While most law firms embrace the concept of planning their future, they quickly discover that strategizing is hard, and developing consensus among partners is even harder. Even among the most talented managing partners across the profession, strategic planning continues to be one of the more exasperating parts of the job.
Law firm strategic plans generally fall into one of three categories. The most common type can be summarized as follows: “Here are all of the things we do now, but we are going to do them better, and we are going to market more.” This is a plan that avoids hard decisions and confronting existing problems, thereby making it easy to approve. But it also results in no meaningful improvement.
