What law firm leaders are prioritizing at partner retreats in 2026

Executive summary

Nexl interviewed senior marketing and business development leaders at law firms across multiple markets to understand what is shaping partner retreat agendas in 2026. The conversations spanned firms of different sizes, structures, and geographies. All findings are presented in aggregate to avoid identifying individuals or firms directly, and any names or identifying details have been changed.

Six major themes were present in most 2026 partner retreat agendas from firms we interviewed:

1. Recruitment and lateral hiring
2. AI adoption
3. Lawyer well-being and work-life balance
4. Business development training
5. CRM and relationship intelligence technology
6. Succession planning

Many firms are operating at or near capacity, with lateral hiring pipelines and internal recruitment infrastructure stretched thin. In several cases, senior BD and marketing leaders have taken on temporary operational responsibilities, including hiring, to support their firm.

Unsurprisingly, AI featured prominently in every agenda, with firms working through tooling, governance, and how to get traditionally cautious partners on board. Similarly, CRM and relationship intelligence usage is improving across the board, but partner adoption remains a consistent challenge.

Why partner retreats?

The annual partner retreat has always served a practical purpose beyond strategy setting. It's one of the few moments of the year when the whole partnership sits in the same room, away from client deadlines and billing pressures, with a shared agenda. What gets prioritized in that time reveals a great deal about what leadership believes the firm needs to work on.

According to our interviews, the balance of retreat time has shifted in recent years. Firms are spending less time setting strategy and more on execution, including how to implement decisions, get partners trained and using new tools, and create accountability for BD activities.

One Chief Marketing & Business Development Officer, who joined her firm less than three months before we spoke, told us she'd inherited a strategic plan, but there was no infrastructure, like formal BD tracking or CRM, to support it. "We reviewed the strategic plan and had everyone contributing feedback," she said, "but the bigger focus was on the execution piece."

What law firms are prioritizing in 2026

Recruitment and lateral hiring

Leaders described recruitment as one of the most pressing issues on their retreat agendas, ahead of AI, technology investment, and BD strategy. One solo marketing leader at a mid-size firm said her firm was "at capacity and struggling to find quality lateral attorneys", and the pressure was reshaping how leadership allocated time and resources across the business.

AI adoption

AI appeared on every agenda, but the conversation has changed over the past 12 to 18 months. Firms have largely moved past the question of whether to invest in AI tools and are working through implementation instead, looking at which tools to prioritize, how to govern use across the partnership, and design training that changes behavior.

Lawyer well-being and work-life balance

Lawyer well-being came up as a priority across several conversations, with some firms investing in dedicated retreat sessions and external speakers. One leader told us that their presentation on lawyer well-being generated some of the strongest post-retreat feedback.

Business development training

BD was consistently included on agendas, with several leaders opting for external speakers to bring a practitioner’s perspective to their retreat. There is clear appetite for BD content that is practical and immediately applicable, particularly for partners expected to develop business alongside a full client workload.

CRM and relationship intelligence technology

Firms are investing in CRM and relationship intelligence tools, with adoption remaining uneven across the leaders we interviewed. Partner adoption remains one of the more persistent challenges across the sector.

Succession planning

Succession planning appeared on many, but not all, agendas. The firms discussing this at their retreats were focused on exposure risk, particularly in practice groups built around a small number of senior partners.

How firms are putting AI to work

A year ago, the AI session at a law firm partner retreat was usually an introduction to what the technology could do and why it mattered. Across the firms we spoke with, the conversation has moved on to a harder question: how to implement AI responsibly across a partnership that ranges from enthusiastic early adopters to cautious holdouts.

One approach that worked well for an interviewed firm involved a deliberate choice about who led the AI presentation at their retreat. The firm’s leadership asked a highly respected senior litigator, someone not known for an interest in technology, to present on AI and how he was using it in his day-to-day. He spent time with the IT team beforehand, learned the tools, and developed practical scenarios specific to his work.

When this attorney told the room he had started out skeptical but now found real value in tooling, the message landed differently than it would have from someone already known as a technology champion. The feedback from attendees was, “if John can do it, then I can too”. Post-event survey responses from that session specifically asked for more AI content at the next retreat, which is an unusual outcome for a technology session in a traditionally cautious environment.

Most of the AI investment we heard about is focused on the practice of law: drafting tools, document review, legal research platforms with AI assistance, and productivity tools for general work. The application of AI to business development, client intelligence, and CRM is at an earlier stage. One leader was direct about the reason: the inputs for practice-focused AI tools are more easily structured, which makes the immediate gains more visible. BD-related AI tools are on many roadmaps, but the variable inputs made it harder for firms to see value immediately.

The leaders we spoke with were clear about what their firms are not doing with AI. None described anything close to automated legal work without attorney review. One leader, who uses an AI writing tool daily for his own marketing work, was emphatic that even blog posts drafted with AI assistance go through attorney review before publication because the tools can produce phrasing that is legally misleading. “We’re certainly not at the set it and forget it stage,” he said. “I don’t know anyone who is. If they are, I think that’s a huge risk.”

Governance is in place at most firms, including AI committees, intranet guidance covering appropriate use and hallucination risk, and formal policies for client-facing work. Several leaders noted that the governance frameworks developed for legal work do not always extend to marketing and BD applications of AI, which is a gap worth closing.

The firms making progress on AI implementation share a few characteristics. They’ve moved from evaluation into structured rollouts, identified credible internal advocates instead of relying on IT-led training, and are realistic about pace.

The gap between BD strategy and follow-through

The firms we spoke with all had a strategic BD plan in place. The challenge that came up consistently was what happens to that plan once the retreat ends and everyone returns to their practices, clients, and billing targets.

One marketing leader described the BD accountability dynamic at her firm as a boom-bust cycle. Partners engage with BD when pipeline is quiet and step back when client work picks up, which makes it almost impossible to build any sustained rhythm.

Practice group leaders face a structural tension that strategic planning does not resolve. They are typically senior lawyers carrying full client workloads, and on top of that they are expected to drive practice group growth, manage junior lawyer development, and maintain consistent BD activity. One leader identified resourcing as the biggest execution gap at his firm. “The practice group leaders are experienced partners and very busy lawyers,” he said. “It’s hard to manage practice groups and manage your own clients and workload.”

The firms making progress had a few things in common. They were building formal marketing and BD functions for the first time, with leaders who had the authority and proximity to leadership to drive change. Several of the people we spoke with were in relatively new roles, brought in specifically because the firm recognized it needed professional infrastructure around BD instead of leaving it to partners to manage.

They were also starting at the individual level before moving to the group level. Practice group marketing plans are a medium-term goal for most of these firms, while the immediate priority is to identify which partners are already BD-active, build habits with them, and create early wins before scaling across the broader partnership.

Firms that struggled were those that didn’t follow up their strategy with a change management plan. Getting partners to spend their time differently is a challenge and requires more sustained effort than a retreat session can deliver.

Rising recruiting pressure

Recruitment featured in almost every conversation we had for this paper and was described as the most urgent issue firms are facing. Firms need more lawyers at a time when the lateral market is highly competitive and internal recruitment infrastructure is often not built for high volumes of demand.

Employer brand is an underdeveloped asset at many of the firms we spoke with. Career pages, the clarity of what the firm offers to lateral candidates, and how the firm presents itself externally through the recruitment process are areas where investment has lagged. The firms best positioned to attract lateral talent have a coherent story about what they offer.

Behind the immediate pressure of lateral hiring sits a longer-term question that most retreat agendas did not allocate enough time to address properly: succession. Practice groups built around two or three senior partners are exposed to structural risk.

Managing partner transition, practice group leadership pipelines, and the transfer of client relationships are conversations that require dedicated time and honest dialogue; however, they tend to get deferred because the immediate pressures of billing and recruitment take precedence.

A persistent problem: Partner adoption

Law firms are investing in CRM and relationship intelligence platforms, and the business case for doing so is well understood at leadership level. The gap that persists across the firms we spoke with is partner adoption.

The pattern we heard repeatedly has three stages: a platform is purchased with leadership support, a training session takes place, and then usage drops off. One marketing leader described her experience rolling out a CRM platform in terms that will be familiar to anyone who has worked in BD at a law firm. She’s shown partners the platform multiple times, in different formats, with different use cases. “Every partner I speak to acknowledges the tool would be helpful if they had time,” she told us. She identified that reducing the time required to see value was much more effective than adding more features or training sessions.

Group sessions and lunch-and-learns are useful for awareness but often have limited impact on behavior. One-on-one meetings, where a partner can ask specific questions relevant to their practice and see the tool applied to their relationships and pipeline, are consistently more effective. That’s more resource-intensive, particularly at firms where one person is managing the entire BD function. Firms with lean marketing and BD teams are increasingly looking for vendors who can deliver implementation and training directly.

The firms seeing better adoption outcomes are using a champion model, giving a small group of tech-comfortable partners in leadership positions early access and dedicated support. When those partners are fully onboarded and have seen the value of the platform, they’re able to champion it across the firm, leading to better adoption outcomes than internal training sessions.

One leader who is planning a Nexl rollout at her firm described her approach in detail. She has specifically chosen a pilot group of attorneys who are technically comfortable, hold leadership positions, and understand what the firm is trying to achieve with the platform. The goal is to build a cohort of credible internal advocates before opening the rollout more broadly. “You definitely need champions,” she said.

AI within CRM platforms is generating curiosity among partners, though the bandwidth to act is limited while firms are still working through the adoption of practice-focused AI tools. As those tools settle into workflows and free up attorney time, BD-focused AI is likely to move up the priority list.

Learnings from law firm leaders

AI adoption

• Find a credible internal voice to lead AI education across the partnership. A respected practitioner who can speak about their workflows will better reach partners than IT-led training sessions.
• Review your AI governance framework to confirm it covers marketing and BD applications, as well as client-facing work.

BD strategy execution

• Make individual partner BD responsibilities specific and time-bound.
• Make sure your firm compensation incentives align with the behavior you want to encourage from attorneys.

CRM and relationship intelligence

• Support platform adoption with a structured lawyer training program. Automated activity summaries, specific follow-up prompts, and simplified contact capture are strong adoption levers when paired with lawyer training.
• Audit your email integration setup before rolling out to the broader partnership. A system that shows an incomplete picture of a partner’s relationships will lose credibility quickly.
• Sequence your rollout around champions. Choose partners who already understand the value of structured relationship management and let their experience guide the conversation with the rest of the partnership.

Recruitment and resourcing

• Invest in your employer brand before your next hiring push.
• Review your internal recruitment capacity. A single person managing recruitment and onboarding is a structural vulnerability when hiring volumes increase.

To see how Nexl can help your firm turn retreat priorities into lasting habits across the partnership, book a demo with our team.