A crisis has an inconvenient habit: it refuses to remain in the communications department. The press statement leads to the managing partner. The managing partner leads to the board. The board asks about the lateral team that started the trouble, the revenue attached to it, the clients likely to leave, the technology that missed the warning and the capital required to fix the whole business. Soon the public-relations adviser is listening to a conversation about everything except public relations.
Baretz+Brunelle built a company around that migration. It serves the business of law - large firms, specialist boutiques, legal-tech makers, alternative providers, corporate legal departments and the investors circling all of them. Its menu now has seven headings: reputation, talent, revenue, leadership, capital, innovation and intelligence. It is a very tidy list for a notably untidy market.
The firm formally arrived in New York on February 29, 2016. Spencer Baretz, a former corporate lawyer, and Cari Brunelle, a former broadcast journalist, left Hellerman Baretz Communications and took an experienced team with them. Nearly all of the predecessor firm's clients followed, according to the launch announcement. The new business was born with an old luxury: trust already in the bank.
A specialist generalist
At first glance, the expansion looks like the usual consulting-firm buffet. Look closer and it is closer to a chain of cause and effect. A law firm wants a stronger reputation because reputation wins clients and recruits. A star recruit requires intelligence about a portable book of business, cultural fit and the probability that colleagues will follow. The recruit needs integration. Integration touches practice management, pricing, finance and leadership. Growth produces a capital question. New technology introduces an adoption problem. Each answer manufactures the next question.
The bars above are not revenue. B+B does not publish practice economics. They show the conceptual architecture: separate entrances, one building. The client might arrive through a crisis, a lateral search or an AI project. The commercial opportunity is the handoff.
That makes B+B different from a communications agency, a recruiter or a technology consultant, though it competes with all three. Large consultancies can bring scale. Boutiques can bring depth. B+B's pitch is adjacency: specialist depth in one market, with enough neighboring expertise to see a decision from several sides. Its roughly 11-to-50-person size, as listed publicly, makes the breadth surprising and puts a premium on senior operators who have already done the jobs they advise.
The client might arrive through a crisis, a lateral search or an AI project. The commercial opportunity is the handoff.The B+B model, in one sentence
The deal that made the map visible
Two personnel decisions clarified the ambition. In April 2024, B+B hired Mike McNamara, the former chief executive of Dentons US, as its first CEO. McNamara had worked on law-firm combinations, office integrations and business operations at a scale far beyond media relations. Bringing him in was a conspicuous way to say that B+B wanted to advise the people making institutional decisions, not merely explain those decisions afterward.
Then, in February 2025, it acquired LexFusion, a legal-tech accelerator with thousands of relationships among corporate legal teams, law firms, vendors and investors. LexFusion's three founders - Joe Borstein, Casey Flaherty and Paul Stroka - became B+B partners, and the global team was integrated.
Before the deal, LexFusion acted as an outsourced chief revenue officer for legal-tech companies and an interpreter for buyers. Its publicly named clients included Agiloft, DISCO, Factor, Hotshot, LegalMation, Litera and Macro. B+B brought law-firm leadership relationships, communications machinery, talent work and financial advice. Together, the firm could hear a vendor's product pitch in the morning and a law department's objection in the afternoon.
The first failure is human
Legal technology has long had a demo-to-daily-use problem. A firm can buy an impressive platform and discover that lawyers do not change their habits, clients do not accept the workflow, security teams stall deployment or the economics reward hours rather than efficiency. Software is often the most visible piece and the least mysterious one. The harder questions are governance, incentives and trust.
B+B turned that observation into three connected LexFusion capabilities. Acceleration helps technology companies grow. Intelligence studies what the market is actually doing. Labs, launched in 2026 under chief innovation officer Dan Szabo, works on off-the-shelf and custom AI applications, implementation, governance and adoption. The sequence matters. Selling a tool, understanding why it stalls and helping an institution fit it into real work are different crafts.
The firm's newer research products make the same bet on behavior. L.E.G.A.L. is a permissioned, longitudinal survey intended to reduce repetitive questionnaires and benchmark generative-AI adoption among large law firms and corporate departments. WIED Shot turns the bluntest executive question - “What is everyone doing?” - into structured interviews, survey input and a composite report. The names are slightly playful. The subject is not. A bad technology decision can waste budget; a bad market assumption can distort years of strategy.
What another firm can borrow
The useful lesson is not to copy the service list. Seven practices would crush a young agency that lacked credibility, senior talent or a client base willing to grant access to consequential decisions. The copyable move is smaller: follow one trusted customer's sequence of problems. Notice the question asked immediately after your work is finished. Build or buy the next capability only when the same handoff repeats.
The adjacency test
- Start with a narrow problem in a market you know unusually well.
- Write down the next decision your client makes after your engagement.
- Look for a repeated handoff, not a fashionable service category.
- Add an operator with lived experience before adding a glossy practice page.
- Use research to test whether what clients say matches what they do.
This model works best where relationships are durable, decisions are interconnected and industry context is expensive to acquire - all true in the legal market. It is less persuasive for a buyer who needs a commodity campaign, a one-off software implementation or advice outside B+B's legal-economy concentration. Integration is valuable only when the problems really touch. Otherwise, breadth becomes overhead wearing a clever suit.
Baretz+Brunelle's business model remains the familiar one of private professional services: advisory engagements, retained communications work, research assignments, talent mandates and outsourced revenue support. The important cost is organizational. To make the model credible, B+B must keep people from different professions close enough to exchange what they learn while protecting the confidences of clients who may sit on opposite sides of the same market.
That is the tension at the center of the company. Its advantage comes from seeing more of the legal economy than a narrow vendor sees. Its responsibility is to keep those lines bright. If it succeeds, the old crisis call becomes something larger: not merely a request for the right words, but an early signal about how an institution needs to change.