Why Big Firms Can't Break In (Or, Developing Business At Biglaw)

Here's how a law firm can win new business -- but it's not easy....

On the one hand, big law firms have all the advantages: With 1,000 lawyers, big firms have contacts at every corporation in the world. Big firms thus have cross-selling opportunities that small firms can’t hope to match. Big firms have members in all the fancy groups — the colleges of trial and appellate lawyers, the institutes, the academies — and can parlay those entrées into yet more members over time. When the authors of books ranking best lawyers — and finest lawyers, and absolutely most stupendous lawyers — make their annual phone calls to decide which firms to recognize, what happens? The callers hear the names of big firms repeatedly — not necessarily because those firms are the best, but because they’re so big that their names keep popping up. The big firms win all the accolades.

I recently saw a survey ranking the best cities in the world for fine dining. But instead of just naming New York and London and the other cities with millions of residents, the book adjusted for each city’s population: Which cities had the most Michelin-starred restaurants per capita? (No need to click through that link: Kyoto, San Sebastian (Spain), and Bergamo (Italy) took the top three spots.) Why doesn’t some clever entrepreneur do the same thing for law firms? Which firm has the highest number of respected lawyers per capita? If you knew that a 25-lawyer firm had 24 good lawyers, wouldn’t that make you more comfortable than knowing that a 1,000-lawyer firm had 27 good lawyers? I’d like to see that survey someday.

But enough of the advantages bestowed by bigness. My thesis today is that bigness actually hampers business development efforts for law firms in two ways. And, to be certain that you click through the link, I’ll also propose momentarily one thing that a lawyer at a big firm can do to overcome those handicaps…

Here’s what prompted today’s column: A big (and expensive) law firm had loaned our in-house department a secondee. Somewhere along the way, that firm predictably said that it was glad to have lent us the lawyer, but the firm would sure like us to retain it more frequently. So folks asked me if I saw any opportunities for us to retain the firm.

As regular readers of this column know, that isn’t how I go about retaining lawyers. I hire people I know to be good, not people who’d like me to retain them.

So what could we tell the big firm that had graciously lent us a lawyer, but now wanted something in return?

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We settled for the truth:

First, we can’t hire you for a small matter. You’re big; you’re expensive; and, because of that, your lawyers almost surely don’t have the ability to handle small matters efficiently. It makes no sense to hire big firms for small cases.

And, for my corporation anyway, we’ve already packaged up and sold off our small cases under a multi-year, fixed-fee deal. We’re certainly not hiring your big firm to handle a matter that another firm is already obligated to handle for us at no additional cost.

So we can’t try out your firm for one small matter and see if we’re impressed. We could only hire you for a large matter.

Which leads to the other thing we told our generous big firm:

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Second, we can’t hire you for a large matter.

You’re big; you’re famous; your deal list won’t quit; your firm has won a lot of awards. (Weren’t you listed in last year’s edition of “absolutely most stupendous lawyers”?) That’s all true, but it doesn’t mean anything. The average lawyer — even at a big firm — is pretty darned average. We’ve worked both at and with many of the largest firms in the world. We were impressed by some of their lawyers; we were unmoved by the vast majority. There’s just no way that we’ll hire you — an unknown quantity who’s likely to disappoint us — to handle a significant matter.

Sorry, Charlie. We don’t want lawyers from good firms; we want lawyers who are good.

This wasn’t really offering much of an opportunity to our generous large firm. But we had to offer something, and we wanted to offer an opportunity that really existed. So we did. It’s the same offer I suspect we’d make to any other firm on the face of the planet: Come up with a good idea that we’re overlooking. Tell us about it, and explain how you could intelligently and efficiently help us to implement your idea.

Presto! You’re hired!

Nothing to it!

Except that it requires you to gin up an idea. That’s new. And good. And that we’re overlooking.

Hey, I didn’t say it was easy. Business development never is.

But Samuel Calvin Tate Dodd did it: He invented the “trust” for John D. Rockefeller.

And Marty Lipton did it: He invented the poison pill.

Those boys did okay for themselves. (Well, alright: I know that Lipton did okay for himself. I’m just guessing that the guy who organized Standard Oil also did okay for himself. I concede that The American Lawyer wasn’t telling us much about profits per partner in 1895.)

You can come up with an idea, too, I’m sure. And, once you do it, you can sell the idea to everyone, not just to us.

Do you work at a big firm and want to break in at a new client?

Start thinking.


Mark Herrmann is the Chief Counsel – Litigation and Global Chief Compliance Officer at Aon, the world’s leading provider of risk management services, insurance and reinsurance brokerage, and human capital and management consulting. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Inside Straight: Advice About Lawyering, In-House And Out, That Only The Internet Could Provide (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at inhouse@abovethelaw.com.