At the start of the year, a Top 25 AmLaw firm completed a significant merger, combining two legacy firms with complementary strengths in energy and real estate. While the merger expanded the firm’s national footprint, it also presented strategic challenges in a market where the firm’s presence had diminished over time.
Challenge
The newly merged firm needed to:
- Rapidly grow its presence in a major market
- Identify high-value growth opportunities aligned with their overall strategy in a competitive legal landscape
- Move beyond traditional lateral hiring and M&A strategies, which often yield inconsistent results
Solution
Led by strategic advisors from Elevate and Parker Analytics, the firm adopted a private equity-style methodology to drive post-merger growth.
Our combined team experience in the legal industry, private equity, and data science helped build a proprietary methodology that closely matched the disciplined approach that top private equity firms and investment funds take to identify, de-risk, and realise investment opportunities. Key components included:
- Assessed internal firm data to quantify and understand the firm’s core strengths, including the fastest-growing practices, client industry sectors, and geographic strengths
- Analysed key geographic markets using data on macroeconomic trends, industry forecasts, employment, and competitor behaviour to align firm strengths with growth opportunities
- Evaluated viable law firm targets for material talent acquisition and M&A opportunities via geography, practice, industry, talent, and financial lenses, using proprietary data-driven Compatibility Scorecards that highlight the best-fit targets as per customers’ growth priorities
- Conducted research on shortlisted target firms, including a critical examination of target firm performance, details on high-impact partners, groups, and offices
- Created detailed, data-driven dossiers that made a clear and concise business case to engage material lateral and M&A targets
