The market you can win today is only half the story
On 22 October, we finished a working method that I think could change how law firms decide where to spend their commercial effort.
It started with a familiar question: which legal services should a firm try to sell?
By the end of the day, I thought that question was too small.
The more useful questions are these: Where does the firm have a genuine right to win business today? And which markets could it become competitive in if it improved the way it commercializes its expertise?
Those are two different markets. They require two different decisions.
Expertise is not the same as an addressable market
Law firms tend to describe their businesses through practice areas: corporate law, employment, construction, transactions, disputes, tax and so on.
That is necessary, but it is not a sales strategy.
Knowing that a firm offers construction law does not tell us whether it is best positioned to advise a project owner, a main contractor or a subcontractor. Those buyers can need much of the same legal expertise while following very different purchasing processes.
A managing director choosing an adviser for an urgent dispute may buy through trust and a recommendation. A professional procurement team may require comparable credentials, documented experience and a defined selection process. In-house counsel may be looking for a particular individual, rather than a firm with an impressive service page.
So we began with a structured catalogue of 18 legal practice areas and 390 underlying specialties, but did not stop at the catalogue.
For each relevant service, the method asks: what is the specific legal problem, who might buy help, what situation makes the problem urgent, who influences the choice, what evidence does the buyer need, and what would make this particular firm worth considering?
The same specialty can lead to several distinct buying situations. Treating them as one market hides the differences that matter most in sales.
We needed two maps, not one
The first map is Right to Win today.
It identifies the combinations of legal service, buyer, situation and competitive position where a firm has a defensible reason to believe it can win work now. Relevant competence matters, but so do proof of delivery, access to the buyer, credibility, capacity and the economics of the mandate.
The practical question is not simply where the market is large. It is where the firm should concentrate commercial activity because its present position gives that activity a reasonable chance of success.
The second map is Potential Right to Win.
Here we look for attractive markets where the firm may already possess much of the legal expertise but lacks part of the commercial capability required to be chosen.
Perhaps its lawyers do this work well, but buyers in a new segment cannot see credible cases. Perhaps the firm has relationships with owner-managers but no systematic way to reach professional finance directors. Perhaps it understands the buyer's problem, yet has no repeatable process for identifying and following up the right situations.
A larger potential market does not automatically require a new legal practice area.
Sometimes the missing capability is not legal. It is commercial.
That distinction became the most important insight of the day.
The road there is not another campaign
We already had a commercialization analysis that examines 58 questions across seven areas: market understanding, service development, digital presence, technology, sales, learning and commercial governance.
Its public evidence tells us how clearly a law firm makes its commercial work observable. It does not, by itself, tell us how well the firm performs internally or how profitable it is.
Yesterday we connected that analysis to the two market maps.
A weakness in qualification should become a question about the firm's real qualification process, followed by a practical improvement if the gap is confirmed. Missing buyer-relevant cases may call for better evidence of delivery. Weakly connected activities may call for clearer account ownership, partner involvement and a rhythm for follow-up. An absence of documented learning may call for a genuine feedback and improvement process, not merely a paragraph on the website.
We call this third part The Road to Win.
It is not a generic list of marketing recommendations. It is a prioritized plan to improve the firm's commercialization capability, linked to the markets that those improvements could make accessible.
That gives a law firm two simultaneous agendas:
- Sell now: focus on the buying situations where today's Right to Win is strongest.
- Build for tomorrow: improve commercial capabilities that could open the next group of markets.
The second agenda should also strengthen the first.
From an interesting framework to a repeatable working method
We tested the approach on two different Norwegian law firms.
The work produced client-facing pilot reports, detailed buyer-path assessments, open questions for the partners to answer, and a repeatable operating procedure for the next firm. We also preserved legal service catalogue IDs beside readable service names.
That last detail is important, but not because a law firm should receive a technical report.
The report is for the firm and its people. It should help partners decide where to focus, what to improve and what they should stop treating as a priority.
The structured IDs mean the same approved decisions can later inform Entriva.ai and company monitoring. If a business event suggests a need for a specific legal service, the system can investigate whether that service belongs to a firm's agreed Right to Win, rather than matching on a broad label such as "construction law."
A signal is still only a reason to investigate. It is not proof that a buyer wants legal advice, that the work is available, or that this firm will win it. I wrote about that distinction in yesterday's field note.
We have built the method and produced two pilots. We have not demonstrated that it increases revenue or profitability. That requires evidence from actual buying decisions and outcomes.
What changed
We moved from asking which legal services a firm can sell to identifying where the firm can compete today and what it would take to compete somewhere else tomorrow.
We also connected two kinds of work that are often kept separate: a diagnosis of commercial capability and a market-level decision about where that capability should be applied.
The result is an operating method, not just a positioning exercise. It can be repeated with another law firm, challenged with evidence and revised when the firm's own data becomes available.
What I think matters
Many firms have more valuable expertise than their current commercial reach suggests.
Telling those firms to "do more sales" is not enough. More activity directed at buyers who have no reason to choose you can simply produce more rejection.
I would rather see a firm make two deliberate choices: first, concentrate on markets where it is already credible and relevant; second, decide which commercial capabilities are worth building because they could create access to a much larger market.
The real promise here is not that every firm can win everywhere.
It is that growth can become a more specific management problem: which opportunities are within reach, which are not, and what exactly has to change?
What remains uncertain
The pilot reports still contain hypotheses. We need the firms to test them against actual mandates won and lost, the people who initiated and decided purchases, competing advisers, fees, margins, available capacity and existing commercial routines.
A low score in public documentation must not be mistaken for the absence of a capable internal process. Likewise, strong public evidence of legal expertise does not establish a Right to Win without examining how the buyer makes the decision.
We also do not yet know which commercial improvements have the greatest effect on winning work, how long new markets take to develop, or how well the approach generalizes across firm sizes and countries.
Those are questions to test, not claims to hide.
Still, something important changed on 22 October.
We now have a repeatable way to give a law firm a sales focus for today and a commercially grounded growth agenda for tomorrow.
The next test is whether those decisions change what the firm does — and eventually what it wins.