Commercialization is what buyers can see you do
A law firm can have excellent lawyers, deep specialist knowledge and an impressive history of client work — and still be unnecessarily difficult to choose.
That is the part of commercialization I keep coming back to.
Professional expertise creates value when it is applied. But before it can be applied, somebody has to recognize a need, find a relevant adviser, understand why that adviser might be right and decide to trust them with an assignment.
The market does not experience what a firm intends to do. It experiences what the firm actually does.
What a potential client can find, see and experience is not a superficial layer around the business. It is part of how the business competes.
The best expertise does not automatically win
Consider two firms with comparable expertise in employment law.
One has a page saying it advises on employment matters, followed by a list of lawyers.
The other explains the business situations it helps employers navigate, names the people responsible, shows relevant experience, addresses common questions and makes the next conversation straightforward.
The second firm has not proved that its lawyers are better. But it has given a potential buyer more evidence with which to make a decision.
The distinction matters because buyers usually cannot assess the full quality of professional advice before purchasing it. They look for credible signals of relevance, experience, reliability and fit. They ask people they trust. They search. They examine websites and public profiles. Increasingly, they may ask an AI assistant to compare possible advisers.
The firm is being evaluated long before a formal pitch begins — sometimes before it even knows the buyer exists.
An assignment may go to a competitor, stay with an incumbent, be handled internally or be postponed. None of those outcomes tells us that legal expertise alone decided the result.
Commercialization leaves evidence
This is why I think commercialization can be examined much more objectively than firms sometimes assume.
We do not have to start by asking whether a managing partner *believes* the firm is good at business development. We can start with observable questions.
- Does the firm make clear which clients and business problems it serves?
- Can a buyer find evidence of relevant work and specialist expertise?
- Is market knowledge translated into useful, timely communication?
- Are the firm's channels active, coherent and appropriate for their audiences?
- Is it easy to identify the right person and take the next step?
- Does the firm demonstrate a recognizable approach to relationships, client development and learning?
These questions concern actions and their visible results. We can specify what counts as evidence, record where and when it appeared, and apply the same criteria to different firms.
In our commercialization benchmark, we use 58 questions across seven areas: market understanding, service development, digital presence, technology, sales, learning and commercial governance. The purpose is to examine how consistently a firm turns its expertise into a position that buyers can recognize and act on.
That does not require guessing what its partners intended. It requires looking at what can be documented.
An objective score is not an opinion in disguise
There is a discipline to making such an assessment fair.
First, define the question before examining the firm. Then define the scoring criteria, the relevant time period and the acceptable sources. Preserve the observation, the source, the date and the explanation for the score. Apply the same rules to every firm.
If there is no public evidence for a higher score after a documented search, do not manufacture it.
But an equally important rule follows: absence of public evidence is not proof that nothing happens internally.
A law firm may have an excellent referral network, sophisticated account plans or strong client-development routines that are not visible on its website or social channels. A public-evidence analysis cannot claim to have inspected those routines. It can accurately say how much of the practice was observable within the stated scope.
That makes a score useful without making it omniscient.
The method itself still involves choices: which behaviors matter, what evidence is sufficient and how different activities should be weighted. Those choices must be explicit and consistent. Once the method is fixed, the observations and scores can be checked, challenged and reproduced.
Objectivity is not the absence of judgment. It is judgment constrained by a transparent method and verifiable evidence.
This belongs on the managing partner's desk
I see commercialization as a leadership responsibility, not a marketing department's side project.
The firm has already invested in acquiring legal expertise, attracting talented people and delivering client work. Commercialization is the organization's ability to make that capability relevant, understandable and accessible to the right buyers — and to develop the relationships and processes that turn relevance into instructions.
If the market cannot recognize what the firm is particularly good at, some of that investment will not be fully commercialized.
If one practice area communicates consistently while another remains almost invisible, that is an organizational choice or an organizational gap worth examining.
If the firm relies entirely on individual partners to generate their own instructions, that may work extremely well for some people. It is still reasonable to ask what happens when those partners leave, slow down or enter a new market.
Measurement turns these questions into a management conversation. It gives leaders a starting point for deciding what to preserve, what to improve and what to test next.
What changed
While developing the analysis and preparing reports for law firms, I have become more convinced that the most useful first conversation is not about buying a new sales tool.
It is about giving a firm a documented view of its current commercialization: where buyers are being given credible reasons to choose it, where the evidence is thin, and how its observable practices compare with other firms measured by the same method.
That is useful even if the firm never buys anything else from us.
The next question — where the firm has a genuine Right to Win today — becomes more valuable when we understand the commercial capabilities already in place.
What I think matters
You cannot manage commercialization seriously if you refuse to examine the evidence it leaves behind.
There will always be disagreement about the best commercial strategy. There should be far less disagreement about whether a buyer can find a named specialist, understand a service, see relevant experience or encounter a useful and current point of view.
Those are observable conditions. They shape the buyer's experience whether the firm measures them or not.
The point of a benchmark is not to award a firm a flattering number. It is to identify the actions that could make its expertise easier for the right clients to recognize, trust and buy.
What remains uncertain
We have not proved that a higher public-evidence score causes more won mandates, higher fees or greater profitability. Those are different outcomes that require data on opportunities, buying decisions, competitors, revenue and the firm's internal commercial work.
Nor does every buyer follow the same path. In many legal markets, referrals and long-standing relationships will continue to matter enormously. A public-evidence assessment captures only part of that reality.
But that limitation does not make observation meaningless.
It gives us a disciplined place to begin: what does this firm actually make possible clients find, see and experience — and what should it do differently?
That is a question a firm can answer with evidence, act on and measure again.