For decades, Kirkland grew by picking strategic markets and acquiring elite partners. They just bet $500 million they found something even better through AI.

What if Kirkland’s real objective is creating super partners, stickier client relationships, institutionalized expertise, and a firm where the enterprise becomes smarter after every client matter? And they do it at scale?

For decades, law firms grew by adding talent. Kirkland is betting the future belongs to firms capable of multiplying it – exponentially.

Here are the 7 lessons for law firms of any size to consider as they plot their next strategic move:

Create Super Partners

Law firms have always searched for elite partners. Kirkland may be trying to create them. The only thing to make an elite partner more elite is to give them more insight, expertise, and both legal and client-facing nuance. AI is the first tool to create this capability firmwide.

Kirkland is partnering with Palantir – one of the only tools able to immediately read, analyze, and integrate data sets and create trigger points for actions.

Palantir’s capability plus attorney insights can make any partner substantially better at what they do.

Turn Knowledge into Firm Power

Most firms have extraordinary knowledge in their ranks. The problem isn’t knowledge – it’s distributing the knowledge. Kirkland appears to be investing in the ability to put the firm’s collective expertise into the hands of every lawyer serving every client.

That’s not a technology advantage. It’s a strategic advantage at its best.

Make Client Relationships Harder to Leave

Historically, client relationships lived primarily with individual partners. The insights lived with the attorneys. Kirkland is investing in relationships by attaching them to both the lawyer and the data across the institution. These relationships become substantially harder to disrupt.

Stay in Front of Client Thinking

The firms winning tomorrow won’t win because they react faster – they’ll win because they see around corners sooner. Clients pay top-of-the-market rates to firms identifying risks and opportunities before anyone else sees them.

Build the Ultimate Succession Plan

Kirkland may be building the most effective succession strategy ever created – capturing expertise before it retires. No one has to volunteer or stand up and announce the plan – the insights are in the system.

Scale Knowledge instead of Headcount

For decades, growth required adding lawyers. Kirkland appears to be exploring how to scale expertise, judgment, and insight instead. That’s a fundamentally different growth model.

Elevate Client Relationships

Clients are buying confidence in getting to their outcome. Enterprise-wide access to the best insight drives better client outcomes – creating more confidence in future outcomes.

Clients will stop looking for other firms if their current firm can deliver more confidence in new creative solutions across the firm.

And these could easily be just the tip of the iceberg.

Productivity is stealing the AI investment spotlight. But – the real money will arrive by turning firm knowledge into firm power. The ability to multiply attorney power by vastly expanding knowledge sharing instead of just adding it is an economic game-changer. Kirkland is betting big on the multiplication factor.

If they’re right, this won’t be remembered as an AI investment. It will be remembered as a new blueprint for growth.

Everything Kirkland is doing is creating a client-facing advantage. They can respond faster with more robust solutions. They are making it more valuable to have a relationship with the firm. It may boost productivity – but these benefits pale in comparison to the client-facing benefits.

AI, Geopolitical Volatility, Client Demands, and Finding Laterals are stealing leadership mindshare – but one risk outshines them all: Partner confidence in each other.

And it’s headed the wrong way for law firms.

In 2023, 12.9% of partners said they do not trust their partners. Fast forward to 1,000 responses from our latest partner survey – and it’s just shy of doubling at 21.2%.

And this could be the tip of the iceberg. The new research reveals the following confidence levels in their partners:

• Full Trust: 18.3%
• Working Trust: 36.4%
• Verify Before Believing: 24.1%
• Rogue Partners: 21.2%

Full Trust drives elite performance. The partners believe their peers will do the right thing for the firm. It’s full speed ahead.

But – fewer than 1 in 5 partners express complete confidence in their peers. More than 80% stop short of saying they fully trust the people helping run the firm – not enough to drive elite performance.

Working Trust delivers good performance. People believe their partners will generally do the right thing. If it feels right – they will believe and dive in.

Verify Before Believing – much closer to no confidence. The partners question what they hear, question strategy, and have little faith in their work product.

Rogue Partners operate outside the system. They create their own rules and priorities. They have their own version of strategy. And they are usually tolerated – and even celebrated – as long as they bring in the business.

They have little use for their colleagues’ work product and largely keep their issues to themselves. They view strategic mandates as options and are comfortable operating on their own path.

They represent 1 in 5 partners – enough to influence culture, slow decisions, derail execution, and weaken the very behaviors firms depend on to grow. They are often silent in their views and can be hard to spot if you are not actively looking for them – until it’s too late.

Every firm has rogue partners. The difference is scale. At 5%, they’re a nuisance. At 21.2%, they’re shaping culture and influencing decisions. Worse yet – they are teaching more junior attorneys the absolute wrong lessons. All this creates cultural chaos and drains both energy and profits. It is the biggest risk to almost any firm.

The good news? Firms can build trust faster than they think. It won’t happen through retreats and occasional jaw boning. It happens through shared work, shared accountability, and shared success. Here are 3 proven strategies:

1. Assign small groups of partners to solve a high-priority firm issue within 6–8 weeks. Give them authority, visibility, and a deadline. Nothing builds trust faster than accomplishing something meaningful together. Potential topics include: increasing partner trust, igniting business development, improving associate satisfaction and retention, and selecting targets as new clients. Ask each group to present their results to the Executive Committee and the firm.
2. Measure and publicize collaborations. This can be between practices, offices, associates, and partner/associate efforts. They don’t have to be wildly successful because the behavior is the message. Few things are more powerful than public recognition.
3. Create opportunities for partners to work together. Assign 2 partners to big pursuits, create a rotating committee of partners to anticipate the needs of top clients, and define topics for breakthrough thought leadership. Include associates in every effort as well.

Most firms try to build trust through communication. The highest-performing firms build trust through behavior. Trust is the operating system of any partnership. Its absence prevents institutionalizing clients, collaboration, mentoring, shared knowledge, and business development.

The greatest threat to a law firm is not losing clients. It’s losing faith in each other. Clients can feel it and silently withdraw.

Every dysfunctional BD strategy starts with good intentions. Smart people create structure, accountability and controls. Then trust, momentum, compensation, politics and attorney behavior collide with the plan. What could possibly go wrong?

Here are 4 real examples of how firms accidentally shut down business development with the best of intentions:

The Business Development Co-Pay

Every firm has business development waste.

One 600-lawyer firm decided waste had gone too far. Leadership instituted a co-pay system. Each partner was required to pay 25% of any out-of-pocket business or unbudgeted BD expense.

The logic: attorneys would pursue opportunities more carefully if their own money was at stake. It would eliminate low-probability pursuits and endless wild goose chases.

Business development activity nearly stopped – except for inbound opportunities and work already walking through the door. Rainmakers felt punished for choosing opportunities wisely. Other partners quietly disengaged.

9 months later the policy was gone – and the firm was fighting to retain rainmakers.

The BD Percentage Problem

An 800-lawyer firm decided BD spending should be proportional to business booked. The solution: reimburse attorneys for BD expenses based on the business booked. Each attorney would be reimbursed a percentage of the business they booked in the current fiscal year.

The policy immediately shifted focus toward protecting origination credit and killed fourth-quarter BD activity. No one wanted to wait a year to learn their allocation. Newer partners, looking to build books, backed off completely – assuming they had no chance of receiving funding.

The system never made it into year 2.

Take a Salesperson to Your Client

A law firm of close to 1,000 attorneys wanted to grow with its strategic clients. Leadership doubted current relationship partners could drive enough growth. They hired 4 dedicated sales reps. They reported to a leadership partner and had no contact with the sitting CMBDO – because the CMBDO thought this idea would ultimately hurt BD.

Each partner was required to bring a salesperson to their strategic clients to help develop business. Most partners exercised a pocket veto – and found reasons not to bring these salespeople to their clients.

2 salespeople left before 5 months. Another salesperson stayed for 9 months, and the 4^th stayed and moved into the Marketing/Business Development department – as the  CMBDO had left.

The firm tried to institutionalize selling without recognizing partners wanted no part of it.

Please Apply to Get Your BD Funded

One 1,100-lawyer firm wanted to support client growth. They loved the idea of investing in strategic accounts and selling multiple services to these clients – and were prepared to invest the funds to do it.

To access funding, all relationship partners first had to complete an 11-page application.

If approved – the strategic account committee could approve all, some or none of the request. Approval was entirely discretionary. No one from the marketing department was on the committee.

The few partners who applied ran about a 50% approval rate – with the remainder being declines. There were no partial fundings.

Partners quickly viewed the process as political, burdensome, and undermining. And the small number of funded plans couldn’t get the collaboration they needed to execute their plans. No one but the lead partner could see the benefit.

Four months later, enthusiasm disappeared – and so did the program. The firm has had no strategic account strategy since.

The Real Lessons

The biggest takeaways from these well-intentioned efforts teach law firms the following about business development efforts:

1. The easier a firm makes it to pursue business development, the more attorneys participate.
2. Most failed BD programs do not fail from lack of funding. They fail because lawyers experience the process as political, punitive, or exhausting.
3. Every additional approval layer quietly discourages the very behavior firms claim they want more of.
4. Partners tolerate inefficient systems far longer than systems that undermine autonomy, trust or judgment.
5. Law firms consistently underestimate how quickly bureaucracy kills business development momentum.

Most law firms don’t fail at business development because attorneys resist growth. They fail because the system quietly teaches attorneys to avoid it.

Most lawyers don’t struggle with business development because they lack intelligence, experience, or relationships. They struggle because they lack confidence in what they’re doing will actually work.

This uncertainty drives attorneys toward the lowest-common-denominator version of business development:

• Asking clients for meetings
• Inviting contacts to webinars
• “Checking in”
• Adding people to mailing lists
• Sending LinkedIn invitations
• Sharing alerts with no commentary or insight

These approaches rarely generate meaningful new business. But they create just enough random activity to produce false hope – and make attorneys feel like they’re “doing BD.”

The 5 Ds of Business Development

The best rainmakers operate differently. They create direction, momentum, and confidence before the client ever hires them.

The 5 Ds accomplish 3 things:

1. They engage clients
2. They create direction
3. They generate trust powerful enough to accelerate buying decisions

The 5 Ds are:

Disrupt Your Client’s Thinking

Say something the client hasn’t heard before.

The most compelling business development happens when attorneys introduce a new way to think about a problem, risk, obstacle, or growth opportunity. Clients don’t remember another capable lawyer. They remember the lawyer who changed how they saw the issue.

Most attorneys possess disruptive insights. They simply don’t share them. They fear being wrong, giving too much away, or saying it before they’re hired.

But clients rarely hire lawyers because they guard their thinking. They hire lawyers because their thinking was valuable.

Clients are happy to pay for new ideas – after they hear them.

Dissect the Unsaid

The best business developers hear what clients are reluctant to say:

• The political landmines
• The budget pressure
• The internal resistance
• The executive conflict
• The fear of failure
• The executive ego
• Fear of looking wrong internally

Great attorneys don’t just solve the legal problem. They identify the hidden constraints shaping the client’s decisions – and build a strategy around eliminating them.

Deliver Candor

Clients don’t need another agreeable lawyer. They need someone willing to tell them the truth clearly, directly, and constructively. Candor builds trust faster than polish.

The best attorneys don’t avoid difficult conversations. They explain risks honestly, challenge assumptions intelligently, and pair realism with practical next steps.

Candor without solutions feels arrogant. Candor with direction feels indispensable.

Design the Path Forward

The best rainmakers don’t wait for the engagement letter before helping clients move forward. They start mapping the path immediately. No fully developed plan. No annotated memo. Just clear direction, informed judgement, and momentum.

The moment clients begin collaborating with you on solutions, the relationship changes – because in their mind, the work has already started. Clients trust lawyers who help them think forward before they’re even hired.

Drive the Next Step

The strongest business developers never leave momentum hanging in the air. They:

• Define next steps
• Create movement
• Establish a path forward

When clients clearly see value, strategy, and direction, pricing discussions become easier. Confidence in judgment and outcomes beats lower rates.

Stop chasing access. Start creating value before you’re hired.

Learn more specific actions your attorneys can take to deliver on the business development driving the biggest and most strategic wins in the brand new BTI Super Listener A-Team 2026: Clients Rank Law Firms Best at Business Development. Order your copy of the report today.