Our insights about markets, trends, and emerging best practices help clients achieve market leadership.
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Results: Strategic Planning
Zeughauser Group has an unparalleled track record in creating strategic growth plans tailored to our clients’ aspirations, leveraging our insight into the legal marketplace as well as our leadership experience consulting with major law firms and their clients.
To achieve market leadership, law firms must align their partnership structure, systems, and go-to-market strategies with one another and their strategic vision. We work with firms at all stages of their evolution and across a broad spectrum of challenges and opportunities, including increasing revenue and profitability, defining and implementing performance metrics, and identifying and facilitating combinations.
We are preeminent strategic advisors on law firm mergers and acquisitions.We have advised on many of the most successful and historic law firm combinations between firms in the United States, Great Britain, and the People’s Republic of China over the past two decades.
In a challenging market, law firms need high-performance marketing and business development teams that drive growth and profitable revenue. Our Marketing Organization Assessment and Design group ensures that the objectives and priorities of your marketing department are aligned with your firm’s strategic business goals and that your marketing team is structured to maximize its contribution to firm growth and profitability.
In an increasingly crowded marketplace where competition for clients grows more intense every day, law firms must allocate scarce marketing resources to ensure that every dollar spent contributes to firm growth or other key priorities. Our consultants have extensive experience creating marketing and business plans that drive profitable growth for law firms.
Client satisfaction is a critical measure of a law firm's success and a prerequisite for market leadership. Zeughauser Group has conducted thousands of successful client service interviews (CSIs) for many industry-leading law firms, including three of the largest 15 law firms in the world.
November 2023
Cravath Salary Raises Pressure Rivals Who Can’t Afford MatchCravath Swaine & Moore’s move to raise associate salaries beyond the scale set by its rival Milbank pressures less-profitable firms to ponder pay bumps they can’t afford. While firms in the top tiers of revenue and profitability are likely to follow Cravath’s lead - and several already have - others in the industry are ill-positioned to do so. Peter Zeughauser observes that the prospect of Cravath-type raises will stress a lot of firms. Some will avoid such raises and suffer the fall-out of “more poaching” from firms that can pay top compensation.
October 2023
Foreign Law Firms Recalibrate China Strategy as Environment ToughensInternational law firms operating in China have trimmed headcounts in China and Hong Kong as a result of the weaker economic environment. Peter Zeughauser observes that the China market isn’t for everyone, so firms need to chart their own China strategy. He also highlights a bigger common problem facing international firms in China at the moment, and that is the rise in sophistication of homegrown Chinese firms.
February 2023
Law Firms Turn to Layoffs Amid Slowing DemandA hiring spree during recent years left many firms overstaffed. Citing economic headwinds and slowing demand, some large law firms are tightening their belts, shrinking their attorney ranks and eliminating professional staff. The decline in demand for legal work last year followed years of growth driven by a boom in mergers-and-acquisitions work, prompting hiring sprees accompanied by six-figure bonuses for even lower-level attorneys. Peter Zeughauser observes that the demand for legal work “has fallen off the cliff. The firms that were really red hot and significantly over-hired are the first movers to lay people off.”
December 2022
Managing Brand Equity When Law Firms MergeMary K Young writes about the process of law firm mergers, the growing urge for firms to combine, the sensitivity around post-merger firm names, and retaining brand equity.
December 2022
State of DEI Content: What Clients Expect from Law Firms and Professional Services ProvidersGreentarget and Zeughauser Group’s latest State of Digital & Content Marketing Survey — our first in three years — revealed that clients of professional services firms see diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) as a key business priority.
December 1, 2022
Why International Partner Promotions Are Increasingly Important for Some American Law FirmsWhile international partner promotions were essentially flat from 2021 to 2022 among Am Law 100 firms, some U.S. firms have nonetheless chosen to invest heavily in their global talent. The message from those firms has been clear: Global markets and international talent matter. Mary K Young comments on the rise in international promotions this year and how promotions may relate to each firm’s individual strategy.