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Time to Think Big: What Law Firm Marketing and Bus Dev Teams Can Learn from the Fortune 500

By Joel Wirchin
December 01, 2023

Of all areas within the law firm, marketing and business development (BD) is one of the top areas impacted by the significant market challenges occurring over the past couple of years. Productivity has been down since Q4 of 2022 (see, Thomson Reuters 2023 State of the Legal Market Report) and uncertainty in the geo-political landscape has caused business across verticals to slow, which has placed enhanced pressure on marketing and BD to win more business. At the same time, rising internal expenses — primarily driven by surging associate compensation — is straining marketing teams to do more with less to protect margins.

2023 also added significant market "churn," as half of corporate clients consider changing firms. This surge in competition came with an accompanying increase in Requests for Proposals (RFPs) adding pressure for marketing and business development to increase output; added too was a surge in mergers and acquisitions in 2023, with 41 mergers compared to 37 and 33 in 2022 and 2021, respectively. See, "It's Not Your Imagination, There are More Law Firm Mergers in 2023," Above the Law, October 2023. This uptick was driven by firms seeking to increase scale in strategic markets to capture needed revenue as productivity dipped or new practice areas to balance out those that were languishing.

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