Tag: Law firm

The Worst Strategic Planning Mistake I See Law Firms Make

Strategic planning sessions in law firms often follow a predictable pattern. Partners gather for an intensive retreat, consultants present frameworks, and everyone leaves energized with a polished document outlining the firm’s ambitious five-year vision. Then, six months later, that same document sits forgotten in a drawer while the firm operates exactly as it did before.

The core mistake isn’t poor planning, it’s treating strategy as a destination rather than a journey.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Most law firms approach strategic planning like a major transaction: assemble the team, dedicate intensive time, produce deliverables, and declare success. This event-driven mindset creates the illusion of progress while ensuring nothing actually changes.

The resulting strategic plans often share common weaknesses. They contain broad aspirations without specific owners, ambitious timelines with no accountability mechanisms, and initiatives that sound impressive but lack the operational detail needed for execution. Partners nod in agreement during the presentation, then return to their practices wondering who’s supposed to make it all happen.

Law firms are particularly susceptible to this mistake because their business model rewards individual performance over collective execution. Partners excel at managing complex client matters with clear deadlines and billable accountability, but strategic initiatives often lack these same forcing mechanisms.

Additionally, the partnership structure can create diffusion of responsibility. When everyone is responsible for strategy, no one feels truly accountable. The managing partner may champion the plan, but without active engagement from practice group leaders and key rainmakers, momentum quickly dissipates.

The Antidote: Strategic Discipline

Successful firms recognize that strategy requires the same rigor they apply to major client engagements. They embed strategic thinking into their regular operating rhythm through monthly leadership reviews, quarterly progress assessments, and annual recalibrations.

These firms assign specific partners to own strategic initiatives, complete with defined milestones and resource commitments. They track progress as systematically as they track billable hours, understanding that what gets measured gets accomplished.

Most importantly, they communicate progress consistently across the firm. Partners and associates understand not just what the strategy is, but how their daily work connects to larger objectives.

What You Can Do Right Now

Rather than grand retreats that promise transformation, effective strategic planning starts with honest assessment of execution capacity. Firms should identify two or three critical priorities that can realistically be advanced given current resources and competing demands.

Each priority needs a champion, typically a partner willing to dedicate meaningful time to driving progress. These champions need authority to make decisions, allocate resources, and hold others accountable for deliverables.

The planning process itself should be designed for implementation, focusing more on quarterly action steps than five-year projections. Market conditions change, client needs evolve, and competitive dynamics shift; strategy must be agile enough to adapt.

Final Thought

Strategic planning fails when firms mistake the plan for the process. The document itself has little value; the ongoing discipline of strategic thinking and execution creates competitive advantage.

The best law firms understand that strategy isn’t about predicting the future perfectly; it’s about building organizational capabilities to respond to change with intention rather than reaction. This requires treating strategic execution not as an addition to daily operations, but as the framework that guides every significant decision.

When strategic thinking becomes embedded in how a firm operates rather than confined to annual planning sessions, real transformation becomes possible. The question isn’t whether your firm has a strategic plan, but whether strategic discipline shapes how you actually run your business.

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Lawyers: Ask for the Order!

Mike O’Horo of RainmakerVT posted a great article, “Lead-generation is not the same as business-generation”.  The article notes how the whole process of marketing as most law firms do it is essentially worthless if you “don’t ask for the order” and make the sale.  Most lawyers have great difficulty with this step, and miss out on a lot of very profitable business.

In most law firms, the number of real rainmakers is less than 10-20% of the total # of partners.  Yet all equity partners are expected to bring in business of a minimum $ amount to support the growth and profitability of the firm.  Rainmakers must be compensated to a level that keeps them happy, as they are a rarity in the practice of law.  You must motivate and retain these rainmaker partners with appropriate compensation packages to ensure the future success and profitability of the firm.  The rest of the partners must be satisfied with earning less if they can’t or won’t bring in the business.

You must reward your rainmakers with bonuses or higher units of compensation to keep them motivated and bringing in new business. You’re not just rewarding partners for hours billed, you’re rewarding partners for originating work, which needs to carry a bigger weighting at compensation time.  This is where many small and midsize law firms’ compensation systems fall short in my experience.  This is rewarding lawyers for increasing sales, and really no differs from paying bonuses to the best-performing car salesperson on the lot. The sooner law firms get this, the better off they’ll be.  Since all partners will share in an increasing pie, individual partners can’t be worried a rainmaker is making more than them, when everyone benefits from what a rainmaker does.

Law firms must operate in a business-like fashion.  For decades, law firms have operated with a partnership business model protected from the ravages of competition that other professions and businesses have had to endure.  Changes must now be made quickly to become more business-like in your operations and reward partners for “asking for the order” before your competitors beat you to it and steal your rainmakers away from you.

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Clients Want Choice on Billing and Project Management

A recent article by Shannon Green of Corporate Counsel magazine caught my eye regarding billing arrangements.  In the article, Shannon summarizes a panel discussion on project management at a Legal Marketing Association event held recently at Latham & Watkins’ office in New York. See here.

Michael Caplan, director of operations for the office of the general counsel at Marsh & McLennan Companies Inc., said, “the biggest misunderstanding law firms have about their clients is thinking that they are first and foremost focused on reducing costs.  To general counsel and CEOs…predictability is more crucial…the billable hour at companies like ours is dead.”

The rest of the article outlines the advantages of using project management to achieve the above goals for clients, and the need to budget carefully the staffing required to do the job to avoid write-offs for the law firm.

Nat Slavin, founding partner of law firm consultancy Wicker Park Group, noted that “It is mind-numbing to keep up with the different needs of clients, but you have to do it, he said, adding that when it comes to managing a project for a client,”One size fits one.”

I observe  that every client has unique needs, whether it’s how they want their project managed or how they want to be billed.  Some clients are looking for cost certainty and fixed fee billing, while others are happy with hourly billing if law firms communicate with them regularly and alert them if hours are projected to go beyond original estimates.

Since clients value different things, it’s necessary to find out exactly what the client values up front, whether it’s cost certainty, turnaround time, etc.  Then you can construct an alternative fee agreement or hourly billing estimate that meets their unique needs. You give the clients a choice of how they can be billed, whether on a fixed fee or hourly basis, or a combination.  There is no one size fits all as far as client demands go on billing arrangements.