Many law firm leaders look at business planning as a massive, exhausting mountain to climb—something to be done once every three to five years, checked off a list, and forgotten. But treating business planning as a rare, monumental event is a dangerous mistake in today’s legal market. With technology changing overnight, client expectations shifting constantly, [...]
When I ask law firms if they have a strategy, most Managing Partners say “sure: we want to grow our client list, recruit and keep top talent, and increase our profitability”. But if those goals only exist in the heads of the management committee or scattered across email threads, you don’t have a firm strategy. [...]
When law firm partners think about operational strategy, they usually focus on external threats. They worry about competing firms stealing their clients, technological disruption eroding their billable hours, or a sudden dip in the local economy. But there can also be internal threats to the firm: Associate churn, Partner under-productivity, a lack of operational efficiency. [...]
As part of the strategic planning side of my consultancy, I find that many of my clients identify a gap between the need for succession planning, and the willingness of their more senior lawyers to embrace and plan for succession. I can easily convince law firms of the value of these plans. The hard part [...]
When I meet new people, it’s hard to explain what I do for a living so I just say “I’m a business strategist for law firms”. At that point, they either really want to know what that means, or they really don't. For the curious, I’ve recently started to explain the story of Steve Ballmer [...]
Through a recent podcast featuring 24-year-old Harvard-educated author Adam Aleksic on the influence of internet language, I was reminded of the incredible speed of change we are all now facing. Take, for example, use of the phrase “unalive” as a way of saying “dead” which might result in algorithmic censorship. Similarly, a watermelon now represents [...]
I live in Canada, but as a strategist, I’m fascinated by the lessons arising from the recent election down South. Specifically, I was shocked by how divided America is between two radially different ideologies. Honestly, they couldn’t be more different. And we’re facing the same thing in Canada. In BC, where I live, we recently [...]
Biden held onto leadership as long as he could. But when it became apparent that he had lost the faith of his party, and that he couldn’t possibly beat Trump in the Presidential election, he was convinced to step down. There can be tremendous strength in quitting a strategy, and trying something different. Lawyers, and [...]
I recently heard about this theory from the tech world, but I think it has relevance in the legal environment, as well. When a business first starts, it aims to produce a product or service that its members can feel good about. They want to be proud of what they have created, and the service [...]
(This article first appeared in SLAW). The other day, an international client of mine thinking about re-entering the Canadian marketplace asked me why there was so little loyalty in Canadian law firms these days. He was referring to the amount of lawyer churn in most law firms. I don’t believe this issue is limited to [...]