A call to action for managing partners to leverage their firm’s Collective Experience
Why Experience Matters
Large firms just rode a strong 2024 on the back of broad demand and aggressive rate growth—but the model is wobbling. Expense pressure is up, realization risk is real, and AI is reshaping how clients assess value. Firms that treat their legal and client experience as structured data (and not as anecdotal story sharing at meetings) will plan faster, pitch smarter, cross-sell wider, bill more, and protect margins when market tailwinds fade.
Think about it. Your lawyers lose meaningful time every day hunting for “who has done this before,” and in many cases, sending around firmwide emails and disrupting the entire organization daily. Knowledge-worker research consistently shows costly drag from scattered information and repetitive tasks. In fact, a recent McKinsey study found that employees spend ~19% of their time trying to track down information (and collaboration tools can lift productivity 20–25%); another Cornell-based study found workers lose ~59 minutes per day just finding data across apps. Multiply that by your lawyer headcount and blended rates and you’re staring at annual recurring seven-figure waste (ARSFW as a new metric, anyone?)
It should be noted that your clients actually prefer and reward the firms that are able to successfully mobilize their entire firms. Recent HBR and research from Dr. Heidi Gardner ties stronger internal law firm collaboration to more billable work and higher origination. That’s not “softer culture stuff”—it’s simple revenue mechanics that drive profits.
Insights Trapped in Silos
Most firms have experience scattered across CVs, bios, DMS folders, CRM notes, old pitch decks, inboxes, and minds. Without a common schema, two nearly identical matters look unrelated. Without coding, you can’t roll up patterns by client, sector, product, or outcome. And without a governance model, data quality decays as quickly as enthusiasm.
Experience data is the foundation for every smart strategy decision you need to make...
All of this is happening while competition intensifies—not only from peer firms, but from ALSPs, which grew to a $28.5B market (+18% CAGR since 2021). The more commoditized work that shifts away, the more your differentiation depends on how quickly you can mobilize proven expertise for complex problems.
The Solution
If you take only one thing from this article, make it this: Experience data is the foundation for every smart strategy decision you need to make—client targeting, industry bets, pricing, resourcing, lateral hiring, and cross-selling. Here’s the minimum viable model:
1. Collect
Capture every matter and credential. At intake, closing, and pitch time, require a short “experience record” that can be auto-enriched later, and do the front-end work to automate or auto-populate other/recurring fields so that you don't waste unnecessary attorney time. For example, if client names, addresses and originator information are automated, asking for 2-3 sentences of the work should not be viewed by employees as a major lift or impediment to the process.
2. Code (standardize)
Adopt standards so experience rolls up coherently. Using standardized NAICS or SIC codes at the client and matter level to identify strengths and weaknesses can be helpful, but you can start simply with the 6-8 industries of focus for your firm. When the data is standardized and coded, it's amazing to see how easily one can uncover unique messaging and marketing opportunities and spot trends and opportunities across practices or sectors. At a minimum core fields should include the client's name, all relevant counterparty, sponsor or affiliated entity information, jurisdiction, regulator/authority, judge or administrative board(as appropriate), practice area, type, issue, lead partner, fees (AFA/HOURLY), timeline,, custom tags based on findings, and a 2 to 3 sentence description that is written consistently (Ie via template). You should aim for 8-10 good matters in each cut, so that if you've got a ton of sell-side Asia-related outbound M&A deals between 10-50M from last year, you can find other ways to further codify the matter. That's when you really start winning new business- and you've already done the work...it's just a matter of organizing and communicating your accolades.
(Note that a future iteration of this initiative could consider SALI task & activity codes (so you can analyze work mix, staffing, and pricing across like matters, price strategically, and conduct capacity analysis)
3. Analyze
Build reporting or dashboards around questions leaders and clients actually ask, including:
- Where do we win/lose by industry + issue? Why?
- What’s our typical team shape, hours, price, and margin by matter type?
- Which clients have latent cross-sell potential based on adjacency (e.g., we’ve done employee handbooks in their industry but not for them)?
- How quickly are we closing these deals and who and where are the outliers? How we can we standardize these offerings to bring transparency and clarity for us and our client base?
Back this with a small data-steward team so lawyers aren’t cleaning data at 11 p.m.
How to Sell it to Partners
Productivity: Reducing search/duplication by even a fraction of the 19% that McKinsey identifies will yield significant recovered billable time and reduce burnout for both staff and attorneys. In fact, a recent Ikaun report noted that more than 50% of law firms cite underinvestment in proposal infrastructure as a direct obstacle to growth, with 79% still relying heavily on manual, error-prone processes. They note that 68% bypass designated platforms in favor of inefficient workarounds! For an attorney charging $800 per hour and spending 5 hours per pitch 20 times a year, the revenue leakage can be substantial.
Revenue growth: More internal collaboration correlates not only with more billable work and higher origination, but this diversification creates "sticky" relationships, reducing the likelihood that a client will switch firms if a partner moves to a different law firm. What's more is that firms that operate efficiently across multiple practice areas also report smoother case handling, especially when leveraging technology to ensure effective communication across teams.
Competitive posture: As ALSPs expand, your edge is not just expertise—it’s how fast you prove it with relevant, quantified credentials. Negotiating an amazing outcome for a similarly-situated client means nothing if the pitching team is unaware or underinformed about the firm's wider skillsets. It's kind of like the tree that falls in the woods when nobody heard it.
Strategic clarity: Market reports show recent growth was powered by extraordinary rate gains and unusual demand dynamics, which is neither sustainable or strategic. Gathering, analyzing, identifying, and making sound decisions based off your authentic market position is how you make deliberate bets for the next cycle and wrest clients from your competitors.
Sample 90-Day Blueprint
Weeks 1–2 – Inventory & scope
- Map the current sources: DMS, CRM, bios, pitch repository, time/billing, intake forms
- Assign resources to extract, integrate, code and draft descriptions into a central repository
- Conduct data gap analysis to identify and streamline current situation
- Pick two priority arenas (e.g., a growth industry + a flagship client) to prove value fast and develop momentum
- Develop information architecture with fields and gain practice group and industry leader approval (ie list of lists)
Weeks 3–4 – Define the schema + governance
- Lock your “experience record” template to be used (15–25 fields, preferably uniform across the firm for codification purposes).
- Choose standards (Template for corporate and litigation, NAICS/SIC, and guardrails)
- Appoint one partner sponsor, one BD/Marketing owner, and one KM/data steward; give them weekly authority to resolve outstanding or open items.
Weeks 5–8 – Build the base
- Complete retroactive audit and begin to input into system/spreadsheet
- Consider automating future ingestion from time/billing (matter metadata), DMS (titles, parties), CRM (contacts), and bios where possible
- Stand up a lightweight QA workflow (new entries flagged for steward review; completeness score.
- Ship a read-only “Firm Experience Hub” for your pilot arenas with search by relevant fields and tags.
Weeks 9–12 – Activate
- Wire experience cards into pitch templates and client-team pages.
- Stand up signals: “If a new matter opens in Client A with NAICS X, alert the X-industry team lead.”
- Report three numbers to the partnership: (1) % of closed matters with full experience records, (2) # of pitches using auto-inserted credentials, (3) hours saved (proxy) from search reduction.
Targets worth setting
- ≥90% completeness on core fields for last 36 months of closed matters
- 100% of new matters tagged with NAICS + matter type at intake
- 48-hour SLA to add/update experience after a closing or major milestone (to be considered by relevant parties)
Potential Objections
- “Lawyers won’t enter data.” Don’t ask them to. Auto-ingest what you can; stewards normalize the rest. Add three lawyer-friendly fields (result, short description, role) at matter close, collected by the responsible associate- and set up triggers for automation ($, hours, drop-off in work). Also consider making it part of a wider BD umbrella structure and allow attorneys to "bill" a set number of hours per annum for these critical BD tasks.
- “Security.” Use standard code sets and central governance; data can remain behind your firewall while still being searchable internally. (Security is a top adoption concern across the industry, so design for it up front and ensure read-only versions stay within your secure operating environment)
- “We already have a DMS/CRM.” Great, but those are systems of record. You still need a searchable, codified system of experience that unifies and codes the data so leaders can plan and teams can sell/execute. Custom fields and information architecture/tagging could even be integrated into existing systems depending on capability and legacy systems.
When attorneys and teams can have relevant information at their fingertips in seconds, the culture begins to shift. Lightbulbs flash as the vision becomes more strategic- and by integrating client and other CRM information, roadmaps and vision crystallize and alliances are formed. Your pricing strategy becomes more focused and profitable, as it will be easy to pull similar matters (scope, team shape, duration, outcomes) to model fees and AFAs credibly. And when it comes to performing gap analysis to uncover where in the lifecycle you may be losing market share, a single, updated version of truth is the most efficient mechanism to uncover lateral hiring, technology and other resource decisions.
It is mission critical to make experience and matter management a high priority program with a named sponsor, budget, and quarterly goals (and the attention of the Executive or Management Committee). Treat it as the operating system for strategy. Because the sum of your parts—the matters, the outcomes, the teams, the sectors—is already your firm’s story. You just need to make it visible, comparable, and usable- and make sure you're telling it the right way. Your firm's future may very well depend on it.
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Mike Mellor is President + Founder of 742advisors, a consultancy that helps law firms accelerate revenue and go-to-market strategies. Connect with Mike on LinkedIn.
