Inside the Impossible Job of Growing a Law Firm
Summary
For COOs, CMOs, CBDOs, BD Directors, and Managing Partners, growth is often described as shared responsibility. In practice, a small group of leaders carry accountability for results without direct authority over the partner behaviors that produce them. This article defines that structural problem as the authority gap and explains how firms can close it with better growth infrastructure.
TL;DR
- Growth leaders are accountable for firm-wide business development but rarely control the client decisions and outreach that drive growth.
- Partners often resist outreach for practical reasons: timing risk, limited context, and competing demands.
- Firms narrowing the authority gap are investing in experience intelligence, relationship intelligence, and proactive signal detection.
Every law firm has someone whose job, on paper, is to drive growth: a COO, CMO, CBDO, BD Director, or Managing Partner wearing several hats. They carry revenue targets, pipeline expectations, and pressure to make the firm more proactive.
What they usually do not have is authority over the group whose behavior determines whether growth happens: partners.
At a recent growth salon hosted by Baretz+Brunelle and Litera in Boston, one BD leader described a familiar situation. Their team identified a clear opportunity at a major client: a leadership change followed by a financing announcement in a sector where the firm had strong experience. They drafted tailored outreach in the partner’s voice, with suggested next steps. The partner agreed the message was well written, then said: “I just don’t want to send anything right now.”
The opportunity passed. The BD leader still owned the growth responsibility, but not the decision.
That tension is the authority gap: growth leaders are accountable for results, while authority over client contact and business development decisions remains with individual partners.
Why Business Development Is So Hard to Scale
Most firms have partners who excel at developing client relationships. They know their clients, watch for meaningful changes, and reach out when it matters. Business development happens, and the firm grows.
Scaling that behavior across the institution is harder. Growth depends on three linked activities:
- Seeing opportunities consistently across the client base.
- Connecting those opportunities to the right relationships and relevant experience.
- Prompting the right lawyer to act at the right time, with the right context.
Traditional BD infrastructure was not designed for that sequence. CRM and ERM systems record who the firm knows and what has happened, but they rarely answer the questions growth leaders ask every day:
- Where is a client or market event happening now that merits outreach?
- Who at the firm is best positioned to engage?
- What, specifically, should that person say?
Without clear answers, growth leaders are left asking partners to “be more proactive.” Partners hear the request but often see more risk than benefit in acting on it.
This breaks down into a simple problem: firms know they should engage clients earlier and more consistently, but the signals that justify engagement are scattered or invisible.
The Authority Gap: Accountability Without Control
This gap is often framed as a culture problem: partners aren’t proactive enough, don’t think like business developers, or need a different mindset. Culture plays a role, but it sits on top of a more basic structural issue.
Growth leaders are held accountable for revenue targets, pipeline health, cross-selling, client expansion, and the firm’s ability to act before competitors.
Yet they typically cannot direct a partner to contact a client, decide which clients receive outreach, or reassign a relationship when a partner is inactive. Authority stays with the partnership even as growth responsibility shifts toward operations and BD. That mismatch is the authority gap.
Culture, coaching, and communication help, but they cannot close the gap alone. If every decision still lands in a partner’s inbox without strong context or timing, growth leaders continue to carry responsibility without the tools to influence action.
Why Partners Push Back on Outreach
Partners who decline proactive outreach are not necessarily indifferent to growth. Many are weighing practical concerns:
- Timing risk. Contacting a client at the wrong moment can feel opportunistic or insensitive.
- Limited context. A generic “just checking in” email rarely adds value and may weaken the relationship.
- Competing demands. Billable work rightly takes priority over speculative outreach, particularly when outreach requires research and drafting effort.
If a request does not answer “why now, why this client, why me, and what should I say?” saying no is rational under uncertainty.
Better infrastructure reduces that uncertainty and gives partners a stronger basis for action.
Growth Strategy Requires Infrastructure, Not Just Intent
Law firm growth strategies often set worthy goals: expand into new sectors, deepen key client relationships, and increase cross-practice collaboration. But goals alone do not answer the operational question: how will the firm make those behaviors repeatable?
Firms narrowing the authority gap are building what Litera calls Return on AI (RoAI): AI investment that produces not only efficiency, but stronger relationships and measurable growth. In practice, that requires three connected capabilities:
- Experience intelligence. Structured matter and expertise data that shows where the firm has done similar work and won.
- Relationship intelligence. A clearer view of who has real client access, how strong those ties are, and where unused connections exist.
- Proactive signal detection. Systems that monitor client and market events and map them to likely legal needs and firm capabilities.
When those elements are connected, growth leaders can bring partners a specific moment, a clear rationale, and a proposed message. The decision remains with the partner, but it is grounded in more than a general prompt to “reach out more.”
The advantage belongs to firms that connect experience, relationships, and timing in one growth system.
CRM vs. Relationship Intelligence
Most firms already use CRM systems and, increasingly, ERM tools that track who emails whom and when. Those tools keep useful records, but they do not drive growth on their own.
CRM answers “who do we know?” Relationship intelligence answers “how strong are those relationships, and how can we use them to grow?”
Relationship intelligence in practice focuses on three activities:
- Track. Monitor client-specific developments, engagement patterns, and industry changes, and route those signals to the right lawyer.
- Keep in touch. Maintain structured, relevant communication linked to events in the client’s business, not just generic check-ins.
- Add value. Provide insights, introductions, and resources that address broader business issues, with the right people involved on both sides.
The aim is to make strong business development behavior repeatable, not dependent on a few partners’ instincts.
What Growth Leaders Need to Change the Equation
COOs, CMOs, and BD directors cannot own growth by mandate alone. They need infrastructure that turns abstract encouragement into specific, actionable options for partners.
In practical terms, that means:
- A clear view of where the firm is best positioned to win, based on actual experience and existing relationships.
- A steady flow of client and market events, detected early and mapped to concrete legal needs.
- Pre-drafted, personalized outreach in each partner’s voice, delivered through tools lawyers already use (especially email), with the context that explains why contact now makes sense.
With that specificity, a partner who declines outreach is making an explicit choice not to act on a well-supported opportunity. That is a very different conversation from asking partners to “be more proactive.”
The authority gap narrows when firm leaders and partners are looking at the same information, and disagreements shift from whether an opportunity exists to how it should be prioritized.
Naming the Authority Gap Changes the Growth Conversation
The authority gap is not an indictment of growth leaders or partners. It describes a structure common to many firms: growth targets sit in one place, while client decisions sit somewhere else.
Acknowledging that structure has two benefits:
- It validates the experience of COOs, CMOs, and BD leaders who live with the disconnect between accountability and authority.
- It reframes the growth conversation away from individual motivation and toward the infrastructure needed to give partners practical reasons to act.
Culture change still has an important role. Partners ultimately decide whether to pick up the phone or send the email. But culture work unsupported by better information and better timing will always feel abstract. Infrastructure built for growth makes those decisions more concrete, more defensible, and more likely to result in action.
Litera’s Growth solutions are built with this reality in mind. By connecting experience data, relationship intelligence, and proactive client signals into a single growth platform, firms can see where to grow, which relationships open the door, and when to engage before competitors do. This transforms proactive outreach into measurable outcomes: new matter origination, expanded client revenue, and competitive wins that don't show up in a CRM until it's too late.
Learn more about Litera’s approach to solving this challenge here.
