Client relationship succession planning is a top concern among law firm leaders. Citibank’s 2019 Client Advisory devoted a section to this topic. Firms of all stripes frequently develop goals to in their strategic plans to facilitate more effective client relationship transitions. However, according to the results of an insightful survey by the Attorneys’ Liability Assurance Society (ALAS) released to its member firms last year, there is room for many firms to take a more formal and proactive approach to effectively transition client relationships across generations.
This yields an increasingly important opportunity in the current competitive landscape in which many clients are using fewer and fewer firms over time. Over the past 10 years, legal departments have decreased rather than increased their spending on outside counsel. Many high-performing firms are successfully growing the size of their client relationships of strategic importance, increasingly serving them across the firm’s platform. And consistent with that trend, 60 percent of GCs say they send nearly all of their work to their top 10 firms, according to a 2018 CounselLink survey.
