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CONNECTING THE DOTS
Turning capacity into conversion
"From single to sustained double digit growth"
Situation
An AmLaw 50 firm was getting the least return from where it had bet the most. Years of investment had built genuine capacity to serve financial services clients: lateral hires, practice buildout, presence in key financial centers. The capability was real. The demand never followed. Growth across the sector sat in anemic single digits year over year, and profitability for the client base sat in the second quartile. "Build it and they will come" had quietly become the strategy.
Approach
We stopped organizing the effort around how the firm delivered services and started organizing it around how these clients conceptualized and ran their own businesses. That single shift drove everything that followed.
To get there, we convened a focus group of internal client advocates, including several alumni now working inside these institutions. They told us what org charts and matter lists could not: where authority actually sat, which initiatives carried leadership attention, and how these organizations thought about the work they were buying.
What surfaced was that the client's highest-value activity was concentrated on developing new products and services, run by cross-functional teams that had only recently been assembled and that no single practice group was naturally positioned to lead.
We rebuilt the go-to-market approach around that. Rather than presenting capabilities and waiting for instructions, partners connected with these internal teams at the design stage and built alongside them, which is where the counsel was worth the most to the client and where early investment made the firm hard to displace. It started with one client: a standing monthly slot inside their own weekly new projects review, closed-door and non-billable, covering tax, technology, fintech, and financial regulation while products were still being shaped rather than after. The format worked well enough that we replicated it across the institutions in the sector. We reinforced the same position externally, collaborating with clients on conference and industry platforms timed to their own product development cycles. Not visibility for the firm's sake, but visibility earned where these clients were trying to accomplish something.
Twist
The most valuable outcome was internal, and nobody planned it.
Rebuilding the firm's marketing collateral meant presenting the sector work as an integrated suite rather than a catalog of practices, described in terms of how clients consumed and valued legal support. Doing that honestly required teaching partners what their clients were actually doing. A marketing deliverable turned into an education program.
Partners discovered client activity they had no prior visibility into, and capabilities they had never thought to connect. In one instance, the firm's lead partner for a major institution was unaware of how central digital assets had become to the client's strategy. It had never come up, because the client did not see him as being in that space. The firm had substantial expertise in exactly that area, sitting in another practice group, and neither the partner nor the client knew it was there. The pattern repeated across the sector.
The project meant to explain the firm to its clients ended up revealing what had been holding the firm back internally.
Result
Growth moved to sustained double digits within two years. Profitability for the financial services client base moved from the second quartile to the first, and the work continues.
The position also produced something the firm had never had. Sitting inside the development process gave partners visibility into what these institutions were building well before it reached the market, which meant the firm stopped learning about opportunities at the point of competing for them.
What the firm built was not a practice group with a new name. It was a platform with multiple points of connection into each client, across practices and financial centers, tied to that client's specific business needs rather than to any fixed group of relationship partners.
The firm did not need more capability. It needed to connect its capabilities to clients' business goals and activities. As one practice group leader put it: "We've gone from offering stale CLEs to becoming key members of clients' skunkworks."
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