Bingham Greenebaum Doll was a traditional midsize Midwestern law firm. It had healthy litigation, transactional and tax practices, and offices in cities like Indianapolis, Louisville, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, places that many lawyers believed to be insulated from broader legal market forces.

But those forces were starting to take their toll. Bingham’s managing partner, Tobin McClamroch, says his firm was experiencing the same trends affecting many across the industry: the need to offer specialized services that clients can’t handle in-house; the need to scale up in order to expand the firm’s footprint; and the need to pay more and more for technology.