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One of the biggest challenges law firms face today is shifting from providing isolated, transactional services to building partnerships with clients. Using client data and fostering a structured approach to collaboration across departments and regions, your firm can unlock millions untapped cross-selling strategies.
Below, Stuart Maister of Strategic Narrative and Introhive’s Al Mercer share their insights on how this approach can transform your firm’s ability to serve your clients while driving more revenue through deeper, more integrated relationships.
Connecting the dots across your firm
Lawyers within large firms often operate in silos—unaware of the broader, global relationships their firm already has with high-value clients. The result? Millions in potential revenue is left on the table, and valuable insights that could guide the client strategically are overlooked. A comprehensive picture of the client’s needs and aspirations is missed.
Unlocking cross-selling opportunities begins with leveraging client intelligence to gain visibility into existing relationships across the firm’s network. As Al explained, client intelligence tools make it possible to map who is working with whom and where different touchpoints exist within a client’s organisation. It’s what helps you answer critical questions like What relationships do we have? How can we deliver more value based on those insights?
From there, it’s essential to align internal stakeholders, using collective insights to craft a strategic narrative that addresses the client’s broader business goals. This narrative helps position your firm’s capabilities in a way that speaks directly to their needs. By integrating knowledge from different teams, you can identify current opportunities and anticipate future needs. Al emphasised that it helps you answer critical questions like:
- Who do we know and who knows them?
- What depth & breadth of relationships do we have?
- Who across the firm can we pull together to build a complete picture of the overall relationship?
- How can we holistically deliver more value for this client based on those insights?
Crafting a client-specific strategic narrative
Once you understand the full scope of your relationships with a client, you can start crafting a strategic narrative with an eye toward cross-selling opportunities that cater to the client’s specific needs and challenges.
For example, consider a large energy company expanding its renewable energy initiatives globally. Instead of focusing solely on the legal issues, your team could engage in broader conversations addressing challenges like supply chain disruptions and regulatory changes. These issues span multiple jurisdictions and require expertise from various specialised areas within your firm, both expanding service lines and increasing the value of your partnership.
Stuart emphasised that this approach allows you to engage with clients about their major challenges and ambitions, not just individual matters. By doing so, professionals can shift discussions with clients from a legal-only focus to talking about broader business strategies. For instance, if the client is focused on gas exploration in a specific region, you could offer expertise spanning various legal issues related to that project, effectively aligning itself with the client’s priorities.
Aligning teams to develop cross-selling strategies and become a trusted partner
To effectively build deeper relationships with key clients, your internal teams need to function as a cohesive unit, moving beyond siloed efforts and aligning around a unified vision. This means fostering collaboration across practice areas and bringing together the right experts to address client challenges as they arise. These purpose-driven teams should work closely to combine insights from different disciplines, ensuring a more comprehensive approach to serving the client.
Rather than focusing on isolated services, or competing over client contacts, true internal collaboration across practice areas will allow you to approach the client holistically, reinforcing the collective strength of your firm’s diverse expertise while also addressing their broader needs. By understanding key touchpoints and mobilising the right teams, your firm can engage with clients not just to sell services, but to deepen relationships, understand strategic challenges, and become a long-term partner — elevating your efforts in cross-selling and turning your firm into a trusted partner.
Stuart shared an example from a top firm working with a large construction company. Traditionally, the firm provided isolated services related to contracts, leases, and property law. However, the construction client wasn’t thinking in terms of individual legal services — they had large-scale infrastructure projects stretching over multiple years. By aligning experts from different areas of the firm like real estate, regulatory compliance, and litigation, to highlight their start to finish support for the client’s projects, the firm was able to present a comprehensive narrative and much more compelling value proposition.
Measuring and maintaining dynamic client relationships
To sustain and grow these key client relationships, you must treat them as evolving entities rather than static engagements. Collaboration across various practice areas should be ongoing, with continuous communication and feedback loops to ensure all team members are aligned on the client’s changing business needs and objectives to continually adapt your narrative and approach. Regularly updating relationship maps and strategic narratives is not just a best practice — it is essential.
Consider measuring success not just by revenue, but by the strength and depth of your relationships. Revenue and profit margins are lagging indicators, the results of strong relationships. On the other hand, frequent touchpoints, thought leadership events and non-matter-related engagements are lead indicators that show whether your firm is actively nurturing and building those relationships.
If you can consistently and proactively measure these lead indicators, using clear insights provided by client intelligence platforms, you’ll be better positioned to serve clients in more strategic ways, adding greater value through cross-selling. These insights should inform regular team meetings aimed at reviewing the current relationship status and setting future goals.
Conclusion
The stakes are high for law firms that continue to cling to piecemeal, transactional work. Clients need more—and those firms that offer broader, value-driven solutions are quickly becoming indispensable partners. By adopting a strategic, relationship-driven approach that fosters purposeful collaboration across your firm’s specialties, you’ll be better positioned to meet client needs holistically and identify new growth opportunities, ultimately becoming a crucial partner in your clients’ overall success.
The shift is already happening. The question is: Is your firm ready to become an indispensable partner, or risk being left behind?
To learn more about creating a strategic narrative for your firm, visit Strategic-Narrative.com.
For more on using relationship intelligence to enable cross-selling across practice areas or regions, explore our recent Legal Guide or book a demo with our team.
About Stuart Maister
After a 10 year career as an on-air reporter for the BBC, ITN, Sky and ABC Australia, Stuart Maister started his first business. Since then, he has led 3 award-winning communications firms, selling one of them to a US NASDAQ-listed company.
Stuart now consults, trains, coaches and gives keynotes in two areas — strategic storytelling and building high trust relationships that create far more value. This is aimed at leaders and rainmakers.
The two connect as follows: get your core story right, setting out what makes you special, different and great, so achieving strategic clarity; then make this true through the way you and your people show up, building trust with each other and your clients and colleagues.
At the centre of this approach is the Trust Triangle, which is at the core of Stuart’s new book published by Economist Books in January.
Stuart also facilitates conferences, webinars and workshops, and has done so around the world.
About Al Mercer, Legal Industry Director at Introhive
Alan spent 10 years as a marketing and business development director for law firms before joining Introhive. Having been on the clients’ side of the table, Alan understands the range of practical and cultural challenges firms face around BD, client development, data challenges, CRM and change management. Alan now works with Introhive’s legal sector clients to understand their needs and devise solutions to meet objectives.
