The success of a practice or industry group depends on more than its lawyers’ expertise. It requires effective leadership, engaged members, clear expectations, accountability, and the right support systems.
Most law firms organize their lawyers into practice groups, industry groups, or some combination of the two. These groups are intended to be engines of growth, collaboration, talent development, client service, and profitability. Yet many fail to achieve their potential.
Why?
In our work with law firms, we frequently see groups filled with talented, successful lawyers that nevertheless struggle to function as effective teams. Members operate independently, meetings accomplish little, business development opportunities are missed, and group leaders become frustrated by their inability to make meaningful progress.
The problem is rarely a lack of legal talent. More often, it is that firms have not established the conditions necessary for their groups to thrive.
Research on high-performing teams, combined with our experience working with practice and industry group leaders, points to several common obstacles.
1. Failing to Build Trust, Engagement, and a Sense of Team
One of the most overlooked responsibilities of a practice or industry group leader is creating a group whose members genuinely want to work together.
Lawyers may belong to the same group on an organizational chart without feeling any meaningful connection to one another. They may know little about their colleagues’ practices, clients, capabilities, or professional aspirations. Without those relationships, opportunities for collaboration, cross-selling, mentoring, and knowledge sharing are easily lost.
Decades of research on high performing teams is clear on the factors that drive their performance. Sharing common and clear goals and having clear roles and responsibilities have been evident in the research for many decades. More recently, Google’s well-known Project Aristotle research examined what distinguishes effective teams. Researchers identified five critical dynamics: psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity (including around roles), meaning, and impact (which can include goals). Psychological safety—the belief that members can speak up, ask questions, acknowledge mistakes, and offer ideas without fear of embarrassment or punishment—emerged as particularly important.
These findings have important implications for law firms, where lawyers often value autonomy, are highly skeptical, and may be reluctant to show vulnerability. It can be challenging for them to build trust enough to develop and truly care about common goals and to be open to sharing what is important to them.
Building trust and engagement requires more than occasional group meetings. Leaders need to create opportunities for meaningful interaction, invite input from members, recognize contributions, and encourage candid discussions about challenges and opportunities.
This is particularly difficult in very large groups. A group with 100 or 150 lawyers may be an appropriate organizational unit, but it is unlikely to function as a single cohesive team. Smaller subgroups, client teams, or focused initiatives may be necessary to create the relationships and engagement that drive the performance that is desired. Ask this question: Do members see themselves as part of a team with shared interests and responsibilities, or simply as individual lawyers assigned to the same group?
2. Lack of a Clear Strategy and Shared Priorities
According to our surveys, most groups have annual business (not just marketing) plans. Far fewer have a strategy that genuinely guides decisions and behavior. A lengthy plan containing dozens of initiatives is not necessarily a strategy. Nor should it be a collection of individual lawyers’ business development goals.
Effective groups identify a limited number of priorities and no more than 3 actual specific, measurable goals that reflect their market opportunities, competitive strengths, client needs, and the firm’s broader strategy. Members understand not only what the group is trying to accomplish, but why those priorities matter and how they can contribute.
For example, an industry group might focus on expanding relationships with existing clients, developing expertise in emerging regulatory issues, or strengthening collaboration across practices serving the same industry.
Without shared priorities and goals, groups never reach “stage 4 – high performing”. Group activities become fragmented. Meetings turn into information-sharing exercises rather than opportunities to build trust and collaborate, make decisions and advance strategic initiatives.
High-performing groups translate strategy into a manageable number of initiatives with clear ownership, milestones, and measurable outcomes.
3. Unclear Leadership Roles, Responsibilities, and Authority
Historically, firms appointed successful rainmakers or respected senior partners to lead groups. For more than the past 12 years, LawVision research with the “AmLaw 200 firms” shows that most firms have selected leaders for their leadership abilities – or potential – including servant leadership, interpersonal skills, emotional intelligence and more. However, they still often did not clearly define what those leaders are expected—or authorized—to do.
Are they responsible for profitability? Talent development? Work allocation? Pricing? Client relationships? Business development? Partner performance?
And which decisions can they make independently, which require consultation, and which remain with firm management? What happens when the decision they make causes issues with one of the group’s biggest rainmakers? Does firm leadership support the practice leader.
The problem becomes more complicated in firms with both practice and industry groups. When responsibilities overlap, leaders may duplicate efforts, compete for resources, or assume someone else is responsible. Clear roles and decision rights are essential. Firms should define the responsibilities of practice and industry leaders, office managing partners and client team leads, their relationships with one another, and their authority relative to firm leadership and administrative functions.
They must also recognize that leadership requires time and skills. Expecting a partner to manage a substantial business unit while maintaining a full-time practice, without appropriate training, support, or recognition, is often unrealistic. A leadership title without the authority, capacity, and resources to deliver results is a recipe for frustration – or worse a leader that doesn’t try or gives up. Harvard Business Review indicates the most “incompetent” leader is the absent one – the person with the title but who doesn’t do the job, which means usually no one else can step in either.
4. Insufficient Accountability for Results
Accountability is particularly challenging in law firms, where partners are accustomed to considerable independence and may resist being held responsible for activities beyond their individual practices. Many groups establish ambitious goals but have few mechanisms to ensure that commitments are fulfilled.
Business development initiatives are launched but not completed. Partners volunteer to lead activities without following through. Underperformance is discussed privately—or avoided entirely.
Accountability does not have to mean a punitive management culture. In effective groups, it begins with clear expectations, realistic commitments, transparency, and regular follow-up. Group leaders should work with members to establish specific responsibilities and measurable objectives. Progress should be reviewed consistently, obstacles addressed, and successes recognized.
Importantly, accountability must extend beyond financial results. If your firm strategic plan has other priorities like collaboration, cross-selling, teamwork and more, those behaviors should be identified, progress reviewed and successes recognized – just like financial results. Otherwise, cynical lawyers will believe “only the numbers matter.” Accountability must extend to collaboration, client relationship development, mentoring, talent development, AI pilots and contributions to other strategic initiatives.
When partners see that their colleagues reliably fulfill commitments, trust grows. When commitments are routinely ignored, engagement and confidence in group leadership deteriorate.
5. Inadequate Business Professional Support
One of the most significant barriers to effective practice and industry group management is the expectation that lawyer leaders can (or should) handle everything themselves. Successful group leadership involves strategic planning, financial analysis, business development coordination, talent management, peer coaching, project execution, communications, and performance monitoring. These responsibilities require substantial time and expertise.
Yet some firms provide little dedicated professional support—or assign professionals primarily administrative responsibilities rather than leveraging their strategic and operational capabilities.
Experienced practice group professionals can serve as invaluable partners to lawyer leaders. They can help develop and implement business plans, analyze performance, coordinate cross-practice initiatives, monitor progress, facilitate meetings, represent the leader to others in the firm, and maintain momentum between leadership discussions. In firms that have truly empowered these professionals, they function like a “COO” or “chief of staff” of the practice or industry group.
Firms also need to distinguish between the responsibilities professionals own and those they simply support. Without this clarity, valuable professional talent may be underutilized, while lawyer leaders remain overwhelmed by operational responsibilities.
Providing the right level of professional support is not simply an additional expense. It is an investment in better execution, more effective leadership, and stronger group performance. It is also typically a key to the lawyer leader being able to maintain his or her personal practice as a lawyer. There are over 600 practice group professionals just in US firms alone and our survey of the AmLaw 200 in 2014 showed 85% of firms had these roles. Today, many more firms have added the roles and added more people to the teams in their firms. The LawVision Practice Group Professional Roundtable is the only organization for these professionals and has 65 member law firms and over 500 individuals from those firms.
6. Insufficient Data to Make Informed Decisions
It is difficult to manage a business without reliable information about its performance. Yet many practice and industry group leaders receive limited financial or operational data—or receive reports that are too complex, outdated, or disconnected from the decisions they need to make.
Traditional financial measures such as revenue, hours, realization, and profitability remain important. But leaders also need forward-looking information about demand, staffing capacity, client opportunities, talent, and emerging risks.
Industry group leaders may face additional challenges because historically the firm’s financial reporting systems have been organized around practices rather than industries. Without meaningful industry-level data, leaders cannot easily assess growth opportunities or performance.
Effective reporting should help leaders answer questions such as:
- Where are we growing, and where are we losing ground?
- Which clients offer opportunities for deeper relationships?
- Do we have the right talent and capacity to meet anticipated demand and emerging practices?
- Which initiatives are producing results?
- Where do we need to change course?
Data alone is not enough. Leaders must know how to interpret it, ask the right questions, and use it to guide action.
7. Too Many Meetings, Too Little Execution
Finally, even groups with capable leaders, strong plans, and adequate resources can struggle because they lack effective execution disciplines. Meetings become dominated by financial updates, announcements, and lengthy discussions that produce few decisions.
High-performing groups use meetings differently. They focus on strategic priorities, problem-solving, collaboration, and accountability. They recognize that one of the most important roles of meetings is to create engagement among the members – a sense of belonging and commitment to executing on the group’s goals. Members leave feeling that their input was valued, knowing what was decided, who is responsible, and what happens next.
The group also needs mechanisms to maintain progress between meetings, particularly when lawyer leaders are balancing substantial client responsibilities. A few well-executed priorities will generally accomplish more than an ambitious plan that receives little attention after its adoption.
Creating the Conditions for Success
There is no single organizational model or leadership structure that guarantees high-performing practice and industry groups. What works for a 30-lawyer specialty practice within a firm may differ significantly from what is needed for a 500-lawyer litigation department or a 150-lawyer industry group spanning multiple offices and disciplines. But the fundamentals are remarkably consistent.
Groups need a shared purpose, engaged members, trusted relationships, clear leadership responsibilities, meaningful accountability, adequate professional support, and reliable information. They also need leaders who can translate strategy into action—and firms willing to give those leaders the authority, training, time, and resources necessary to succeed.
Ultimately, high-performing groups do not happen simply because talented lawyers are placed together on an organizational chart. They are built intentionally.
For firms dissatisfied with their groups’ performance, the most productive starting point may not be reorganizing the groups or replacing their leaders. It may be first examining whether the firm has created the conditions that allow those groups—and their leaders—to succeed.
Posted In