Context

A law firm with a long-standing ambition to transform from a siloed city practice into an integrated international firm focused on private capital faced significant cultural challenges. The transformation required a major shift towards multi-disciplinary collaboration and a more commercial mindset – neither of which came naturally to many partners who were satisfied with the status quo.

Our Collaborative Approach

Rather than creating a strategy in isolation, we worked alongside the client through several key phases:

• Building alignment within the global Executive Committee by helping them clarify what the strategy truly meant for the firm

• Engaging partners and senior associates in defining nearly thirty strategic change projects

• Co-designing the overall transformation programme with clear approaches, methods and deliverables

• Creating an engagement approach that involved partners in refining and delivering the strategy

• Developing internal change management capabilities, including a new Transformation Management Office

Throughout this process, we transferred knowledge and built the firm's change capabilities, ensuring they could sustain momentum independently.

Impact We Created Together

The partnership created meaningful results:

• Within six months, the leadership cohort aligned behind and actively advocating for the strategy had quadrupled

• More than 60% of Partners became involved in strategy storytelling

• Cross-referrals and multi-service client relationships increased significantly

• Within 12 months, major transformation projects were successfully running, overseen by the new TMO

Most importantly, the firm began a genuine transformation – growing their private capital client base and giving lawyers the opportunity to work on more complex, interesting, longer-term and valuable cases.