In response to frequent requests from our law firm clients for benchmarking data on the marketing and BD (M&BD) function, Totum has recently undertaken our most comprehensive survey yet of M&BD teams, across UK firms.

The findings have now been published in a detailed report, ‘Adapting to Change: Developments in law firm marketing and BD teams’, which covers a wide range of firms from smaller operations of just one or two offices, with revenues of under £50m per year, right up to global operations with an average of over 40 offices and revenues of £1bn or more.

At the same time, Calibrate Legal, a US recruitment and consulting firm with whom we partner on many research projects and candidate searches, undertook the same survey with a wide range of US firms. Altogether 127 firms kindly participated in the survey, answering a huge breadth and depth of questions on their M&BD teams.

The report explores the UK results, bringing to bear details from the US sample to highlight areas of particular interest for comparison. The report covers a huge number of areas, providing insights into the current structure and role of the M&BD function in law, how Covid is impacting its current contribution to business, and how this may impact the team’s future make-up and development.

Highlights of the report include:

  • Details on the current size of UK M&BD teams, including ratios of partners to M&BD employees and showing differences in team sizes between firms in different revenue brackets.
  • Investment levels in digital and technology, both in the short term as a result of Covid, as well as longer term as firms agree future marketing budget priorities.
  • Findings into how M&BD teams are engaging clients and managing client relationships in a virtual working environment – including firms’ strategic approach plus use of supporting tools.
  • Details on the latest state of play with events and conferences – and what the future holds for conferences, event sponsorship and virtual alternatives.
  • Analysis of how firms structure and split their M&BD teams, including the numbers (and types of firm) using shared services centres on or offshore, what kind of roles feature in such teams, and plans for the future development of shared services.
  • Information on how firms are splitting their teams in terms of roles, and which skillsets are expected to be most in demand moving forwards.

The full report, presenting all the data collected plus an in-depth analysis of each area, is now available in PDF-format.

If you would be interested in receiving a copy of the report, please contact Sarah.Broad@TotumPartners.com. Alternatively,  for any questions or to discuss the survey findings in more detail, please contact Totum Director Rebecca Ellis at Rebecca.Ellis@TotumPartners.com.

 

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