By Simon P Marshall, former journalist and founder of legal marketing agency TBD Marketing and publisher of Si’s Matters.
Leaders may post about awards, but what keeps them up nights –at least right now – is Weil.
I spent Wednesday at a law firm leaders’ conference where Weil was nowhere on the formal agenda, yet its prospective dissolution kept finding its way into conversations throughout the day. The speed with which such a venerable institution has unravelled has clearly unsettled people who run partnerships of their own.
What began as discussion of Weil’s predicament frequently turned into a much less comfortable consideration of how vulnerable other firms might be, and what their leaders would do if faced with something similar.
Compare that with what law firm leaders are telling the world on LinkedIn. Over the past five months, TBD Marketing’s analysis of their posts counted 245 references to growth or new offices and 209 to awards or rankings, compared with just eight mentions of pricing, eleven of client listening and 27 of restructuring.
I would hardly expect managing partners to broadcast their anxieties on social media, but the gulf between the public feed and the private worry list was hard to ignore after Wednesday’s conversations.
Those discussions have prompted this week’s edition: ten questions I have heard law firm leaders wrestling with recently, together with one slightly more unconventional question of my own. I cannot pretend to have all the answers, but I suspect plenty of readers will recognise some of the concerns behind them.
1. What would I have done at Weil?
It is easy to look at Weil from outside and identify the warning signs in retrospect. Putting yourself in the position of its leadership, with incomplete information and partners beginning to leave, makes the decisions considerably more difficult.
The departure of leading M&A partner Michael Aiello to Cravath was followed by further high-profile exits, failed merger discussions with Willkie Farr & Gallagher and executive-partner-elect Ramona Nee’s decision not to take up the role in January 2027. The firm’s management committee has now recommended an orderly wind-down, with a partnership vote expected. For a 95-year-old institution with around 1,200 lawyers, the speed of the unravelling has been extraordinary.
Several of the conversations I had on Wednesday came back to the same uncomfortable predicament. At what point would you have pulled the emergency brake, and would doing so have made any difference? By the time a succession of partner departures becomes an existential threat, the options available to the people running the firm may already be painfully limited.
2. How do we keep our rainmakers when the client relationship can leave with them?
A firm can spend decades building a client relationship and still discover that much of the loyalty belongs to a partner who can walk out of the door.
The financial incentives are formidable. Legal Cheek’s latest Firms Most List runs from Kirkland & Ellis at £8.2m to Brabners at £214,000, a reminder of the extraordinary differences in the economics of law firm partnerships. Few firms can compete with the highest-paying US rivals pound for pound, so what else can they offer that might persuade clients to stay when a rainmaker leaves?
One suggestion I heard at the conference was to make a firm’s accumulated knowledge and technology more specific to individual clients, giving them something valuable that belongs to the institution rather than the partner managing the relationship. It is an interesting way of thinking about client loyalty, although putting it into practice would be far from straightforward in a partnership where individual lawyers have traditionally controlled their own relationships.
3. Would I walk, or would I stay and try to fix things?
Ramona Nee was due to become Weil’s first female executive partner in 2027, but decided against taking up the position as the firm’s difficulties mounted. I have no wish to judge that decision, particularly when none of us outside the firm knows everything that informed it. Her experience nevertheless illustrates how difficult succession can become when a firm’s circumstances change dramatically.
I found myself thinking about Tony Williams and the very different leadership challenge he faced when Andersen Legal collapsed alongside Arthur Andersen in 2002. While the business was sinking, Williams was busy trying to get other people into lifeboats, spending much of his remaining time helping lawyers and trainees find new homes. His conduct earned him enormous respect in the profession, and I remember telling him so once, face to face. I admired the way he had looked after people when it would have been entirely understandable to concentrate on his own future.
Leadership in a partnership is an unusual responsibility. You are accountable for the firm’s direction, yet the people whose support you depend upon can choose to leave, sometimes at very short notice. The choices leaders make when things go badly can shape how colleagues and the wider profession remember them long after the immediate crisis has passed. Tony Williams is a good example of that.
4. Are we in growth or maintenance mode?
Ask most firms about their ambitions and they will talk about growth; yet more than one leader acknowledged on Wednesday that maintaining the current position may be the more realistic objective for now. Revenue can edge upwards and profit per equity partner improve, particularly when the equity pool shrinks, without much changing about the underlying business. That is not growth, but arithmetic.
After several years of strong performance across much of the legal market, there are perfectly sensible reasons for a firm to consolidate. It may be better to strengthen what you already have than pursue expansion for its own sake, provided partners understand and support that choice. Maintenance mode is a perfectly good strategy when a leadership team has chosen it deliberately. The danger is drifting into it while the strategy deck still says “ambitious”.
5. Merge, be bought, or be carved up?
Knights has completed its £27m acquisition of Moore Barlow’s commercial and private wealth business, taking on around 160 fee earners and £30m of annual revenue. Fletchers acquired the personal injury, clinical negligence and Court of Protection operations. A firm with a history stretching back more than two centuries thus has effectively been divided between two businesses with different priorities.
Elsewhere, Taylor Wessing’s former UK operation has combined with Winston & Strawn to form Winston Taylor, while Stephenson Harwood is in discussions about a merger with the remaining European Taylor Wessing business. Clifford Chance and Cavenagh Law have also agreed to end their 14-year formal alliance in Singapore, although Clifford Chance will continue operating there.
Leaders need to understand which parts of their business are essential to its future, where a combination might create genuine advantages and whether some practices would be better served under different ownership.
Every managing partner and senior partner ought to have a clear view of where a merger, acquisition or a carve-up fits into their firm’s thinking, and why. It should be something they can explain to colleagues and clients without reaching for a strategy presentation. If you can’t say it in two sentences, your partners will fill the silence for you. And so will the legal press.
6. Who should own a law firm?
Partners, private equity investors, public shareholders or perhaps a technology business with a legal practice attached?
The range of ownership models continues to expand, although appetite for outside investment varies considerably across the market. Some partnerships remain sceptical about private equity, while others see opportunities to accelerate growth or invest in capabilities they could not easily finance themselves.
The proposed minority investment by Palatine in sports law specialist Centrefield, subject to regulatory approval, is one recent example. Other firms have considered public listings, while newer technology-led legal businesses are experimenting with different ways of bringing capital and legal expertise together.
My own enthusiasm for outside capital in law remains limited, although I can see the attraction where it offers funding, expertise or access to markets that a partnership cannot readily secure itself. But before giving up a share of the business, I would want a convincing answer to one question: what could outside investment give this firm that we couldn’t achieve with what we’ve already got?
7. AI: build, buy, or be built around?
Law firms are taking markedly different approaches to AI, from working with established technology providers and developing proprietary tools to building new businesses in which lawyers and engineers collaborate from the outset. Some are backing several platforms, while others are making substantial commitments to one supplier.
The market has developed at extraordinary speed since ChatGPT’s public launch in November 2022, and there is little certainty about which products or business models will look strongest in another 18 months. Whatever you choose now, you may need to unchoose in 2028.
That is why I think any firm’s AI strategy needs to explain the thinking behind its current approach, what it hopes to achieve and what circumstances might cause it to reconsider. Recording those assumptions gives the leadership team a sensible basis for reviewing its decisions as the technology changes, rather than feeling obliged to defend a choice long after the reasons for making it have disappeared.
Experimentation remains entirely sensible, but there is a limit to how long a firm can say it is “evaluating several platforms” without explaining what it wants AI to do or where it intends to commit its resources.
8. Do we have a plan to create our partners of 2040?
At Wednesday’s conference, one senior leader described going out personally to meet prospective recruits rather than leaving the job entirely to the graduate recruitment team. I liked that. If you want the right people running your firm in 2040, taking a personal interest in finding them seems a pretty good place to start.
Later, someone suggested that junior lawyers had traditionally learned their craft by doing due diligence. A managing partner asked a wonderfully simple question: “Did they?” Another participant remembered colouring in maps as a trainee. I suspect plenty of lawyers will recognise that sort of experience. Yes, some routine work helped juniors understand how transactions operated, but we should be honest about how much of it actually taught them to practise law. There were plenty of hours spent on mechanical tasks that required little judgement, even if the client was still paying for them.
The traditional training model was built for a different timetable. Today a lawyer can be genuinely useful by two years’ PQE, something I witnessed for myself recently with the BBC’s in-house legal team, whose trainees, apprentices and second-years are sharply commercial, ask difficult questions and willing to challenge things immediately. It made me wonder whether private practice has underestimated what junior lawyers are capable of, while overestimating the educational value of some of the work it has traditionally given them.
AI is now taking on more of those routine tasks, and clients are hardly going to thank us for keeping them alive simply to give trainees something to do.
For years, firms have been able to fund much of their junior lawyers’ development through chargeable work. If that work disappears, who pays for the training? And if juniors no longer spend their early careers immersed in the detail of transactions, what experiences will give them the judgement they need to become partners? I am not convinced enough firms have worked out the answers.
9. If we merge or acquire, how do we keep the people we need?
When firms plan a merger or acquisition, they need to distinguish genuine opportunities to combine roles from the people and capabilities the new business cannot afford to lose.
A law firm’s goodwill sits on both sides of the house. Fee earners are important, of course, but so are the business services professionals who know the clients, the systems and where the bodies are buried. Some of that knowledge has been accumulated over decades and would be difficult to replace.
During negotiations, leaders must keep the existing business running while working out who they want to retain and which roles may overlap. That is difficult enough without the uncertainty that inevitably accompanies a deal. If you value a particular business services colleague, you need to make sure they know it before a recruiter persuades them that their future lies elsewhere.
Savings that look convincing in a merger presentation can disappear quickly if the integration drives away the very people needed to make the combined business work.
10. When is enough enough?
At what point does a rainmaker decide that the financial rewards are sufficient? When should a managing partner hand over to someone else? And how long should a firm prize its independence if a different arrangement might offer its people and clients a better future?
After years spent shaping a firm, a managing partner may find it difficult to contemplate handing over responsibility, just as partners who have spent their careers building an independent business may struggle to imagine it becoming part of something larger. I wonder how many have a point in mind at which they would say enough, and how many will only confront that decision when circumstances leave them little choice.
And one off the wall: if our firm folded tomorrow, who would bid for our brand, our data and our people?
The prospective dissolution of Weil has produced an unusual development. Crosby, an AI-native legal business founded about two years ago, has reportedly submitted a letter of intent to acquire certain Weil assets, including its trademark, brand and internal data.
Think about that for a moment.
A legal business barely two years old is interested in buying the name and data of a firm that has been around for 95 years. Whether anything comes of the approach remains to be seen, but it suggests that an outsider may see considerable value in assets that the partnership itself would never have contemplated selling.
Now apply that thinking to your own firm. If the partners with the strongest client relationships departed, how much of the firm’s reputation would remain attached to the institution? What might another business be willing to pay for its data, systems or other assets? And how much thought has the partnership given to protecting and developing those things while it still controls them?
It is a rather uncomfortable exercise, particularly against the backdrop of Weil’s difficulties, but I suspect the answers would surprise quite a few managing partners.
Over to you
Which of these questions is occupying you at the moment, and what else should be on the list? I’d be interested to hear what you’re discussing in your own firm, so hit reply or drop me a DM and tell me. I read every response.
Former legal journalist, Simon Marshall spent 14 years working in-house across six law firms before founding TBD Marketing in 2018. The UK-based consultancy helps law firms sharpen their business development, marketing and growth strategies. He created the quarterly Legal LinkedInfluencers rankings, highlighting lawyers making the greatest impact on the platform. and also hosts The Nudge, a weekly business development club focused on turning professional connections into clients and new instructions and publishes ‘Si’s Matters’ on legal news.
