Collaborative Planning: The Engine for Strategic Law Firm Growth

The legal industry’s approach to annual go-to-market planning can often feel like solving a Rubik’s cube — rarely achieving true alignment. With 25 years as a consultant and C-level leader in law and accounting firms, I’ve witnessed how a structured planning process can fuel not only growth but, more importantly, collaborative growth — where professionals work together toward a common goal, maximizing relationships, reputations and revenue.

An effective planning process empowers marketing and business development (BD) teams to orchestrate collaboration and provide proactive support. However, many firms struggle with planning at every level, leading to missed opportunities and inefficient resource allocation.

Research shows that companies with collaborative planning processes experience significant benefits, such as 20% higher service levels and 20% increase in planner productivity (McKinsey), 18% greater sales (Gallup), as well as 1.8x more likely to have a highly engaged workforce and 2x more likely to be innovative (Deloitte).

What’s more, law firms’ unique pressures — from billable hours to ingrained autonomy — demand a collaborative approach that connects firm-wide goals with practice group initiatives and individual attorney objectives.

Critical Elements for Success

Let’s examine key enhancements at each level of the planning process and the role marketing and BD professionals can play, driving a more effective process and accelerating collaborative growth.

Firm-wide Strategic Planning

Firm-level planning, typically led by the chief operating officer (COO) and chief marketing and business development officer (CMBDO), defines the strategic direction and sets priorities for alignment across the firm. Key elements include:

• Transparent Goal Sharing: Leadership should share priorities and initiatives across services, industries, clients and BD goals to enable alignment at all levels.
• Resource Allocation: Similar to managing a stock portfolio, resources are allocated methodically, with priority given to high-growth areas and expectations clearly set for performance and collaboration. Teams must track and meet these expectations to maintain or grow their resources year after year.
• Standardized Data: Capturing essential information through standardized taxonomies improves data aggregation, ensuring ongoing collaboration and support across teams.
• Centralized Coordination: Multi-practice initiatives should be managed within central marketing budgets, providing strategic oversight and coordinated support to achieve firm-wide goals.

Practice Group Planning

Practice group planning bridges the firm’s strategy with individual execution. To foster collaboration, practice groups need to align with firm-wide goals while leveraging their unique strengths.

• Focus on Team Impact: Practice group plans should emphasize initiatives that benefit multiple attorneys, maximizing team growth with a few high impact efforts.
• Two-stage Process: Initial attorney planning submissions should be followed by revisions, allowing practice leaders and BD professionals to refine plans based on collaboration opportunities within and across teams.
• Budget Integration: Align plans with allocated budgets before finalization to avoid creating unfunded goals that lead to frustration and disengagement.
• Cross-practice Discovery: BD professionals enable practice groups to identify and leverage synergies across teams, ensuring that collaborative opportunities are maximized.

Individual Attorney Planning

At the individual level, attorneys set personal growth goals and identify specific activities that support practice group and firm objectives. Effective individual plans align these growth areas, such as client expansion or industry expertise, with larger firm goals.

• Goal Alignment and Roles: Attorneys should target clients, sectors and organizations that balance personal aspirations with their expected role and contributions to team goals.
• Budgetary Discipline: Allocating budgets tied to growth metrics encourages attorneys to evaluate return on investment (ROI) and fosters collaboration by pushing activities with broader impact to team plans. Research supports that constrained resources enhance spending discipline, creativity and execution (Harvard and Journal of Management).
• Collaboration Data: Providing critical data on clients, industries and activity types enables firm-wide analysis, making collaborative opportunities easier to spot.
• Collaborative Relationships: Attorneys should identify specific colleagues involved in their activities, helping all parties align plans and budgets to support effective collaboration.

The Marketing Professional's Strategic Role

Marketing and BD professionals act as the strategic hub, connecting planning across levels to foster growth. They enhance collaboration and value through:

• Training: Provide training in effective BD planning for team leaders and individuals, setting expectations for collaboration and demonstrating best practices for attorneys at different career stages and roles.
• Customized BD Advisory: Work with attorneys to create personalized plans with a coherent set of activities, avoiding typical generic recommendations.
• Standardized BD Methodology: Establish a unified BD coaching approach to ensure consistency across planning and execution, enabling BD professionals to collaborate effectively.
• Data for Informed Decisions: Give attorneys access to historical plans and spending analyses to help them make informed decisions, including ROI and estimations of future costs.
• Ongoing Collaboration: Tag and index all plans and make the data accessible to all attorneys to ensure that marketing team efforts support continuous collaboration and grow emerging opportunities recognized and acted upon throughout the year.

Examples of Successes from Collaborative Planning

By incorporating these key elements into a collaborative planning process, law firms I have been associated with have experienced significant benefits, including:

1. Key Client Program: Discovering that multiple partners were targeting the same clients led to the foundation of a key client program, boosting growth potential.
2. Cost-effective Memberships: Revealing that many attorneys were involved or considering involvement in the same association, allowing the firm to switch to a firm-wide membership. This enhances value and participation while reducing costs.
3. Industry Team Diversity: Identifying attorneys interested in specific strategic industries led to a more diverse team and the creation of a new team targeting an emerging industry niche.
4. Optimized Conference Engagement: Creating a firm calendar for high-cost conferences allowed marketing to provide proactive support, leading to stronger client engagement.
5. Unified Thought Leadership: Recognizing a shared client issue across practice groups enabled coordinated thought leadership, showcasing the firm’s multidisciplinary expertise.

Investing in Collaborative Planning for Firm-wide Success

Collaborative planning in law firms is not merely an administrative task — it is the foundation for orchestrating collaboration across individuals and teams, maximizing the firm’s collective capabilities, talents and interests to achieve growth. This approach drives alignment on all fronts, bringing together attorneys, practice groups, and marketing and BD professionals toward common objectives that yields stronger client relationships, enhanced reputational standing and more robust revenue growth, while also reducing rivalry among attorneys and practice groups.

By creating a planning process that empowers marketing and BD professionals to function as strategic hubs, firms can cultivate a unified culture where collaboration not only supports firm-wide objectives but also drives individual and team successes. Marketing and BD professionals play a critical role in connecting goals, fostering alignment and ensuring resources are strategically deployed for maximum impact. As professionals and teams increasingly recognize the value of these strategic partners, their engagement in the planning process deepens, amplifying the benefits for all involved.

In today’s competitive environment, firms that embrace collaborative planning to unite their resources, insights and strategic focus transform the planning process from a routine exercise into a powerful engine for sustainable growth and cultural alignment. To those in legal marketing and BD, the call to action is clear: evaluate how your own firm’s planning can unlock collaborative growth and foster a culture where every team member actively contributes to the firm’s collective goals.