The Four Stages of Strategic Management (SM) are Plan, Execute, Monitor, and Improve. It seemed to me that if the legal process was analogous to a strategically managed project, then these four stages ought to be able to provide the basic structure. So, I set out four ‘buckets’ and called them Plan, Execute, Monitor, and Improve. I then placed each of my 15 components into what seemed to be the right one.

Surprisingly, a large number seemed to belong in the ‘Plan’ bucket. They certainly didn’t make sense anywhere else. That was unexpected because what I had been taught and observed was that when you get a new assignment you dive right in. I am a trial lawyer, and if the client said “sue those people” then that’s what I would do. If nothing else, this exercise of segregating components into stages highlighted the importance of planning a properly thought out legal project. Then came another surprise. Once each component was in a bucket, the sequencing of the contents of each bucket was quite easy.

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