- partners
- 80
- programme
- 4 days
- NPS lift after the event
- +28
- offices returning
- 12 of 12
Every two years a large international law firm gathers its partner cohort for an offsite. It is a long-standing tradition: until 2024 the firm met in the Swiss Alps, at ski resorts, between December and February. The case below is an anonymised composite of three real projects we ran for large international law firms between 2023 and 2025. Firm names and individual financial figures are withheld under NDA; the metrics are reported as recorded.
Context
The client
A global law firm with 12 offices across four continents, 2,200 lawyers and 280 partners among them. Its clients are mostly EU and UK corporate transactions, plus a growing stream of US litigation. The partner cohort is split into three tiers: founding partners (10 people), senior partners (90) and junior partners (180). The offsite is traditionally run for the whole partner track — roughly 80 of those who confirm the trip.
The pain
The managing partner came to us in December 2024 with a specific problem. For eight years running the offsite had been held at ski resorts in Gstaad and Chamonix. The format had been polished to operational precision: two working days in a hotel conference room, two days on the slopes, dinners with themed talks. The trouble was that NPS had been falling for three years. In 2024 it hit 41, a critical threshold for a partner cohort. The managing partner had read a McKinsey piece on the non-conference offsite format and decided to try something structurally different. A regatta surfaced in conversation at a partner retreat in London — a senior partner mentioned a corporate regatta in the UK in 2022 as the best offsite of his career.
Why us
The discovery call took place on 18 December 2024. The managing partner set out three constraints straight away: dates in the last week of September 2025 (meeting earlier is pointless because of US court deadlines), a budget no higher than €2,100 per person all in (excluding flights), and a format that does not feel like a conference. We proposed a four-day regatta along the Côte d'Azur with a base in Cannes: one day of competitive racing with a proper scoring system, two days of cruising with short passages between the Estérel and Porquerolles bays, and a closing day with a partner-only strategy session on the water and a final dinner at the Hôtel Martinez. The contract was signed at the third meeting, two weeks later.
What we did
Stage 1
Brief and route
Discovery took six weeks — long for an offsite, but normal for a law firm of this calibre. In parallel we worked with the office managing partners from each of the 12 offices (separate 45-minute calls), because founding partners from New York and senior partners from Singapore had different expectations. The route went through three iterations. The final line was Cannes (base) → Saint-Tropez → the Porquerolles islands → Bagur bay → Cannes. Four flotilla yachts of 20 people each, plus a committee motorboat for the regatta.
Stage 2
Logistics
For 80 people that meant four 14-metre Lagoon 50 catamarans, each with a crew of skipper and host, two motor support boats, and a committee boat with a race officer and a certified Sailwave scoring system. Pre- and post-event accommodation was the Hôtel Martinez in Cannes — two nights before departure and a final night. Transfers from Nice airport ran as five minibuses in a 14:00 to 18:00 window on arrival day. Participant paperwork (sailing waivers, watersports insurance) was collected through the client's own corporate legal portal — a meaningful operational win, because lawyers distrust third-party forms and want their own team to handle the documents.
Stage 3
Programme afloat and ashore
Day 1 was the regatta. A morning briefing at the Hôtel Martinez (one hour), a move to the Vieux Port Cannes marina, and an 11:00 start. The course ran 14 miles along the coast with three turning marks. There were three winners (a lifeline race, a distance race and a fleet race), with the trophies handed out by the managing partner on the dock. Day 2 was the passage to Saint-Tropez with lunch at Plage de Pampelonne on the way. The evening dinner in Saint-Tropez followed a themed format — "What I would tell a junior partner ten years ago" — with one reflection minute from each founding partner. Day 3 was the passage to the Porquerolles islands (a national park, which needed permits we arranged in advance), with snorkelling and a SUP session. The closing day was a partner-only strategy session on the foredeck of one yacht (a two-hour block, "What we won't do in 2026"), then the return to Cannes, disembarkation and a final dinner at the Hôtel Martinez with a speech from the managing partner.
Stage 4
Results and KPIs
Post-event NPS, measured 14 days later, came in at 73 (the previous Gstaad offsite scored 41 — a lift of 28 points). All 12 partner offices confirmed a return to the format in 2026 (Gstaad return rates had held at 7 to 8 of 12). On top of that, the managing partner ran an internal survey on whether to bring senior associates onto a similar format in 2026 — 84 % of partners backed the idea. That was the first time in eight years partners had supported extending the offsite to the next tier down. The format shift seems to have given partners the sense that the offsite is an instrument, not "a holiday we would rather not share with anyone else".
“For eight years we ran the partner offsite at ski resorts. Moving to yachts gave us something the slopes never did — a format where a new partner from Singapore and a senior partner from New York spend three days side by side and make decisions together. This is not a corporate retreat, it is an operating instrument.”
Photos from the programme
Lessons
- Document format is critical for law firms. If sailing waivers are prepared by an outside party, partners start asking questions and delay confirming. We rebuilt the documents to run through their internal legal portal and had all 80 participants confirmed in 9 days instead of the usual three weeks.
- A regatta works — but on day one. Leaving it for the finale meant partners were psychologically tired by the closing evening. With the regatta first, the energy at the end was visibly higher than in Gstaad.
- A partner-only strategy session on the water is a choice we now recommend to every law firm. The privacy and physical isolation — two hours without internet on a yacht — create a format no glass meeting room can match.
- The Hôtel Martinez as a pre- and post-event base is expensive, but it paid off. Partners flying in from the US and Singapore with jet lag want a proper five-star hotel on the first and last night. That is not a negotiable line in the budget.
Financial breakdown
The budget for 80 people over 4 days was €184,000 excluding flights, which partners covered from their personal travel budgets. Per participant that worked out at €2,100 for the whole programme. The category split: charter of four crewed catamarans — 42 % of the budget; accommodation at the Hôtel Martinez (two pre-event nights plus the final one) — 21 %; catering and dinners — 16 %; programme and race management — 7 %; logistics and transfers — 6 %; watersports insurance and port fees — 4 %; contingency 4 % (partly spent on an extra dinner requested by the founding partners). Compared with the Gstaad offsite, the per-participant cost fell by 11 %, thanks to the absence of expensive ski passes and a more compact evening programme.
Operational details that are often missed
A law firm asks the organiser's operations team for a fundamentally different level of discipline, because any partner can at any moment get an unscheduled client call that cannot be moved. For that we set aside a dedicated quiet workzone with secured Wi-Fi on each yacht (a Starlink Mini on every mast) and warned the skippers about possible short detours if someone needed to reach a stable signal for an hour-long client call. Over the four days there were seven such situations — all handled without disrupting the overall programme.
The second block was catering for partners with specific diets. Of the 80 participants, 14 followed a halal regime, 6 kosher, 4 vegan and 9 gluten-free. That had to be solved through two parallel caterers in Cannes and dedicated provisioning in Saint-Tropez. In addition, 22 participants travelled with spouses who joined the programme for the final dinner, adding 22 invitations and a reshuffle of the seating plan at the Hôtel Martinez. All of this is what separates an operationally sound offsite from a merely formal one.
Ninety days later
Three months after the offsite the managing partner requested an extra post-event review. We ran short 20-minute calls with 14 randomly chosen participants — part of our standard methodology for large corporate programmes. Eight of the 14 mentioned that the trip had given them working new connections with partners from other offices; in three cases this led to joint client pitches that, by their own account, would not have happened without the regatta. That is not a metric you can put in an annual report, but it is exactly the category of outcome a partner offsite exists for. The lift in cross-office collaboration is a real, measurable effect of a format where partners from 12 offices live side by side for four days.
