A succession plan that doesn’t address thought leadership could dampen a successor’s marketplace visibility and hinder their ability to maintain and grow their predecessor’s practice.

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A senior partner at a law firm is three years away from retirement. She and her firm are working hard to execute a succession plan.

So far, both are doing everything correctly.

They’ve picked a successor, a talented junior partner. They put her on every matter of the partner’s. She’s in the client meetings. The GCs and other clients know her name, they like her, and they trust her.

Hours get billed, issues get resolved, and clients seem happy to be working increasingly directly with the junior partner.

Three years go by, and then finally, on August 31, the senior partner retires.

The junior partner now controls the relationships with the senior partners’ former clients. Hours keep getting billed, issues keep getting resolved, and clients keep appearing to be happy working with the junior partner.

But then something funny happens. Within nine months or so, two clients decide to run a beauty contest for a new law firm.

They like the junior partner, but when the general counsel’s boss, their COO, asked, “So who is this person who’s handling our legal work?” Nobody could provide a satisfactory answer.

Sure, the junior partner has an online bio, but she hasn’t produced any thought leadership, spoken at any conferences, or engaged in any other activities that would give COOs, CLOs, general counsel, and other current and prospective clients an idea of her thinking, her abilities, and how she sees the world.

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The thought leadership angle in succession planning

The law firm executed one half of the succession plan perfectly, the client-facing handoff, but they fumbled the market-facing handoff.

Greentarget and Zeughauser Group survey corporate decision-makers every year about how they choose outside counsel. The most recent report, the 2025 State of Digital and Content Marketing, asked those people to rate the importance of various factors when they research outside firms/organizations to hire for their legal and business issues.

Number one, unsurprisingly, was “recommendations from sources you trust,” with 92% of in-house counsel and 86% of C-suite members selecting it.

But number two was “articles and speeches thought leaders have authored,” with 78% of in-house counsel and 74% of C-suite respondents selecting it.

That means that, according to this survey, most in-house counsel and C-suite executives view thought leadership—the thinking and opinions that attorneys put out into the world—as the second most important factor in deciding which law firms and attorneys to work with.

But ask most law firms, and they’d tell you that their succession planning focuses primarily on the highest-ranked factor, the trusted recommendation: A recommendation from a trusted senior partner to their clients about their successor, followed by a prolonged effort by the senior partner and successor to build a client’s trust in that successor through introductions, meetings, and working together.

For that reason, few firms understand the need for the successor to build market visibility through thought leadership as part of their firm’s succession planning process because that’s not how their succession planning process played out.

Client relationships transfer in private behind closed doors, but market credibility transfers in public. Firms plan the private handoff, but they often ignore the public handoff and then act surprised when a client reevaluates their former attorney’s successor and whether they want to continue working with them.

Think about what an organization’s reevaluation of their outside counsel actually looks like. It’s often not so much that the general counsel decides that they’re suddenly unhappy, as it is driven by people other than a successor’s daily client contact.

For example, a reevaluation could result from a new chief legal officer or general counsel arriving, a procurement review, a board member asking why a law firm’s fees are what they are, or someone two levels removed from the attorney-client relationship who has never met the successor looking them up online to see what they can find.

At that moment, a successor is either someone with a visible, demonstrated point of view on the legal and business matters a client is worried about through thought leadership and prior speaking engagements, or just another attorney with an online bio listing their representative matters and, hopefully, a relatively up-to-date headshot.

Retiring partners likely spent two or three decades putting their thinking and opinions out into the world through articles and speaking engagements. Yet, it would not be surprising if their successors were not brought into that thought leadership program to get a running start sharing their views of the world before taking over for their predecessor.

A thought leadership succession plan should be an easy initiative to start

If this were simply an oversight, firms would have fixed it by now, but it’s probably not an oversight; it’s probably more of an incentive issue. Law firm succession planning often stalls because of firms’ partner compensation systems. Origination credit rewards attorneys who bring in clients, even when they don’t work on those clients’ matters. When partners have to transition that relationship, they’re often staring down the barrel of a pay cut.

Partners are rational and territorial about their income. So while a succession plan might get written, executing on it is a different story.

But the thought leadership piece of succession planning is a whole different animal because it doesn’t impact partners’ compensation, which means it should be painless for them to buy into and participate in.

Sharing an article byline or co-presenting on stage doesn’t cost a senior partner a dime. It won’t hurt their relationships with their clients. (If anything, it can help improve them). Nor will it negatively affect their origination credits or their roles on their client matters.

By sharing the thought leadership spotlight with their soon-to-be predecessor, a would-be successor gains increased public visibility, which isn’t scarce or a zero-sum game. Both a retiring partner and their successor can have their names on an article or presentation without taking away from the other’s visibility or presence.

A proposed thought leadership succession plan

Thought leadership succession planning is straightforward. Like most marketing- and business-development-related efforts, it’s the execution that trips up law firms and attorneys. Here’s what a thought leadership succession plan could look like.

First, the retiring partner, the junior partner successor, members of their law firm’s marketing and business development team, and anyone else involved in succession planning should meet to discuss the need to include a thought leadership component.

Next, the group evaluates the retiring partner’s thought leadership efforts to date and how they might be expanded, such as by publishing articles in additional media outlets, securing speaking engagements at additional conferences and events, and exploring new fronts, such as guesting on podcasts or creating videos.

Then, a timeline is mapped out to cover the transition period. For our purposes, let’s assume there’s a three-year transition period.

In year one, the junior partner plays second fiddle. They draft articles that carry both their and the senior partner’s names, but they do the heavy lifting to research and draft the article, and the senior partner’s name goes first on the byline.

The same thing goes for speaking proposals. The junior partner does the bulk of the prep work and the presentation-building, but the senior partner does most of the speaking and is listed first in credits. If one of them has the opportunity to participate in a panel discussion at a conference, the senior partner gets first dibs.

In year two, the junior partner still does most of the research and creation, but their name is listed first on articles and in presentations, and they handle most of the speaking during those presentations. The attorneys also try to divide panel discussion opportunities 50/50.

Then, in year three, the junior partner has their own byline on articles, gives presentations on their own, and joins panel discussions without the senior partner.

This might seem perfunctory or so obvious as to not be worth talking about, but thought leadership succession planning is an overlooked aspect of overall succession planning whose omission could imperil the whole premise of succession planning: When a successor takes over for a retiring partner, they not only maintain that partner’s client relationships and reputation, they grow them.

To be seen in the marketplace as a service-provider successor to a senior partner, a partner must also build their reputation as that senior partner’s intellectual successor.

This helps reassure the market, namely current and prospective clients and referral sources, that the successor has the intellect, legal acumen, and critical thinking skills to be a worthy successor to the senior partner. Clients might see that the junior partner is a worthy successor based on their everyday legal work, but the broader market doesn’t know that until the successor produces thought leadership that reflects their knowledge, wisdom, and worldview.

Two common objections to thought leadership succession planning

There are two common objections to thought leadership succession planning. First is the concern that allowing a successor to build their public profile in this manner increases their attractiveness as a lateral candidate to other law firms, and thus the likelihood that they’ll leave their firm.

In this modern era of legal free agency, that is a legitimate concern. But what happens if they didn’t build their public profile during the transition period and clients and referral sources have little confidence in their ability to serve them after the senior partner retires? That poses an immediate, significant threat to the client relationship in the short term, with more tangible repercussions than a successor’s lateral move down the road.

Additionally, a successor lateraling to another firm will most likely do so after spending time standing in the shoes of the retiring partner, serving their clients, and, importantly, relying on their colleagues to support them. Those colleagues could build relationships with those clients strong enough to keep them with the firm if the successor leaves.

The second common objection is that thought leadership succession planning wastes resources on a successor who, throughout their career, has shown little interest in or ability to conceptualize and produce thought leadership.

That’s neither unusual nor unfixable.

Many attorneys don’t appreciate the value of thought leadership until they realize they need to build a book of business. Some successors will be late bloomers who will embrace all aspects of thought leadership once they’re elevated to a role of managing and developing client relationships.

Successors who aren’t naturally born thought leaders can be “coached up” through training from colleagues at the firm or outside consultants that teaches them how to think about their work in a way that inspires thought leadership.

Equally important, it’s better for the successor and their firm to learn early in the succession planning process that they will not love having to produce thought leadership and aren’t natural-born thought leaders, so they can work together to address those issues through coaching and training.

When succession planning, don’t forget about thought leadership

There’s much work to do when law firms build succession plans for senior partners. And of course, there are plenty of potential landmines when asking partners to share relationships, origination credit, and other aspects of their practice that affect their income.

Thought leadership is an important area of succession planning that, in my experience, firms often overlook. They shouldn’t, since thought leadership affects a successor’s visibility in the marketplace, which is a key driver of their success and their practice group’s success once a senior partner rides off into the sunset.

Building a plan for co-authoring and co-creating thought leadership probably won’t prevent law firms from stepping on various landmines in the succession planning process. But doing so is cheap, easy to implement, and will pay dividends by increasing the likelihood that the market looks as fondly upon a successor to a highly regarded senior partner as their own firm does.

Wayne Pollock, a former Am Law 50 senior litigation associate, is the founder of Copo Strategies, a legal services and communications firm, and the Law Firm Editorial Service, a content strategy and ghostwriting service for lawyers and their law firms. The Law Firm Editorial Service helps Big Law and boutique law firm partners, and their firms, grow their practices and prominence by collaborating with them to strategize and ethically ghostwrite book-of-business-building marketing and business development content.