CC needs to remember its own lessons
Twelve years of covering business has taught me one over-riding lesson about what separates winners from losers: a brilliant plan badly rolled out will always be trumped by a bog-standard strategy well executed. This seems particularly relevant for Clifford Chance (CC) as the firm reflects on a punishing financial year and a decade in which it has struggled to deliver on the promise of its 1990s incarnation. Because CC had a brilliant plan, one that defined what was happening to global legal services at the time and one that rivals borrowed from – first grudgingly and then openly. The firm that published Vision for the Future in 1997, the manifesto for the global law firm, looked to have realised that vision within just two years.
