Law Firm Leadership

How Lateral Hires Affect Law Firm Marketing

Lateral hiring is one of the biggest disruptions a law firm marketing department faces. Almost no firm plans for it. Here is what managing partners and marketing directors need to understand.

10 min read

Lateral partner hiring has become one of the primary growth strategies for regional law firms. The business case is straightforward: hire a partner with an established book of business, capture the revenue, and benefit from the expanded client relationships.

What is less often discussed is how profoundly lateral hiring affects the marketing function, and how consistently firms underinvest in the marketing integration that would improve the return on their lateral investment.

The announcement is not a marketing plan

Most lateral arrivals produce one marketing output: an announcement. A press release goes out, a bio gets written, the attorney directory gets updated, and the marketing department moves on to the next priority.

The announcement is the beginning of the integration, not the end of it. What happens in the sixty to ninety days following a lateral's arrival largely determines how much of their book of business actually transfers and how quickly they become productive contributors to firm-wide revenue rather than solo operators using the firm's platform.

Book portability and what marketing can do about it

Book of business portability is lower than most lateral arrangements assume. Client relationships are partly personal and partly institutional. When a partner moves, some clients follow because of the individual relationship. Others stay because the prior firm has institutional relationships the lateral cannot carry.

What determines which clients follow is largely how quickly and personally the lateral communicates the transition. Marketing support in the first thirty days, including draft client communications, a list of priority clients to contact in person, and a clear narrative about why the lateral moved and what it means for the client relationship, can meaningfully improve portability.

Firms that leave this entirely to the lateral's discretion see wide variation in results. Some laterals are good at this. Many are not. A marketing-supported protocol reduces that variance.

The cross-selling opportunity that gets missed

Every lateral arrival is also a cross-selling opportunity. The lateral's clients need to know about the firm's other practices. The firm's existing clients need to know about the capability the lateral brings.

In most cases, this opportunity goes largely uncaptured. The marketing department does not have the client relationship data to identify the overlap. The lateral does not have the firm relationship knowledge to know which existing clients might benefit from their practice area. The practice group leaders do not have an established protocol for coordinating the introduction.

Building a ninety-day BD plan for the lateral that identifies the top five to ten cross-selling opportunities in both directions, and assigns specific responsibility for making those introductions, is one of the highest-return marketing activities a firm can do following a lateral hire. It requires about six hours of marketing director time and pays back disproportionately.

How lateral volume strains the marketing function

Firms with active lateral hiring programs often find that the marketing department is in a constant state of reactive announcement production. Each lateral triggers a round of bio writing, directory updates, practice area revisions, and announcement drafts. If the firm is hiring four to six laterals per year, the marketing team can spend a significant portion of their capacity on lateral onboarding work rather than strategic BD activity.

Managing partners who are actively growing through lateral hiring need to account for this capacity cost when evaluating the marketing department's resource needs. The lateral hiring strategy and the marketing resource plan should be developed together, not separately.

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