorporates marketing and financial details. This would involve an integration between time and billing system, CRM and ERM systems.

For firms at the intermediate level, the next step should be to integrate digital marketing data to help expand the understanding of the client's needs and interests. This would involve integration between the firm's website, marketing automation system and CRM platform.

Advanced Level: At the advanced level, the law firm has a robust set of data-driven goals that are informed by data from fully integrated business planning, financial and marketing systems. Procedures and processes are in place to aid in execution of plans and management tracks progress against the goals and hold individuals and teams accountable for achieving them.

Often analytics tools are used to gain insights into the performance of various marketing channels and campaigns, and using those insights to set more targeted and effective goals. For instance, practice leaders have access to dashboards that summarize their progress with their identified targets over the last 12 months that includes:

• Work pitched and opportunities won

• Matters worked, hours billed, revenue generated, profitability and/or other financial measures

• Whitespace

• Business Development Outreach including meetings, events, CLEs and other types of one-on-one outreach

• Marketing activities and content engagement

• Relationships added or expanded

As important as it is to look back at progress, top law firms have to tools to inform future plans. Incorporating digital marketing and lead generation information can help teams focus business development activities on the highest value potential targets, allowing for more effective decision-making and resource allocation. Advanced firms are able to provide lead generation dashboards and supplemental external information to practice, industry and geographic team leaders including:

• Targets engaging with relevant digital content (website, blogs, e-marketing, events)

• Targets with new or strong relationships (laterals, GCs moves, Alumni)

• Targets that have characteristics that match the best client profile

• External client and industry profiles

Lawyers and BD professionals can use this data to filter and focus creating plans and goals that allocate scare business development resources to the highest value potential opportunities.

Finally, a few top firms are using their business plans to inform their content strategy. For these firms, the virtuous cycle, of content strategy creating leads and business plans defining content strategy provides a significant competitive advantage. Business informed content strategy ensures that the content it produced is relevant, engaging, and targeted to the right audience. Plans can be used to drive personalized digital experiences, such as tailored email campaigns and social media outreach, to deepen relationships with key clients and targets.

This level of strategic integration is very complex, not only does it involve developing a comprehensive understanding of the client's needs, priorities, and decision-making processes and aligning the law firm's services to meet those need, but it requires a comprehensive, multi-year, firm-wide technology strategy and roadmap.

If you have been asked to implement a key client program or develop practice or industry plans our team help you create a strategy and roadmap that incorporates best practices, business process, change management as well as the technology changes needed to support data driven business planning processes. We can help you prioritize the roadmap, concentrating on quick wins that demonstrate ROI. It's a complicated journey, don't go it alone. Our team has developed strategies and implemented technologies and best practices for business planning at AM50 law firms.

advanced level

intermediate level