Skip to content
  • There are no suggestions because the search field is empty.

How Does Client Sense Support Cross Firm Collaboration

This article explains how to see whether your practice groups actually work together, why collaboration is harder than it looks, and what relationship data can and cannot tell you about the barriers inside your own firm.

In this article:

Short answer

Cross firm collaboration is a measure of whether your firm behaves as one firm with lawyers working together across silos. The same reports in Client Sense that highlight cross-selling opportunities will also show you which of your practice groups never appear on a client together, which is an indicator about how your firm operates rather than a list of opportunities about your clients. Reading the reports to focus on collaboration turns a sales exercise into a management one.

Why it matters

Cross collaboration looks inward at the firm. Cross servicing looks outward at the client, asking which accounts should be approached about a second service. Here the question is different: which of our teams are strangers to each other, and why.

The case for focusing on cross collaboration goes well past revenue. Heidi Gardner’s research on cross-silo working links it to higher margins, stronger client loyalty, more complex and higher-value work, better integration of lateral hires, improved retention of talent and reduced enterprise risk. Those are firm-health outcomes, and they are what a managing partner is actually weighing when deciding whether a collaboration initiative is worth the disruption.

Clients notice too. A firm whose teams coordinate looks like a firm that knows them. A firm where four people make contact in a fortnight without knowing about each other looks like several small firms sharing a name.

What this looks like in practice

McInnes Wilson Lawyers, a multi-disciplinary Australian firm, describe the shape of the problem precisely. Their commercial divisions operated largely independently, and it was common for a single referrer to send work to five or six of them. Each lawyer ran separate communications with the same organization, with reminder systems ranging from personal to-do lists to sticky notes on the wall. Things were missed, and from the referrer’s point of view the firm was several disconnected relationships rather than one. Read the full account in the McInnes Wilson Lawyers case study.

A worked example: run a cross-servicing report between Commercial and Employment and look past the list of companies to the count. If the two teams appear together on three clients out of ninety, you have not found eighty-seven opportunities. You have found two practice groups that do not work together, and the list is a symptom.

How to do it in Client Sense

Read the Cross-Servicing report by practice area pairing

Go to Reports, choose Cross-Servicing, set a Department with Contact and a Department without Contact, then Export Results. Steps are in How to Generate a Cross-Servicing Report.

Now run it for every pairing of practice areas that ought to be more collaborative, and record only the number of shared clients in each case. What you end up with is a matrix of your own practice groups. Pairings with healthy overlap are collaborating. Pairings near zero are not.

Look at breadth on your key clients

Open a client’s Contact Card and choose Engagement. Two figures matter more than the rest for this purpose: the number of Departments and the number of Offices involved. A client dealing with one department is a single-service relationship however large the fees. Tracked across your top clients over time, these two numbers are the closest thing to a collaboration measure the system produces. See How to view the level of Engagement your firm is having with Key Individuals and Companies.

See which colleagues are connected

A heat map with employees down one side shows which of your people are connected to a client and which are not, which exposes duplication as well as absence. Two partners independently working the same contact is a coordination problem, and it will not appear in any report that counts opportunities. See How to Run a Heat Map Report for a Specific Company.

Tip: Run the pairing exercise once a year rather than quarterly. Practice groups do not change how they work in three months, and a yearly comparison shows whether an initiative moved anything.

Turning the output into action

The data locates the problem. It does not explain it, and the explanation is where the work is.

  • Pick two practice grouppairings, not ten. Choose ones where the client need genuinely follows, and where both team leaders are willing. A collaboration program announced across the whole firm dissipates.
  • Find out which barrier you have. Gardner distinguishes competence trust, where people do not know how good their colleagues are, from interpersonal trust, where they fear a colleague will not look after their client. Firms grown through merger tend to have the first. Firms grown through lateral hiring tend to have the second. The remedies are different, so diagnosing this is not an academic exercise.
  • Deal with the financial incentives. Where origination credit rewards holding a relationship rather than sharing it, no report will change behavior. This usually sits above the person running the initiative, which is a reason to raise it early rather than a reason to ignore it.
  • Create occasions rather than instructions. Joint client reviews, shared sector groups and paired attendance at events do more than a directive to cross-refer. People collaborate with colleagues they have met.

Common pitfalls

  • Announcing collaboration as an initiative. Firms have heard it before. Two pairings that visibly work will persuade more people than a firm-wide program.
  • Ignoring the credit system. The most common reason a well-designed collaboration effort stalls, and the one least likely to appear in any report.
  • Using the data to name individuals. The moment a partner believes the reports are being used to assess them, the conversation stops being about clients. Read it by practice group, not by person.
  • Confusing breadth with coordination. A client dealing with five of your departments who receives five uncoordinated approaches is worse served than one dealing with two that talk to each other.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

How is cross collaboration different from cross servicing?

Cross servicing points the data outward at the client and asks which accounts to approach about a second service. This looks inward at the firm and asks which teams work together and which do not. Same reports, different unit: one client and one opportunity in the first case, a pair of practice groups and a pattern across the whole client base in the second.

How do we measure collaboration?

The most practical measures are the number of departments and offices involved with each key client, tracked over time, and the count of shared clients for each pairing of practice groups. Neither is perfect, but both are drawn from behavior rather than from opinion, which is what makes them usable in a partner meeting.

Our teams say they collaborate. The data says otherwise. Who is right?

Both, usually. People remember the times they did collaborate and those are genuinely memorable, while the routine absence of it is invisible. The value of the report is that it describes the pattern rather than the exceptions.

Can the data tell us why teams are not collaborating?

No, and it is worth being clear about that. It shows where the gaps are. Whether the cause is that people do not know what colleagues do, do not trust them with a client, or are paid in a way that discourages sharing is something you find out by asking. The report starts the conversation and does not finish it.

Should we share this with partners?

Share it by team pairing rather than by individual. Read as a picture of how the firm works, it invites a useful conversation. Read as a scoreboard of who refers work to whom, it produces defensiveness and nothing changes.

Where do lateral hires fit in?

They are the clearest case. A new partner arrives with a network the firm cannot see, and colleagues cannot collaborate with relationships they do not know exist. Running the relationship data on a joiner after a few months shows which of their contacts were already known internally and where an introduction would help, which is the practical version of building competence trust.

How long before we see a change?

Longer than most initiatives allow for. Practice groups change how they work over years rather than quarters, so measure annually and expect the first visible movement in the pairings where two willing team leaders were involved.