Memo
To: Law Firm Partners
From: Nermin, Esq.
Date: April 14, 2026
Re: Who is responsible for growing the firm?
If each partner is responsible for doing business development and managing and growing their own book of business
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Doing the legal work and billing their time
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Managing their junior associates/their team
Then who is responsible for growing the practice revenue and profits?
Is it the managing partner? You might be quick to answer “yes,” but in my experience, the managing partner is often holding the firm together with duct tape. All the little things that happen behind the scenes, all the times the managing partner has to smooth things over between partners or associates, while doing billable work. Where on the managing partners schedule is “grow revenue” and “increase profits”?
You might argue back and say that’s the point of the monthly partners meeting. In reality, the monthly partners meeting is more political, an attempt to keep the peace amongst intellectual people who are emotionally invested because money is on the line (and everyone is emotional about money).
If it’s not the managing partner, then it has to be the Chief Operations Officer or Operations Manager, right? Except, I’m pretty sure they’re spending their day chasing down overdue invoices, figuring out why the printer isn’t working, and managing employee time off requests. If you look at the emails/Teams messages you’ve sent to your COO, how many have the word “revenue” or “profit” in them?
It’s not the partners responsibility.
It’s not the managing partners responsibility.
It’s not the COO’s responsibility.
Then whose responsibility is it?
In the firms I have worked with, everyone has the right intentions. Everyone wants to increase revenue and profits. No one is behaving maliciously or with ill will toward the firm.
Everyone believes wholeheartedly that their actions are growing the firm.
Every job description for COO or Managing Partner or even for a Partner has a vague sentence that says “grow the firm’s revenue” or “increase your book of business.” But what does it actually mean to grow revenue? And to increase profits?
How does it happen? And when it does, how will you know that it happened and you succeeded?
When it comes to growing a law firm’s revenue, and increasing partner profits, someone has to take ownership of this role, explicitly, and understand what it means to own revenue.
If you look at any tech company or manufacturing organization or other business, there’s usually someone who has the title “Chief Revenue Officer” and there’s multiple people with a title along the lines of “Vice President of Sales” or “Sales Manager.” Anyone is this role is explicitly responsible for revenue, taking the business from $10,000,000 in annual sales to $15,000,000 or $20,000,000.
Is the same true for your law firm? Is there one person who is responsible and owns all the micro tasks and decisions that come with growing revenue and profits for your law firm? Is there someone who spends 80% of their time on growth metrics, tactics, analyzing data and trends to help the firm grow?
I’m betting your answer is no.
If you have 5 people “kind of” owning growth but in reality they spend 5% of their time each month on growing the practice, it’s nowhere near the time and effort it takes to grow a law firm.
I am saying you need to be honest: if no one’s is spending more than 20 hours/month to grow the practice and the partners collectively spend less than 10 hours/month, then it’s unlikely that you are going to grow.
What the partners are doing is making decisions. But making decisions is different from owning the growth responsibilities of the firm. And sometimes you can make decisions without tying it to impact on revenue.
Here’s what I mean (you can zoom in on the image below):
When I work with partners and their firm, I am tracking what decisions are being made and how that ties to revenue increases and ultimately firm growth.
Not only that, but where decisions are stalled or delayed, I can show how much it’s costing the firm by delaying these decisions.
Pause and ask yourself: do you know how much each decision you and the partners made brought in revenue wise for the firm?
You may be flying blind. And this is what it would look like if you could see.
Nermin
nermin@nerminesq.com
