Beyond the Mid-Year Reset: Creating a Stronger Year-End Runway

Last June, I wrote about the mid-year reset, taking the slower summer weeks to pause, revisit your January goals, and recalibrate before the second half of the year. Fall is almost always a dead sprint to year-end. Firms and their leaders benefit from entering one of the busiest seasons with extra headspace, without fully taking their foot off the accelerator.

For most firms, June is a narrow and valuable window. You have enough data from the first half of the year to evaluate performance and enough time left to change your trajectory.

The question for leadership is: what do you want to achieve in the second half of the year, and where do you want that growth to come from?

Start with an H1 review

Before building any H2 plan, firm and practice leaders need a clear-eyed view of the first half:

• Based on the goals you set in January, which practices and sectors are on track — and which are not?

• Where are you seeing real demand, and where are matters slowing down?

• Which clients and matters surprised you and why?

• Are you focusing partners’ time, marketing support, and pricing flexibility in the right places?

The point of the exercise is to enhance focus. Too often, firms assume the next six months will mirror the first six. Industries shift. Clients shift. Demand moves. What worked in January won’t necessarily work in October, and your mid-year review should leave practice leaders clear on which clients, sectors, and matters they must prioritize before year's end.

Create an H2 pipeline and make it visible at the practice level

A stronger runway needs definition. Rather than relying on a patchwork of individual effort, which will likely take place anyway, use the summer to focus on the top 3-5 opportunities for any given practice, and make the pipeline visible.

Ask each practice to:

• Identify a short, prioritized list of top clients for H2 (for most mid-sized firms, this should be 3-5 existing clients; larger firms will have more)

• Name the key opportunities it is pursuing with those clients — new matters, new business units, new geographies, or cross-practice work

• Set a small number of H2 pipeline targets tied to those clients (for example, the number of high-value opportunities you want in motion by October) and communicate the full list of clients among all practice areas to further enhance collaborative efforts

  
  

When practice leaders and firm leadership can see the same H2 pipeline — who the priority clients are, which opportunities matter most, and where there are gaps — they can make better decisions about where to invest resources in the second half of the year.

Use summer to shape client budgets and expectations

By late summer, corporate legal departments are already drafting budgets, reviewing outside counsel relationships, and forming opinions on where next year’s work will go. Many want a defensible budget in place by October or November. Your window to shape those decisions is smaller than it feels in June.

Three firm-level actions are especially important.

1. Strategic client conversations, including value and pricing

Priority clients should not be surprised by your value story or your rates during budget season.

At the practice level, ensure you are:

• Meeting with top clients to understand what they must accomplish before year-end and where they see emerging pressure in 2027 and beyond

• Asking when they expect to finalize budgets and how their legal teams are being measured internally

• Discussing value and pricing early — where predictability, speed, or different fee structures would help them make better use of your firm

These are not one-off rate discussions. They are conversations about outcomes, resourcing, and how your firm can make it easier for clients to justify continuing — or expanding — the relationship.

2. Coordinated marketing and business development around emerging trends

Client needs are evolving, and the issues that will dominate the next twelve to eighteen months are already taking shape. Align marketing and business development now around the specific trends that matter to your priority clients. Many firms set their core topics and areas of focus early in the year and never revisit them. That’s a mistake.

At a firm and practice level, coordinating around emerging trends means:

• Choosing two or three emerging issues per key sector or practice that will anchor your H2 efforts

• Developing practical, client-facing content around those themes — short briefings, checklists, or Q&A pieces that speak directly to your top clients

• Planning how those themes will show up in your fall visibility: client roundtables, webinars, targeted emails, and partner-led commentary on LinkedIn

Your fall marketing and business development efforts should feel like a natural extension of the conversations you’re having with your most important clients this summer.

3. A focused fall events and speaking strategy

By September, most agendas are set. If you want your firm in the rooms and on the stages where your clients will be, summer is the planning season.

At the practice level, identify:

• The 3-5 events that matter most to your priority clients and industries

• Where you want your lawyers to attend, where you should sponsor, and where you want to speak

• Opportunities to pair those events with client-side engagements — small dinners, on-site briefings, or follow-up sessions that reinforce your themes

The goal is to align your activities to a handful of well-chosen events, tied to your priority clients and emerging issues, which will do more for your H2 pipeline than a crowded, unfocused calendar.

The accountability layer

Most firms don't fail for lack of ideas — they fail for two reasons. First, execution gets crowded out by client work. Second, they pursue too much in too many directions and dilute their efforts in the process.

In the context of your H2 pipeline, this means establishing a simple rhythm where practice leaders regularly review:

• The status of strategic client conversations, including value and pricing discussions

• The fall initiatives — content, events, and speaking — tied to their emerging trend themes

  
  

The mechanics can be straightforward with brief pipeline reviews in practice meetings, short written updates, or simple scoreboards shared with leadership. The important part is that activity is visible and tied back to the firm’s practice-level priorities.

What managing partners and CMOs should expect by Labor Day

By Labor Day, managing partners and CMOs should be able to look across the firm and see:

• A visible H2 pipeline for each key practice, anchored by a clear list of top clients and defined opportunities

• Strategic client conversations in motion with those priority clients, including early value and pricing discussions

• A small set of coordinated, practice-level marketing initiatives on the fall calendar — client-facing content, events, and speaking engagements aligned with the emerging issues your clients care about most

  
  

When those elements are in place, October and November become a period of execution, and you can avoid the “random acts of marketing” that plague many firms when calendars start getting stacked. Your practices are working a defined pipeline, showing up where it matters for their most important clients, and reinforcing a clear value story — increasing the odds that the work you originate in the fall can be billed and collected before year-end.

If you’d like help turning your summer runway into a concrete H2 plan — including practice-level pipeline priorities, client-conversation frameworks, and aligned fall initiatives, let’s talk.