Collaboration Is the New Economics of Cross-Selling in Law Firms

Every firm runs on an economy of collaboration and trust. It underpins client relationships and, when invested wisely, compounds into growth. For all the talk of systems and strategy, collaboration in law firms still depends on something stubbornly human: confidence that a colleague will deliver for your client as well as you would.

In different law firm cultures and environments, trust and collaboration must be built attorney by attorney through visibility. As firms grow through mergers and lateral expansion, where hundreds within a single firm may carry the title of partner, focus must be given to creating, nurturing, and protecting visibility between attorneys.

Global firms now span dozens of jurisdictions, with practices that cut across borders, industries, and regulatory systems. This scale can dilute culture and collaboration where it’s not strong, as well as further complicate internal visibility.

Visibility and collaboration are arguably the most valuable assets in any partnership, but they aren’t line items on the balance sheet. When they flow between practice groups and across offices, they compound like interest. Visibility, with the partners knowing and understanding each other’s practices, becomes liquidity, and collaboration becomes the yield.

The awareness challenge. In law firms, cross-selling can be equally a sales challenge as an awareness and knowledge challenge. Attorneys who feel fully knowledgeable about their colleagues’ practices are far more likely to introduce additional attorneys into a client team. To further underscore the evolving nature of growth within law firms, it’s important to recognize that expansion is no longer solely organic.

A critical step when growing by lateral hiring is the integration that follows successful recruitment. Effective and enduring integration ensures that new talent and capabilities are fully embedded into the firm’s culture and collaborative networks, maximizing the potential for trust, visibility, and cross-selling success.

When lawyers publish relevant, insight-driven commentary, they not only reach clients—they make their expertise visible to colleagues inside the firm. A key part of any lawyer’s professional development should be the encouragement to find and express their own perspectives, and to regularly publish and share insights on issues affecting their area of practice.

If awareness and trust are the cultural foundations of cross-selling, visibility is its market data. Yet most firms still lack reliable ways to measure how collaboration develops, who is engaging with whom, which relationships are strengthening, and where isolation persists. In addition to the type of data that lives in CRMs, more firms are turning to new forms of “trust analytics,” mapping how lawyers read, share, and comment on each other’s work to visualize where collaboration is growing.

These “collaboration maps” function as a kind of balance sheet for the trust economy. They show where social capital is concentrated, where it’s stagnant, and where new investment is paying off. The goal isn’t to mechanize relationships, but to replace guesswork with evidence.

Early indicators of progress. Too many collaboration programs bombard their firms with endless counterproductive content. In practice, what works is a focused approach, where a handful of well-judged, relevant messages show real understanding and, in turn, build trust.

Each small act, opening, sharing, and commenting is a microtransaction in the trust economy, a point of visibility and an expansion of knowledge and awareness, and each is a signal that one lawyer recognizes another’s relevance to a client’s needs. Individually, these moments are modest. Collectively, they trace the health of collaboration across a firm.

Firms that have started measuring internal engagement are already seeing positive returns. According to platform data from Passle’s CrossPitch AI, which tracks indicators of cross-selling activity, average open rates for internal emails now exceed 40%, more than double the usual benchmark for email open rates in professional services firms.

From anecdotes to evidence. For managing partners and business development leaders, the next step is to make collaboration as measurable as any financial metric. With modern analytics tools, leaders can now see where information flows freely and where it gets stuck, which teams are highly networked, and whether integration efforts are succeeding.

In the trust economy, these insights are the new audit trail of culture. When used effectively, technology can reveal where collaboration thrives and where it’s needed. When thought leadership becomes habit, when colleagues consistently engage with one another’s expertise, and when leaders can see and support that behavior, collaboration begins to scale naturally.

Here are some additional practical steps firms can take to increase visibility and collaboration:

• Give lawyers structured opportunities to be seen. Encourage each practice to share a small number of well-judged, insight-driven updates. The goal isn’t volume—it’s ensuring colleagues have a clear, current understanding of one another’s expertise.
• Treat lateral integration as a visibility exercise, not just an HR one. Within the first months, help new partners build internal awareness by pairing them with colleagues on matters, spotlighting their insights, and making introductions deliberate rather than ad hoc.
• Make cross-practice introductions a routine habit. Partners who routinely amplify a colleague’s work by referencing an alert, drawing on sector experience, or looping a peer into a client discussion set the tone for the firm.
• Reward the behaviors that build trust. Recognize micro-acts of collaboration: sharing a colleague’s analysis, contributing to a joint update, or engaging thoughtfully with another partner’s insight. These small actions compound into a culture of visibility.
• Ensure leadership models the behavior. Partners watch how senior leadership collaborates. When managing partners and practice chairs regularly engage with colleagues’ content, elevate others’ expertise, and make strategic introductions, it sends a firmwide signal that visibility and collaboration matter.

The firms that make trust and collaboration a baseline for all partners will continue to have the best reputations for client service. In addition, the firms that treat visibility, awareness, engagement, and trust as measurable assets, rather than abstract ideals, will outpace those that see them as intangible.

Cross-selling isn’t just a growth strategy. It’s the clearest barometer of a firm’s internal cohesion. And in the trust economy, cohesion is the most valuable currency of all.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law, Bloomberg Tax, and Bloomberg Government, or its owners.

Author Information

Rohan Massey is managing partner of Ropes & Gray’s London office and a leader in the firm’s data, privacy, and cybersecurity practice.

Tom Elgar is co-founder of Passle, a technology company that supports content-driven business development for professional services firms.

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