Consider two firms in the same market. About 200 lawyers each. Similar profits per partner, similar revenue per lawyer, good clients, no debt to speak of. Seven years later one of them has 260 lawyers, headcount and revenue up about thirty percent, profits per partner up by nearly a fifth, and offices in two new cities. The other has 135 lawyers and profits per partner down by a quarter.
Same starting point. Same market. Our founder opens Win the Talent Game with those two firms, because in more than twenty years of this work the difference between them has almost always come down to one thing. Firm A had a plan to grow. Firm B assumed it could hold still.
Recruiting executes a strategy. It cannot substitute for one.
Holding still is not available. Partners retire, move, or die. The ones who remain get older. Ten years on, the lawyers over 65 control most of the revenue and have no obvious successors, headcount is down, and the market has quietly filed you as an old firm. Now you are recruiting from weakness, paying a premium for the laterals you could once have chosen.
Most firms do not choose a growth strategy. They accumulate one, a partner at a time, because someone became available or a market got mentioned in a meeting. The alternative is not complicated, only rare: put the options side by side, price each one honestly, and argue them out before anyone calls a candidate. We do that work with firm leadership, and sometimes it ends in a decision not to run a search at all.
The five options, and what each one actually costs
Almost every growth question a firm faces reduces to one of these. The useful part is rarely the option itself. It is the last column.
| The option | What it means | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| Hold and deepen | Stay where you are and get better at it. Raise rates, improve realization, invest behind the practices already winning. | The discipline to decline opportunistic hires, and honesty about whether your strongest practices are genuinely defensible. |
| Grow organically | Hire from law school and develop your own. Keeps the firm young and the culture yours. | Time. Seven to ten years as an associate before a lawyer is truly productive, and more before they can bring in clients. Your clients have urgent matters now. |
| Enter a market | Open where clients are already pulling you, usually because one has said they will send the work if you have boots on the ground. | A credible first hire who can recruit the rest. An office built around one partner with no bench behind them stays one partner. |
| Add a practice | Build capability you do not have, because you are declining work or referring it to firms that then meet your client. | Patience through the two years before it pays, and partners willing to hand relationships to a group they did not choose. |
| Combine | Acquire scale, bench, or a market in a single move rather than assembling it hire by hire. | Leadership attention for two years, and a willingness to let the resulting firm be genuinely different from the one you run now. |
If you recognize your firm somewhere in that table but cannot say which row, that is the conversation worth having. Six questions will tell you which two are in play, and what each would cost.
Two questions that come before any of it
Why. Is the purpose a market, a practice, deeper service to existing clients, or reputation in an industry? Adding headcount for its own sake is a legitimate answer. Not knowing is not, because the answer dictates everything that follows.
Why you. Why should a lateral move to your firm? If leadership cannot answer it, a good partner will not be able to either. The honest version of this is a full accounting of the firm’s strengths and weaknesses, and the selling points have to be genuine. A firm cannot sell a robust IP practice on the strength of two lawyers.
If your firm is under forty lawyers
The advantages of a smaller firm are real, and larger firms struggle to compete with you on them: a culture that is easier to hold, collegiality that comes from twenty partners rather than two hundred, and a genuine voice in decisions. Your vulnerability is equally real. Lose two of five rainmakers, and the firm is in trouble in a way a firm with fifty would barely feel.
The strategy, then, is not to imitate the large firms. It is to find the partners who want what you have and care less about what you lack, and there are more of them than most small-firm leaders believe.
Why an outside read helps
- No position to defend. We do not sit in your partnership, we do not lead one of your practice groups, and we have no compensation outcome riding on which way you go.
- Current market knowledge. Who is genuinely movable in a given city and why, which groups are quietly unhappy, and what a practice actually costs to stand up this year rather than three years ago.
- An ecosystem view. Where your firm sits relative to the firms you compete with for work and for talent, which is frequently not where leadership assumes it sits.