Photo: Christine Glade / Adobe Stock

Ask a law firm leader how they standout in the elite market, you might be met with a choreography of dazzling words.

"We're differentiating." "We're a disruptor"; "We're nimble."

So often are these lines uttered they've become industry platitudes. Perhaps firm leaders have magnified the small adjustments they've made to traditional ways of working such that the sense of being pioneering, 'a disruptor', is real.

The problem of differentiation, of standing out in a market in which the product on offer is broadly homogenous, is hardly unique to legal. But remember: talking about being a disruptor doesn't make you one.

At a recent event, I asked a U.K. general counsel what she made of the recent trend of law firm leaders accenting 'disruption' and 'differentiation'—if it was real, imagined, fabricated. She offered a charitable view. It's important, she said, and she'd seen positive developments at firms across tech, diversity and CSR owing to wanting to be different and upsetting the status quo. But the only two factors she really cared about and that dominated her decision-making when discriminating between counsel: "Quality of people" and "quality of advice".

What really matters, the GC said, is whom you 'click' with. And opportunities for 'clicking' are often serendipitous—right place, right time, right people. At what was a social event, perhaps the GC thought it indecorous to mention 'pricing' in her criteria. I'll take the liberty to include it anyway.

It's a tall order to expect elite lawyers of similar schooling, training, cultural learnings and with the same understanding of what it means to be a corporate lawyer to differentiate significantly along relationships, advice and pricing.

Don't get me wrong—corporate lawyers can be awfully clever: deals are skillfully crafted, poison pills invented, fiendishly constructed models deployed in advancing the client's best interests. Perhaps one firm is better at leveraging tech than its neighbor. And some firms have excelled at seeking, and seizing, opportunities where others have been left behind (I shan't blather on about Kirkland & Ellis's well-documented cornering of the top-end PE market, nor Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan's genius in riding the anti-bank and latterly the class action waves).

Indeed, the ability to spot and dive head-first into new markets we can suitably call a differentiating factor, and one that is surely a hallmark of a disruptor.

But, be honest: are you a follower or a leader?

Are you taking that plunge, or following others into erstwhile unexplored territory? Put differently, can you truthfully call that clever thing you just did a 'differentiator'? Or is it a word you use on clients in the hope that there are no follow-up questions?

The phenomenon of Kirkland & Ellis and Latham & Watkins—the industry's only $5 billion+ law firms—accelerating so far ahead of what they might once have called 'competitors' has created a sort of cultural tug, with lawyers up and down the AmLaw 100 yearning to be the next "$20 million lawyer", recruiters tell me. Today, you might throw firms like Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison into this 'market leader' bucket.

The Kirkland-Latham tug has dulled any hint of differentiation. What we have now are firms expecting that a close adherence to the 'K-L' blueprint will see them safely into the top 10. The desperation around being a $3 billion or indeed a $5 billion firm has made 'differentiation' and 'disruptor' little more than buzzwords. I've asked multiple partners, leaders among them, what's meant by the words. More often than not they reach back into the buzzword bucket for 'nimble', 'prescience', or 'dynamic'.

The greatest risk in chasing that $3/$5 billion group is that you prioritise 'big' over your niches, which can lead to you failing to effectively market or capitalise on them.

It's something that firms like Cravath Swaine & Moore have done well for generations. But, seemingly, there is a flipside to not chasing the leaders.

Recent events at Cravath—which has for years occupied a rarefied, if not entirely differentiated, market position—tell us that it's not just the $3 billion-chasers that are at risk of fading into the pack. The firm, long a Wall Street outlier and famously lean—fewer than 100 equity partners—has faced a flurry of recent departures.

Patrick Smith wrote about how "lateral exits were once rare at Cravath", but that in January alone the firm saw three decamp to rivals. Poor Cravath, which has coursed down the PEP rankings over the years, now sitting at 13th on the Global 200; it seems it is paying a price for not playing the $3 billion game, a key aspect of which is heavy onslaughts on rival firms' ranks.