In a conversation with Arthur Rothrock on The Litigator's Path, Hilal walks through her process for diagnosing what's actually wrong inside a firm, why most business plans fail before they launch, how two very different client events produced real business development results for boutique firms, why accounts receivable problems almost always trace back to intake and communication failures, and what smaller firms can offer talent that big law cannot. The thread running through all of it: law firm leaders who treat the business side of their practice as an afterthought will keep hitting the same ceilings, and the fix almost always starts with listening – to clients, to employees, and to the data the firm already has but isn't using.
How Shireen Hilal Diagnoses a Firm Before Proposing a Single Change
Most consultants show up with a framework and start prescribing. Shireen Hilal starts by interviewing people – sometimes dozens of them. At a 150-person firm, she sat down individually with roughly 45 employees, from assistants to partners. At a four-person firm (a managing partner, one associate, and two paralegals), she met with everyone. She pairs these conversations with anonymous surveys for firms where people may not speak candidly in a one-on-one, though she says that's rarely the problem: "when people are given a voice, they speak and they speak loud."
She reviews financials, marketing materials, the employee handbook, billing systems, and client intake processes before presenting findings to the managing partner or executive committee. The assessment itself is priced as a flat fee – one Hilal acknowledges doesn't pencil out if measured by hourly rate. She treats it as her own investment in the engagement. Every firm that has gone through the assessment has hired her for the follow-on work.
The model after that varies: hourly or monthly retainer, depending on the client's preference, though most of her clients want flat fees and cost certainty. From there, it's what she calls "hand-to-hand combat" – working alongside the firm to implement changes one initiative at a time, iterating as they go. She is explicit that no strategy survives first contact intact, which is why she pushes firms to pilot changes in one practice group or with one client before rolling anything out firm-wide.
Why Shireen Hilal Tells Firms to Forget Their Competitors and Talk to Their Best Clients Instead
Shireen Hilal recounts sitting with an executive committee at a mid-size firm as they mapped current practice areas against trendy new ones – ESG advising, cannabis law – based largely on what competitors were offering. Her response was blunt: take your 20 best clients and ask whether they actually need those services. Beilal Chatila arrived at the same conclusion from a solo starting point: focus obsessively on the specific clients and communities where you have a genuine edge rather than chasing whatever the market appears to want. "It's always easier to meet demand than try to create it."
She pushes firm leaders toward what she calls "royalty to royalty" conversations – the managing partner calling the CEO or general counsel of the firm's five largest clients and asking strategic questions: Where are you growing in the next 24 months? What markets are you entering? What products are changing? These conversations do double duty. Andre Rembert applies a version of this same client-obsession logic to his solo PI practice – staying close to clients in multi-passenger cases to generate household referrals instead of chasing cold leads through ad spend. They surface real demand the firm can build around, and they create natural openings for cross-selling. A client discussing expansion plans might need the firm's tax group or corporate team without anyone having to make a hard sell.
The broader principle applies to firms of any size considering a new office, a new practice group, or a new service line. Hilal's filter is simple: do your existing clients need this, or are you building it and hoping someone shows up? For law firms – which are, as she puts it, among the last businesses willing to invest speculatively – "build it and they will come" is an especially dangerous bet.
Two Client Event Models That Shireen Hilal Built for Boutique Firms
Shireen Hilal described two marketing programs she recently designed for clients, each built around a specific buyer and budget reality.
The first was for a small immigration law boutique – two partners – whose typical corporate client was a head of HR at a tech or financial services company. Hilal assembled a roundtable trio: one of the immigration partners, an employment lawyer from a separate boutique, and a high-end recruiter from her network. Each brought a distinct, non-competing expertise relevant to the same buyer. They alternated between Zoom webinars and in-person events, tripled their combined audience, and each did only a third of the work. The secondary payoff: the three professionals built trust with each other and created a referral network that continues to produce introductions.
The second was for a securities litigation firm – a specialized shop of former big-law transplants – targeting in-house counsel and compliance officers. Instead of the standard partner-at-the-podium format followed by a cocktail hour, Hilal designed a workshop. She gathered questions from attendees in advance, seated them at small tables with one partner each, and let the in-house professionals workshop real problems with their peers. The partners facilitated rather than lectured. The day after, Hilal debriefed the partners as a group: what's top of mind for these buyers, and how should the firm's thought leadership and go-to-market strategy shift over the next two quarters to address it? The firm came away with both deeper client relationships and a content roadmap grounded in what their market actually cares about.
Why Accounts Receivable Problems Usually Start at Client Intake, Not Collections
One of Shireen Hilal's clients came to her with a significant accounts receivable problem. Her diagnosis went well upstream of the collections process itself. She identified three failures stacked on top of each other.
First, the engagement letters weren't setting clear expectations. Clients weren't having real conversations about scope, budget, or the number of timekeepers on their matter. The result, as Hilal put it: "I guess you'll find out when you get the bill." Second, the firm's time entries weren't telling a story of progress. Bills looked like a series of disconnected research tasks rather than a clear narrative showing the case moving forward. Third – and this is the complaint Hilal says clients have always had and probably always will – communication gaps. Clients were chasing their lawyers for updates.
Stack those three together, and write-offs and collection delays are predictable. Hilal's fix involved building a structured AR process (what happens at 30 days, what happens at 60), but also going back to the root: tightening the intake conversation, coaching attorneys on how to write time entries that demonstrate value, and establishing communication cadences. "Leaky buckets are an awfully expensive way to gather water."
How Smaller Firms Can Compete for Talent Without Matching Big Law Salaries
Shireen Hilal's advice to firms that can't compete on compensation alone: stop trying, and build a value proposition around what you can offer that large firms cannot. She gave a concrete example – offer a four-day workweek at 20% less salary. An A-player who values a three-day weekend will work hard for that arrangement, and the firm avoids settling for a B-player willing to accept low pay.
Beyond scheduling flexibility, she encourages firms to tie compensation to metrics that actually drive the business. For a B2C firm with a client intake team, that might mean quarterly bonuses pegged to conversion rates. For a firm where online reviews matter, it could be a firm-wide bonus tied to consistently earning five-star ratings. The point is to give everyone – from the receptionist to the senior associate – a stake in outcomes the firm cares about.
Hilal also recommends testing before committing. Before hiring a full-time marketing person, contract out the work to learn what channels and skills actually produce results, then hire someone whose strengths match what's working. The same applies to offshore staffing for paralegal work or process-heavy tasks like immigration filings – build strong SOPs first, then staff flexibly around them. For firms still growing into new functions, this kind of test-before-you-commit approach can apply to litigation support as well – platforms like Legion let solo and small-firm litigators draft pleadings, discovery, and motions without adding headcount, which fits the same logic of scaling output before scaling payroll.
She is equally direct about what doesn't work: the "cram-down method," where leadership sets goals and pushes them down without input. By month two, she says, the team knows the goal is unreachable and stops trying. The alternative is presenting a plan, asking the people responsible for execution what they need to hit it, and negotiating a target everyone can commit to.
What Litigators Can Take Away
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Build your go-to-market strategy around your existing clients' needs, not your competitors' service menus – Hilal's filter is to take your 20 best clients, ask what they need in the next 24 months, and build from there, because meeting existing demand is always cheaper than trying to manufacture it.
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If your firm has a collections problem, audit your engagement letters and time entries before you build a better dunning process – Hilal traces most AR issues back to vague scoping at intake, time entries that don't show progress, and inconsistent client communication, not to a missing follow-up email at 60 days.
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Before hiring full-time for a new function like marketing, test the work on a contract basis to learn which channels and skills actually produce results, which lets a small firm avoid locking into a full-time hire whose strengths don't match what the firm ends up needing.
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Partnering with non-competing professionals who serve your same buyer can triple your audience and split the work – Hilal's immigration boutique roundtable (immigration lawyer, employment lawyer, recruiter) cost each participant a third of the effort and reached three times the audience any one of them could have drawn alone.
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Repurpose a single piece of thought leadership across six or more weeks of content – Hilal turns each quarterly Law360 column into chunked LinkedIn posts, short videos, and conference topics, getting, as she puts it, "multiple bites out of the apple" from one investment of writing time.
Listen to the Full Episode
Hilal covers significantly more ground in the full conversation – including why law firms are even more resistant to change than other professional services firms, how firm culture breaks down during scaling, and why most attorneys struggle to talk about their own value when it comes time to raise rates. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. You can find Shireen Hilal on LinkedIn or at maiorconsultants.com.