Firm Forward

Friday observation, rainmaker side of the firm.

Partner branding gets framed two ways at most firms. Visible thought leadership: articles, panels, podcast appearances, LinkedIn posts. Relationship equity: client retention, referral routing, reputation among partners.

These two frames get weighted unevenly inside firm marketing investment, and the weighting is usually backwards.

Visible thought leadership gets the budget and the calendar slots. Relationship equity does not appear in any monthly report. The firms generating origination at the rainmaker level are running on relationship equity. The visible thought leadership is the surface; the routing is the substance.

For rainmakers whose books are stable and growing, the marketing investment that compounds is not another podcast appearance. It is editorial discipline on the partner's bio, matter list, and Chambers profile.

The partner-branding investment most firms underweight is the editorial layer. The investment most firms overweight is the visibility surface their referral partners do not read.

The 2026 ACC and FTI Consulting Chief Legal Officer Survey produced a finding most legal marketing voices have not addressed.

A meaningful share of CLOs changed their outside counsel evaluation and selection criteria in 2025. The survey draws on more than a thousand chief legal officers.

Buyer criteria are now less stable across cycles than they were three years ago. Firms whose marketing assumes criteria stability are working from outdated assumptions.

Three things this changes for BD strategy in 2026:

1. Firm positioning content — the "what we stand for" content, leadership commentary — is now more legible to buyers than in past cycles.
2. Public-facing firm decisions — sponsorships, statements on industry questions — are explicit data points in CLO evaluation, not background context.
3. Referral relationships at the partner level remain dominant, but firms whose buyer-facing positioning is consistent rather than aspirational route more referrals.

For marketing teams: ensure firm positioning is internally consistent, deliberately decided, and reflects the actual answers to questions buyers are now asking.

Format choice on LinkedIn in 2026 is a 2x to 3x engagement multiplier.

The data across independent research datasets: Carousels and documents at 6.6% engagement. Single image at 2-3%. Long-form text (1,300+ characters) at +18% over short text. Native video with brand visible in first 4 seconds at +69%.

Most law firm content sits in the worst-performing format band by default. The fix is not "post more." The fix is to weight the calendar by format-performance data and reserve the right format for the right substance. Audit your last 20 posts — if more than 12 are single images, the rebalance is the highest-leverage move you'll make this quarter.

Chambers reviewed 70,000 submissions in the 2026 research cycle.

Chambers USA 2026 launches June 4. Chambers NewLaw on June 11. Chambers Brazil and Chambers Latin America 2027 follow through August. The first deadline for the Chambers USA 2027 cycle is July 16.

What the volume reveals is the constraint on the researcher side: at 70,000 submissions, decision speed has replaced thoroughness as the binding variable. Firms that produced ten clear, well-edited, easy-to-read submissions in 2026 outperformed firms that produced twenty average submissions, every cycle. Three slides on what changed in submission strategy this year.

LinkedIn's Saves Metric Changes the Game

LinkedIn added the saves metric in late 2025, and it's reshaping how content performs. Posts that earn saves get roughly 35% more secondary distribution than posts that don't.

Here's what matters: resource posts get saved. Frameworks, lists, named-source overviews, methodology comparisons—these are keeper content.

Opinion posts get commented on. Named position, contrarian observation, industry critique—these spark discussion.
Both have a place in your strategy. But most firm content tries to do both at once and underperforms on both.

Before you hit publish this week, ask yourself: which of the two is this post actually designed to be? If the answer is "both," the answer is usually "neither."

Choose one. Own it. Watch what happens.