Client: a national law firm with a Property Litigation practice spread across several regional offices

The challenge

What happens when a firm decides its offices should stop doing their own thing?

This firm was in a period of transition. Its marketing and BD team was moving away from office-by-office activity and starting to write strategies based on a national outlook. My remit was to write the Property Litigation marketing and BD plan as part of that shift.

The brief was clear. The plan needed to be as evidence-based as possible, and it needed to give the practice clear guardrails on where to focus its effort. That meant understanding the practice properly first, rather than relying on assumptions about where the work and the opportunities were.

Building the evidence base

I designed and delivered a reporting framework that brought together every source of evidence the plan needed. This covered:

• Client and matter analysis looking at matter types, sectors, recurring work and wider portfolio trends.
• Strategic client analysis to identify the clients to protect, the core clients to grow and those to re-engage or that were falling away.
• Cross-selling analysis of Corporate, Construction and Real Estate clients with low levels of Property Litigation work, to find untapped opportunities.
• Intermediary mapping of relationships with property advisers and other referrers, showing relationship strength, gaps and ownership.
• Marketing and BD spend analysis to show where time and budget had historically gone.
• Competitor and proposition analysis comparing directory rankings, regional visibility, specialist capability and positioning, location by location.

Each report had a summary setting out what the data was actually telling us, so the findings could feed straight into the plan.

Using AI to go further with the data

Of course, a lot of this analysis would normally take weeks of manual work in spreadsheets. I used Microsoft Copilot in Excel to build more complex reports than I could have produced efficiently by hand, which meant I could spend my time interpreting the data rather than wrangling it.

In practice, Copilot helped me to:

• Classify strategic and core clients based on their spend over a five-year period
• Identify which offices had the strongest cross-selling opportunities
• Suggest a list of clients for each office to investigate
• Map intermediary relationships across offices and geographic regions

Every output was checked and sense-tested before it went anywhere near a partner. Used this way, AI didn’t replace judgement. It made it possible to bring a far deeper level of evidence to the plan in the time available.

The partner playbook

Partners don’t need the underlying data. They need to know where to focus, why and what’s expected of them. So I distilled the analysis into a national Partner Playbook covering:

• The ambition and key strategic priorities for the practice
• The current position, strengths and barriers to growth
• Priority clients, markets, specialisms and areas of opportunity
• Cross-selling, internal referral and intermediary opportunities
• National marketing and BD priorities and routes to market
• How each office contributes to national growth
• Measures of success and how progress would be tracked
• Partner actions, responsibilities and the decisions needed to move forward

This gave partners a clear set of guardrails they could read quickly and act on, with the reasoning behind every priority visible.

The national marketing and BD plan

A strategy only works if someone can deliver it. Alongside the playbook, I created a longer national marketing and BD plan for the BD team to take away and action.

Where the playbook set the direction, this plan was deliberately practical. It broke the strategy down into specific, owned activities so the Head of Dispute Resolution BD could divide the work across the team in a way that was manageable and easy to track. Each activity linked back to a priority in the playbook, so the team could see why they were doing it, not just what they were doing.

The result

The practice now has an evidence-led national marketing and BD plan that fits the firm’s new way of working. Partners have clear guardrails on where to focus and what’s expected of them. The BD team has a workable plan they can divide up, deliver and report against. And the firm has a model for how evidence, and the smart use of AI, can sit behind future practice strategies.

Is this a challenge you recognise?

If your firm is moving towards a national approach, or you know your data holds more answers than you’ve had time to find, you’re not alone. Getting the evidence in one place and turning it into something partners and BD teams can actually use makes all the difference, and it’s well worth the effort.

If you’d like to talk about how an evidence-led plan could work for your practice, get in touch. I’m always happy to have an initial conversation about where you are now and what you want to achieve.