Case 01 · BD Collapse

“The rainmaker walked. And took 38% of the book.”

Mid-market Mumbai corporate firm · 22 lawyers · 11 years

~40% of bookShare of firm revenue at risk on partner exit
01 / 08Composite Indian law-firm case

What broke

A senior partner with the biggest book of business — most of it built on personal relationships from her prior BigLaw years — accepted an offer from a larger firm. Within weeks, key clients followed. The remaining partners discovered the firm had no documented client relationship history outside the departing partner's head, no second-chair coverage built into key accounts, and no structured outreach to the rest of the client base to reassure them.

Why it broke

Like most Indian boutique and mid-market firms, all BD activity ran through individual partner networks. There was no firm-level account ownership, no shared client institutional memory, no contingency for a single-partner exit. Revenue concentration risk was sitting at ~40% in one partner and nobody had ever measured it.

How CTD would have caught this

  • BD audit would have flagged 38–40% revenue concentration risk in Year 1
  • Second-chair relationships built into top 10 accounts
  • Firm-level CRM with client touch history, not partner-personal Rolodexes
  • Retention outreach protocol triggered before the departure became public
  • Structured pipeline replacing 60–70% of departing-partner book within two quarters
Tags:
BDStrategyPartner-Concentration Risk
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