Here’s a stunning statistic – 48% of lateral lawyers leave their new firm within the first five years (Intapp, May 2023). It’s no secret among law firm marketing and business development professionals that it’s hard to get lateral integration right. It requires more than merely offering your laterals a place to sit in the office. To crack the lateral integration code, it’s important to see integration as a two-way street. You’re not just integrating lateral lawyers into your firm – you’re integrating your firm with the laterals.
When your firm takes on a new group of lawyers or merges with another firm, everyone has ideas about how the combination will benefit their practice. But law firms don’t always understand what it takes to fully realize those benefits. Many firms onboard laterals in a cursory way – setting them up with computer passwords and familiarizing them with the basics about the firm – but they don’t really integrate them into the firm meaningfully.
In our decades of working with law firms, we’ve seen various challenges arise when laterals join. Competing agendas, cultural disparities and overwhelming workloads can disrupt even the best laid plans for growth.
How can your firm successfully and meaningfully integrate laterals into your practices and into your firm? Let’s start by reminding ourselves why law firms recruit laterals in the first place.
The Importance of Lateral Integration
Lateral integration begins when a firm recruits experienced lawyers from other places – such as another firm, government, courts or in-house – to join them. These laterals often have expertise or a book of business in an area where the firm wants to grow. Recruiting this kind of talent can be a costly, time-consuming process.
Orientation for laterals happens early on, and can vary from a quick overview to a more in-depth process. Marketing and business development staff will often be tasked with adding laterals’ bios to the firm’s website, including their areas of focus into the firm’s collateral, inviting them to various meetings, and orchestrating a series of check-ins. But in our experience, this is often where lateral integration stops – and it’s a missed opportunity that can leave your carefully chosen talent unable to connect with your firm’s culture.
Thoroughly integrating your laterals into your firm’s culture is critical and requires a more sophisticated, considered approach if you’re aiming for true integration, not just onboarding.
Five Necessary Principles for Successful Lateral Integration
Erin Ryan, Director of Partner Integration & Business Development Coaching at McGuireWoods LLP, originated the lateral integration role at her firm after spending over a dozen years working in law firm business development. Before she implemented her firm’s program, she carefully studied integration in general, and found that these five elements are imperative in any integration context:
- A sense of community
- A sense of belonging
- A sense of identity
- Access to information
- Access to resources
Erin knew that approaching integration from this foundational place made sense. “Human psychology has shown us that these are crucial factors when assimilation is taking place – from large groups to small family units,” she said. It was important that the program she built was rooted in those elements and not just checklists. “Everything we do is in the name of helping lateral partners move closer to those five things.”
Erin’s data indicates that her firm’s lateral integration program has worked so far. She surveys their lateral lawyers every few months and has the data and anecdotal feedback to back up the program’s success. And anyone who has lateraled into another firm in the past has told Erin that their program is unlike any other – a rare exception to the rule.
What We’ve Seen Go Wrong
As long-term law firm marketing experts, we’ve seen law firms invest significantly in laterals but ultimately fail to fully integrate them into the firm. Here are some of the most common problems we’ve seen.
Lack of access to information – It can be disastrous if a lateral is paired with another partner and hasn’t been given all the information they need to go to market. If they approach their clients or new prospects with a disjointed pitch or presentation and can’t answer basic questions, they will raise concerns that this behavior represents what the client can expect when working with the firm.
Laterals need to be quickly brought up to speed on the firm’s current messaging and thought leadership before they go to market. Also, the firm needs to be aware of the unique areas of focus, skills and offerings that the laterals bring so they can share those with clients.
Most importantly, laterals and their counterparts at the firm need to collaborate on their presentation and messaging so they can pitch smoothly and effectively to internal and external audiences. That’s why laterals can greatly benefit from business development coaching and collaboration coaching that goes beyond simply introducing them to their firm counterparts.
Lack of bandwidth on your internal team – It is likely that your internal marketing and business development team is already at capacity. They are dealing with everyday tasks that take considerable time and effort, such as creating presentations and pitch materials, and they may also be involved in larger, longer-term projects.
What this means is that they’ll have to squeeze in the sophisticated tasks of integrating new partners as best they can. Relying on internal marketers who may be overwhelmed by their regular work – and may not have relevant skills such as collaboration coaching – will likely leave laterals feeling unsupported, especially during the first 100 days that involve a heavy lift of announcements, introductions, client transfers, etc.
Unclear definition of success – It’s easy to get caught up in the process of onboarding a lateral lawyer or group because there’s a ton of activity, marketing and otherwise, that occurs. Be sure to define what successful integration looks like so you recognize success when it happens, or can course correct if it’s elusive. To define success, you can revisit the business case for bringing the lateral(s) to the firm and determine milestones or measurements based on that. And, if at all possible, share the business case with the people responsible for lateral integration. It’s a wealth of useful information.
Lack of retention – Recruiting and hiring laterals is a considerable investment of time and money for your firm. It’s not good for anyone involved if they leave within a few years. In addition to the 48% who leave within five years, 62% of laterals fail to bring their promised book of business, and 35% fail to fit in, creating cracks in a strong culture.
Elizabeth Kennedy, founder of New Edge BD and creator of Growth Factor, Merger and Lateral Integration Solutions for Law Firms, notes that “lateral integration is a process involving the coordination of multiple departments and significant investments of time by business development professionals and sponsor partners. Most firms don’t recognize how much work is required in the first 100 days and leave a lot of that work for the lateral to do themselves.”
Indeed, when we work with a firm, we have a 45-item checklist that Elizabeth developed to help integrate laterals. That can seem like a daunting list, so firms sometimes ask for an abbreviated process. But as Elizabeth has noted, an abbreviated process can result in abbreviated support that doesn’t fully integrate your new lateral and maximize their potential.
If laterals don’t feel integrated into the firm’s culture, they may leave as quickly as they came.
How to Integrate Laterals Into Your Team
When considering how to best integrate laterals into your law firm, your approach will need to differ depending on your size and your budget.
Consider these options:
Increase the bandwidth of the internal marketing team – If you are a smaller or even midsize law firm, you will need to ensure that your internal marketing team has the bandwidth to take on the task of true integration. This could require hiring more people or moving some of their current duties onto different people. But taking this approach could still put a lot of pressure on a busy team. As Erin says, “I don’t see how it can work if it’s 1/25 of 25 different people’s jobs” – especially considering the level of sophistication and specific experience needed for lateral integration.
Centralize the lateral integration function – Rather than dividing up the integration roles among various HR or marketing staff, law firms may be well served to centralize the lateral integration function instead. For this approach, finding the right person with the right experience for the role is crucial.
Lesley Wynes, the former Chief Legal Talent Officer at a St. Louis-based firm, was hired to revamp the firm’s lateral partner integration program after serving as an assistant dean at Northwestern University for a decade. “For the work to be more effective,” Lesley explained, “we needed to centralize integration and improve accountability and communication amongst functions across the Firm.” For each lateral partner her firm hired, Lesley created an integration support team of HR, marketing and business development professionals, as well as partners from several of the firm’s offices, and a written integration plan detailing the responsibilities of each team member.
Once that happened, she had the time to get to know the new laterals, learn what their goals were and effectively integrate them into the firm’s culture. One of her greatest successes involved pairing two lawyers who had both recently joined the firm based on her in-depth knowledge of their interests and backgrounds. They eventually partnered together on a client deal – a collaboration that generated several million dollars in business for the firm.
When Erin conceptualized her firm’s new integration function, she believed centralizing it from business development made the most sense. “Good business development professionals are natural connectors, have a keen understanding of the firm at large and are focused on driving revenue,” she said. That combination of knowledge and skills has served laterals well in her role so far.
Contract with consultants or fractionals who have the bandwidth and expertise to do this – There are a growing number of consultants with significant expertise in creating lateral integration programs who can help you to navigate these challenges, which may be more cost-effective than hiring a full-time integration specialist.
Elizabeth and our team at CMO2Go bring decades of experience to law firms that want their laterals to succeed fully. We are able to step in and work closely with your in-house teams, using the program Elizabeth developed to decipher your challenges and ensure the success of your lateral integration program.
While almost half of lateral lawyers leave their new firm within five years, meaningful integration practices can cause meaningful change in your firm’s ability to retain them. If you can crack the lateral integration code at your firm, you’ll realize a full return on your investment, and turn integration into a two-way street benefiting everyone involved.