Connor: Hi all. My name is Conor Kinnear, and welcome to the Passle podcast, Laterals and Mergers: 2 Good, 1 Bad. It's the short podcast where we ask leaders from law and professional services who are involved in the integration of lateral hires or mergers, two good things they've done or do that works really well, and then one bad thing they've done that they would never do again.

Craig, welcome.

Craig: Connor, it's a delight to be with you as always.

Connor: Thanks, Craig. So how have you been involved in your career in lateral integration at K&L Gates and now at the Budner Performance Group?

Craig: Yeah. So Hughes and Luce was the legacy firm I worked at that merged into K&L Gates in 2008. And so I had a front row seat, obviously, being one of the leaders of Hughes and Luce that shepherded the firm into the merger, into the integration process for those mergers. K&L Gates grew by merger and lateral growth, so I was quite interested in how that worked. 

And then the global managing partner at a certain point asked me to be in charge of lateral integration, which essentially was assisting with the integration of merged firms as well as the integration of lateral partners, which we would have anywhere from 25 to 75 lateral partners a year come in our doors. So it was really important for K&L Gates for it was almost existential that we succeeded at integrating those partners and merged law firms.

Connor: Great. It's expensive business, so getting it right's really important, which is why we're, why we're here today. So tell me this, tell us two good things you've done or you're doing that have made a real difference to the firms you've been with.

Craig: Yeah. And so it's just really been K&L Gates that I've had this role for as you say a number of years. And one good thing we did that I think is absolutely critical that not a lot of law firms do, is connect the dots between the integration function and the business development teams. You really have to train your business development team so they can have a seat at the table and have great conversations with their partners about the industries that they serve and the practices that they have.

So they really have to know them to get that seat at the table. But once you have that, it's so critical for those teams to support the integration of the partners because sometimes the partners get busy and the other partners in the firm that have been there for a while get busy, and the BD teams can really, really supercharge that integration. I would say the second good thing that we've done and we continue to you know, you mentioned the Budner Performance Group, which we started a couple of months ago, and this is some of the stuff that we support professional service firms on is accountability. So creating measurable goals for each lateral.

It may not be the same. And then really, really track that. So there are obviously leading indicators and lagging indicators. A lot of firms just look at those lagging indicators. They might get frustrated if somebody is in Europe or Australia, they might have had a garden leave. And so if you're just looking at lagging indicators, it might be quite frustrating because they can't approach their clients for a while. So really focus also on leading indicators, which means touch points within the firm and touch points out of the firm. And you didn't ask me to do this, so you can cut it out if you don't like it, but your technology tool at Passle is one of the ways to really seriously track a leading indicator because if somebody's engaged in learning the thought leadership of their fellow partners and then pushing it outside, it's really usually an indication that they're switched on and might be very successful.

The one bad I would say it was an interesting time in the history of our firm, and it was more than, you know, a decade ago actually almost fifteen years ago, where we felt it was really urgent in certain markets that we hire and we skipped the due diligence process in a material enough way that there were some ridiculous surprises by some very high price laterals that lost the confidence in our lateral hiring for a year or two. And you can't, as a law firm, lose the confidence of your partners who are your investors in lateral hires. You have to make sure you're always impressing upon them how there is return on the investment of laterals because there will be some that don't work out. But you have to remind them that the preponderance of them work out at and when they do work out, it's enormously profitable to the rest of the firm.

Connor: Brilliant, Craig. So listen, thanks for joining us today, Craig. Thanks to those who have tuned in. It's been great to have you and you've been listening to the Passle Podcast, Laterals and Mergers, 2 Good, 1 Bad. Have a great rest of the day.

Charlie: This episode is brought to you by CrossPitch AI, the new cross-selling tool from Passle. You can follow the Passle CMO Series podcast on your preferred podcast platform. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time