• Kaustubh Mehta
• 16-07-2026

A firm’s reputation used to be something clients discovered. Now it is something they research.

There was a time when a law firm’s standing in the market was decided almost entirely by what happened inside a courtroom, or inside a boardroom during a negotiation. The work spoke, eventually, and the market caught up in its own time. Business development followed a predictable sequence: relationship, pitch, mandate. That sequence has quietly inverted.

A client today forms an opinion of a firm before the first meeting is scheduled. They have read the partner’s last few articles. They have noticed, whether consciously or not, whether the firm shows up with a point of view or simply shows up. By the time a General Counsel picks up the phone, they have usually already narrowed the field to two or three firms, and communications, more than credentials, is what got a name onto that shortlist.

The Pipeline Starts Earlier Than Firms Think

A decade ago, the business development funnel started with a pitch meeting. Today it starts long before that, with whatever the prospective client encountered about the firm while they were still deciding whether they had a problem worth calling a lawyer for. A well-argued piece on an emerging regulatory risk, published months before a client faces that exact risk, does more for an eventual mandate than any capability statement handed over in a conference room.

This reframes what business development teams and communications teams are actually meant to do together. The traditional method assumes that the two run on separate tracks, BD builds the pipeline, communications builds the brand. They do not, however, work in separate silos anymore. The content a firm produces is the pipeline, or at least its earliest and least visible stage.

Firms that still separate these functions organisationally often find their output drifting apart: thought leadership on topics no client is currently asking about, or outreach unsupported by any public track record to point to. Firms that integrate the two, without restructuring anything, tend to find that each piece of published insight performs a two-fold duty, building credibility and keeping the pipeline energised at the same time.

Nishith Desai Associates is a useful illustration of what this looks like in practice. Long before “content marketing” became an industry term, the firm built its practice around a daily research culture, producing detailed client hotlines and research papers on emerging regulatory questions well ahead of client demand. That published body of work, more than any pitch document, is widely credited with the firm’s standing as a preferred adviser to global companies entering India and to Indian companies expanding abroad, most of whom the firm counts as repeat clients.

What Happens During a Live Mandate

Consider what happens during a major transaction, a regulatory shift, or a contentious dispute. The legal work itself may be flawless. But whether that work converts into the next mandate, the referral, the client who stays for a decade rather than one matter, depends heavily on whether communications was built into the strategy from the outset.

Firms that treat communications as an afterthought tend to discover, too late, a competitor’s name attached to the story instead. Firms that build it in from the start find that every matter becomes a visible demonstration of judgment, a well-timed client alert, a partner quoted with genuine insight rather than a generic soundbite, the firm’s own account of a landmark ruling published before three other firms recycle the same headline. Each of these is a small, compounding contribution to future revenue, and not merely a reputational nicety.

Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas offers a visible example of communications built into a matter rather than bolted onto it afterward. The firm’s Managing Partner, Cyril Shroff, hosts a recurring conversation series on CNBC-TV18, engaging business leaders such as JSW Group’s Sajjan Jindal and TAFE’s Mallika Srinivasan on live economic and regulatory questions as they develop. The effect is that the firm’s name stays attached to the story while it is still being written, rather than to a press release issued once the outcome is already known.

Trust & Revenue

Every client relationship begins with an implicit question: can this firm be trusted with something that matters? Historically, that trust was earned slowly, over the course of an engagement.

Strategic communications does not, and cannot, replace that process. It shortens it, and a shorter trust curve converts directly into faster, more frequent instruction. A prospective client who has already read a partner’s considered view on a relevant development arrives at the first meeting with a portion of that trust already extended. The relationship still has to be earned in the room. But the room got easier to enter, and easier rooms close faster.

This matters more in an environment saturated with AI-generated content that sounds competent and says very little. Sophisticated clients have become better at detecting the difference between genuine insight and filler. The firms converting that discernment into revenue are not the ones publishing the most, they are the ones whose every piece of communication is recognizably theirs, distinct enough to be remembered when the actual need arises.

This is also why independent recognition by market intelligence platforms such as Chambers and Partners functions as more than a credentialing exercise for Indian firms. Client-sourced commentary collected by these publications, describing a lawyer as thorough, accessible, or a dependable problem-solver, does the same trust-shortening work as a well-placed article. It reaches a prospective client through a channel the firm does not itself control, which is precisely what makes it credible.

The Partner Brand

One tension worth naming briefly: visible, well-regarded partners generate inbound interest individually, sometimes disproportionately to the firm’s own name recognition. That is a business development asset, not a threat, provided the firm’s own positioning is clear enough to hold the frame around it. A partner known for sharp commentary on a niche area does not dilute the firm’s revenue potential, they become one of its most efficient, and least expensive, channels for generating it.

AZB & Partners is a case in point. Independent legal directories and industry commentary have long observed that a substantial share of the firm’s market reputation traces back to the visibility of its co-founder and Managing Partner, Zia Mody, consistently ranked among India’s most powerful legal figures and profiled extensively in the business press over a career spanning four decades. That visibility functions as one of the firm’s most durable sources of inbound work, entirely apart from any single transaction, and it long predates the firm’s current scale.

Measuring the Return

The strongest argument for treating communications as a revenue function is that it can now be evaluated as one. Firms taking this seriously track which published pieces preceded which new mandates, which partners’ visible positioning correlates with inbound interest, and which relationships closed faster because the groundwork of credibility had already been laid before the first meeting.

That kind of tracking does not require abandoning the qualitative judgment communications has always relied on. It requires holding it to the same standard as any other investment expected to produce a return.

Nishith Desai Associates is again instructive here. Beyond its own research output, the firm invested in a structured, year-long programme to train partners across practice areas in public commentary and visibility. The return showed up in measurable terms by heightened visibility and reputation in jurisdictions beyond India. The firms treating communications as a revenue function are, increasingly, the ones able to point to results of exactly this kind.