Announcing our law firm beta: what I learned from interviews with 40+ law firm leaders

Introduction 

My primary focus over the last eight months has been to determine whether Propense should develop a cross-selling solution specifically for law firms and to recruit firms to participate in the collaborative development of such a solution. 

I’m happy to share that we’ve now closed out the recruitment process with the signing of our third and final law firm to participate in our beta development period. 

The participating firms—ranked respectively in the Am Law Top 40, Top 130, and Top 160—employ a combined total of more than 2,000 attorneys and some of the best and brightest Marketing and BD teams in the business. We’re grateful to partner with each of them and I know we’ll build a better solution with them than we ever could on our own. 

We’ll now spend the remainder of the year working with these firms to develop an AI-fueled, data-backed, secure solution that provides equally as valuable cross-selling insights as we currently provide to our accounting firm clients. It took a lot to get to this point.

Research & Due Diligence

Tim started Propense in 2023 with a vision and the determination to bring it to life. During that first year, he recruited accounting firms and VC investors to build out our initial solution. Both the VCs and the initial accounting firms put a lot of faith in us and, two years later, we’re fortunate to now call 12% of the IPA 100 clients. 

I joined Propense in March of 2024 and after my first few months, Tim decided it was time to expand into a second vertical. This was always the plan so we rolled up our sleeves and started interviewing our network of law firm partners, c-suite executives, and consultants. Our goal was to understand whether Am Law 100 and 200 firms would find value in a solution that proactively anticipated their firm’s clients’ needs and recommended cross-selling opportunities to address them.

We conducted over 40 interviews during this due diligence period and asked a lot of questions. Key takeaways included:

• Every firm knows they need to improve their cross-selling initiatives. 
• Clients want their law firms to anticipate issues that could affect them and proactively propose solutions to them. 
• Very few attorneys understand the full breadth of their firm’s offerings and they rarely think outside of their own “box.” 
• There is a “Trust Gap” at law firms. As firms grow–whether organically, from M&A activity, office expansions, or lateral hires–attorneys know and trust a shrinking percentage of their colleagues. No one is willing to potentially jeopardize their client relationships by introducing a colleague they don’t know or trust to clients they’ve spent years developing. 
• Firms struggle to spur collaboration across practice groups, industry groups, and offices. 
• Firms lack the data science resources necessary to conduct cross-selling analysis beyond basic ad-hoc whitespace analysis (“we don’t do any IP work for Acme Corp… ergo there’s an opportunity to do IP work for Acme Corp.”) 
• Charlie Munger nailed it: “Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.” Attorneys are highly motivated by origination credit and compensation plans.

Needless to say, we learned a LOT.

Our interviews unequivocally demonstrated that nearly every large law firm needs a technology that puts their data to work as part of a multifaceted approach (those facets being data, tech, people, and process) to modernize how they cross-sell to their existing clients. Challenge accepted. 

Beta Development

We’re now actively working with our beta clients to build on the foundation we set for accounting firms to create a law firm solution that considers the nuances of their business:

• Instead of working with data from STAR, Workday, and CCH Axcess, we’ll be processing data from systems like Aderant, Foundation, and DealCloud (while still working with systems that carry across both industries like Salesforce, Dynamics, and HubSpot); 
• Terminology will change: instead of Departments, we’ll consider Practice Groups; instead of Engagements, we’ll focus on Matters; 
• Billable hours will be prioritized and origination will be considered; and  
• We’ll likely create entirely new models for predicting where clients have unserved needs. 

And, as Tim often says, data and tech are useless without people and process. Which is why we’re also building out a network of leading BD, marketing, and growth consultants to help our clients address the people and process elements required to truly enable cross-selling success. We’ll be announcing more about our consulting offerings this summer.

Conclusion

We’ve got our work cut out for us but we couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity in front of us. Cross-selling is a universal challenge and we’re going to give everything we’ve got to collaboratively build a solution that will truly change how law firms serve their clients and cross-sell additional matters. 

Here’s to the crazy ones. Let’s BD Different.