Too many initiatives, too little strategy: When law-firm business development loses focus

Law firms rarely suffer from a shortage of business-development ideas.

Yet many firms continue to manage the CMO as though the role were primarily responsible for fulfilling requests.

At any given moment, a firm may be sponsoring conferences, hosting client events, launching thought-leadership campaigns, investing in technology platforms, developing industry programs, pursuing cross-selling initiatives and asking individual practices to increase their visibility in the market. Most of these activities have a reasonable business case. Many have an enthusiastic partner behind them. Some may produce excellent results.

The problem appears when you look at them together.

A firm can make dozens of individually defensible business-development decisions and still end up with a weak commercial strategy. In fact, the accumulation of good ideas can make strategy harder to execute. Resources become fragmented, practices pursue overlapping audiences, messages compete with one another and the firm's most important opportunities receive roughly the same attention as everything else.

The organization is busy. The calendar is full. Marketing activity is visible everywhere.

But activity is not a strategy.

Strategy requires concentration, and concentration requires choices.

That distinction is becoming more important for law firms as the number of legitimate demands on their resources continues to grow. Firms are simultaneously navigating artificial intelligence, changing client expectations, pricing pressure, talent competition, new technologies and evolving service models. Each development creates another plausible investment opportunity. Add the ambitions of individual practices, sectors and offices, and the commercial agenda can expand remarkably quickly.

The natural response is to try to accommodate all of it, but that may be precisely the wrong response.

When Good Initiatives Add Up To A Weak Strategy

Law firms have a structural reason that makes them particularly vulnerable to initiative overload.

Practices need autonomy. Their clients differ, their competitive environments differ and the opportunities facing a litigation group may bear little resemblance to those facing a corporate, tax or intellectual property practice. Partners also have valuable market knowledge and client relationships that should inform business-development decisions.

But practice-level autonomy creates a portfolio problem at the firm level.

Imagine several practices independently identifying the same group of general counsel as a priority audience. One sponsors an industry conference. Another develops a webinar series. A third proposes an executive roundtable. A fourth launches a thought-leadership campaign.

Viewed separately, every initiative may make sense, but viewed through the eyes of the client, the distinction is less obvious.

The firm may be spending four times to reach essentially the same audience without becoming four times as relevant to it.

This is where business-development activity can begin masquerading as commercial strategy.

The question is not whether an event, sponsorship or campaign is worthwhile in isolation. The question is whether it deserves scarce resources relative to every other opportunity available to the firm.

That is a much tougher conversation.

It is also where strategy begins.

Strategy Requires Unequal Choices

One of the most persistent misconceptions about firmwide strategy is that it should create an equal opportunity for every practice.

That instinct is understandable. Firms are partnerships, and leaders must balance different constituencies. A decision to concentrate investment in one market, industry or practice can easily be interpreted as a decision not to support another.

But equal activity and sound strategy are not the same thing.

A strong commercial strategy identifies the areas where the firm has an unusual combination of client demand, credibility, expertise and competitive opportunity, then concentrates enough resources behind those areas to matter.

That inevitably produces uneven investment.

If every practice receives an event, a campaign, a sponsorship and a technology budget simply because another practice received one, the firm hasn’t necessarily made a strategic choice.

This is why Michael Porter's enduring observation that strategy requires choosing what not to do remains so relevant. Organizations generally understand the principle. Applying it is more difficult because adding an initiative creates visible momentum, while declining or ending one can feel like a loss.

Over time, that asymmetry creates what might be called strategic sediment. Events recur because they occurred last year. Sponsorships renew because the relationship already exists. Committees continue meeting. Campaigns become annual traditions. Technology platforms survive because the firm has already invested in them.

The original rationale may have disappeared years earlier.

The activity remains.

Eventually, the firm's commercial portfolio begins to reflect the history of its decisions more than the strategy for its future.

Managing partners and firm leaders can test for this problem by asking four questions.

Which Initiatives Advance A Firmwide Priority?

The first question sounds obvious, but it forces an important distinction: Is the initiative strategically important to the firm, or merely useful to a practice?

Both can have value. They should not automatically receive the same level of investment.

If a firm has identified health care, energy or private equity as a significant growth opportunity, for example, investments supporting that priority should reinforce one another. Thought leadership should strengthen the same positioning that client programs support. Sponsorship decisions should create access to the audiences the firm has deliberately chosen. Business-development resources should help lawyers deepen relationships within the same ecosystem.

The result is cumulative.

One initiative makes the next more valuable.

Without that alignment, firms can spend substantial amounts on activities that produce isolated wins but little strategic momentum.

This is an important distinction because budgets alone do not create concentration. A firm can spend heavily on business development while spreading that spending so widely that no market experiences the full weight of its expertise.

The relevant question is therefore not simply, "Is this a good initiative?"

It is, "If this succeeds, does it make our strategy more likely to succeed?"

Those are very different standards.

Where Are Practices Competing For The Same Audience?

Law firms often think about competition externally. Commercial leaders should also examine overlap internally.

Multiple practices may be targeting the same client executives, industries or referral networks without realizing how much their efforts intersect. One group may approach the general counsel, another the chief financial officer and another the business unit, but the buying organization experiences all of those interactions as coming from the same firm.

This creates both a risk and an opportunity.

The risk is fragmentation. Clients receive disconnected messages, partners unknowingly duplicate outreach and the firm spends multiple budgets building separate relationships with the same organization.

The opportunity is integration.

If several practices genuinely matter to the same client population, that overlap may be evidence that the firm should stop treating those efforts as separate campaigns and build a stronger firmwide proposition instead.

The question changes from "How do we market each practice?" to "What problem are we uniquely positioned to solve for this client?"

That is a more strategic question because clients rarely buy according to a law firm's organizational chart.

The best commercial strategies therefore look for places where practices can combine expertise to create relevance that none would possess alone.

Which Activities Persist Without Meaningful Evaluation?

Some initiatives survive because they work.

Others survive because nobody has asked whether they still do.

Recurring events and sponsorships are particularly susceptible to this problem. They develop institutional momentum. Partners expect them. Relationships form around them. Attendance becomes a familiar metric.

But familiarity is not evidence of commercial value.

This does not mean every business-development activity needs to produce an immediately attributable matter. Professional-services buying cycles are complex, relationships compound over time and some investments are intentionally long term.

It does mean the firm should be able to articulate what an initiative is intended to accomplish and what evidence would indicate progress.

Did the sponsorship create access to priority clients?

Did the event deepen strategically important relationships?

Did the thought-leadership campaign establish credibility in a market the firm intends to own?

Did the technology platform materially improve how lawyers identify or pursue opportunities?

If leadership cannot explain what success looks like, evaluation becomes almost impossible.

And without evaluation, continuation becomes the default.

What Should The Firm Stop Funding?

This may be the most important question of all.

Leadership teams spend enormous amounts of time deciding what to launch and remarkably little deciding what to stop.

Yet every new initiative consumes something finite: budget, partner attention, marketing capacity, business-development resources or simply the organization's ability to absorb another priority.

Capital is visible. Attention is not.

A firm knows when a budget has been exhausted. It is much harder to identify the moment when its people have been spread across so many "important" initiatives that none receives the concentration required to succeed.

That is why adding a new strategic priority without removing or reducing something else should make leaders uncomfortable.

A useful test is simple: If this initiative did not already exist, would the firm approve it today?

If the answer is no, history alone is a poor reason to continue funding it.

Stopping an initiative does not necessarily mean it failed. Markets change. Client priorities change. Firm strategies change. Something can have been the right investment three years ago and the wrong investment now.

The ability to make that distinction is a sign of strategic maturity.

AI Will Make This Problem Harder

Artificial intelligence introduces an interesting complication.

As AI makes certain forms of research, content creation, analysis and execution faster, law firms may discover that they are capable of doing significantly more business-development activity with the same resources.

The obvious response will be to do more.

More content. More campaigns. More personalization. More market intelligence. More outreach.

That may prove to be one of the least strategic uses of the productivity AI creates.

The real opportunity may be to use increased capacity to improve the quality and speed of the few initiatives that matter most.

Technology can expand an organization's ability to execute. It cannot decide what deserves execution.

If anything, as execution becomes cheaper, judgment becomes more valuable.

Law firms will still need to decide which markets warrant disproportionate attention, which client problems they can credibly own and which opportunities deserve sustained investment. AI may make it easier to pursue ten strategies simultaneously. It will not make pursuing ten strategies wise.

The Discipline Of Doing Less

There is a reason initiative overload is so persistent: saying yes is easier than making trade-offs.

A new sponsorship can be approved. Another campaign can be added. Another practice can receive support. Each decision preserves momentum and avoids a difficult conversation.

Strategy does the opposite.

It forces leaders to decide where the firm has the greatest opportunity to build disproportionate relevance and value—and then to back that decision with resources.

That does not mean ignoring the rest of the firm. Nor does it require centralizing every business-development decision. Practice-level initiatives will always have a legitimate place in a professional-services organization.

But firmwide strategy should determine where the organization places its biggest bets.

The strongest law-firm growth strategies are therefore unlikely to be the ones with the greatest number of initiatives. They will be the ones where partners can clearly explain what the firm is trying to become known for, which clients and markets matter disproportionately, and why resources are being concentrated accordingly.

That clarity should extend to what the firm has decided not to pursue.

Because a strategic priority without corresponding resource allocation is not really a priority. It is a request.

Law firms do not need fewer ideas. They need greater conviction about which ideas deserve to become strategy.

The measure of that conviction is not how much a firm is willing to start.

It is what the firm is willing to stop.

Read more by Janita Pannu on Law360 Canada