Tag Archives: Law firm

The writing on the wall #7 – location, location, location

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Location, location, location...

Let’s for a moment put aside the discussion as to whether an investment by a law firm into premium real estate makes sense. Let’s assume that clients don’t object to funding acres of marble and an atrium full of lush vegetation. This question is about where your firm’s offices are, not what they are.

The location question is very personal. For some firms it might be simply be about growth – we are outgrowing our current premises – do we just need a bigger office, or should we open a second office (and if so, where). For other firms it might be about national expansion, or response to an existing or future competitive threat. However for many firms the stakes are higher, and it’s about international expansion.

It may be an understatement, but international strategy is not easy. Aside from the economics, the cultural, regulatory and language differences, suddenly the complexity and management overhead increases dramatically. Whether the market entry strategy is through acquisition, merger  or lateral hire, you can then throw a whole host of political and personal factors into the mix.

With that in mind, opening a new office seems like a decision to be made thoughtfully, but in a fast moving market that is changing more than ever, how can you make the time you need to really assess where the right locations are for you?

 

The writing on the wall #4 – the commodity game

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It seems that whatever the practice area, lawyers talk in hushed tones about their work becoming a commodity. Corporate law, employment law, technology law are among the areas where there is much gnashing of teeth and squeezing of margins.

Much of the debate focuses on whether to do the commoditized elements and if so how to do them profitably, but there is little discussion of what will replace that work at the high end. I suspect the implications of this will be felt in the not-too-distant future.

The writing’s on the wall #3 – resistance to change

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IMG_4954.JPGThere is no shortage of commentary about the need for law firms to change in what is the most significant transition in the profession in a lifetime. Theories from Darwin to Kotter are cited yet firms still struggle with the day to day reality of change.

Partners speak of their frustration that things don’t move fast enough and clients are increasingly outspoken about the growing gap between their expectations and the service delivery they receive.

So for your firm, what’s at the heart of the resistance to change, and critically what can you do to address it?

Excuse me, I think your pricing is broken

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I was pleased to read the post on 3 geeks about value billing as this is definitely a topic that needs exploring further, not least because I’m astonished by the number of law firm partners who continually tell me that it’s for clients to find a pricing model that works for the firm’s services.

Caroline the Finance Director had the new pricing model absolutely nailed

The common refrain from private practice lawyers (especially those who know how I feel about hourly rate billing) is that in-house lawyers who talk about value based billing really just want to pay less, and are not really interested in concepts like sharing risk. Opening a dialogue about pricing is simply an exercise in getting the law firm to do the same work for less money.

I my have missed the point, but of course they want to pay less!

The fact that the firm hasn’t developed a model that really meets their needs, or if they have the firm can’t communicate it in a compelling model does not turn this into the client’s problem. It’s the private practice lawyer’s problem. It’s the firm’s problem. It’s the profession’s problem.

The market has changed.

Forever.

Except for those highly differentiated firms that have unique or otherwise genuinely marketing leading skills and expertise, law firms are shifting to being price takers rather than price setters in the market. As barriers to entry in the legal market fall, and new models of legal service delivery emerge, clients have more choices about how they resource work:

  • Big firm, small firm?
  • Global firm or international network?
  • Insource, outsource?
  • Disaggregate, multisource?
  • Onshore, offshore, nearshore?
  • Automate?

Fewer and fewer GCs respond well to a conversation with a law firm that starts at a notional rate card, which of course is all great news if you’re a firm with some creativity and innovation.

To me, understanding value starts with a conversation with the client.

Too many firms assume that clients all want the same thing, but in my experience the range of client needs and expectations are almost infinitely variable.

Organisations of a similar size in the same vertical industry may look similar on the outside. They may have similar sized legal teams which do similar types of work. But actually the underlying businesses may have different operating models, different shareholder expectations, different objectives, different risk tolerances and of course different legal budgets. What they want from their internal and external lawyers may be very different, in fact it might vary significantly across the business.

There are a whole host of client needs that might emerge from a well structured conversation, implemented through some good questions.

The challenge for the law firm is then to define the service that would best meet those needs, identify the variables, work out what the cost implications of those variables are on the overall cost of service delivery and then stitch the whole thing together into a great value proposition at a compelling price.

Some of the variables might include turnaround times, the style of advice (who is the ultimate recipient – business person or in-house lawyer?), the  level of detail, different types of relationship management (dedicated team?) and the hours of operation/availability for the external lawyers.

Thinking about how these factors help the client’s business, as well as the needs of the inhouse legal team, can provide a deeper understanding of value – for example will a quicker response time allow a deal to be completed more quickly? If so, what does that mean for the business?

From this baseline understanding, the firm can get creative, but to do so also needs to ensure they really understand the cost and benefit to the firm of moving these “levers” (i.e. changing the variables).

Cost is often not simply the employee cost, but also may encompass opportunity cost or the cost of holding WIP for specific periods of time. The flip side is that the benefits to the firm can be broader than simply revenue – improved cash flow, client referenceability, employee retention (if the work is prestigious or interesting), replicability (the ability to reproduce the output for other clients at lower cost/higher margin) are all benefits that have value and can be quantified.

With all these factors to play with, plus of course the dynamic of genuinely sharing risk and reward with a client, I would be amazed if a firm couldn’t find a pricing mechanism that works for both the client and the firm. Once some pricing options (hint: that last word is a useful one in these conversations), the overall value proposition for the service offering can be pulled together and communicated. Law firm BD has become increasingly sophisticated, and there are plenty of skilled professionals who can ensure the resulting proposal is truly compelling and is tightly tied to the value it will deliver.

So I’ll grant you this – it’s more effort than simply negotiating percentage discounts on an hourly rate. It requires you to understand the client’s business in more depth, but also your own. But surely both of those are worthwhile steps in any event.

And if you do get a client who is genuinely not interested in this type of conversation (assuming you are not in the commodity market where the price genuinely will be just about lowest price), then maybe they’re not the right fit for your practice?

Or maybe you need to go back and tweak the model some more…..

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The legal market place – carnage or opportunity?

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When you look at the legal marketplace, what do you see?

With the implementation of the far reaching Legal Services Act finally happening in the UK (albeit with some fairly significant delays in related regulation), it seems the right time to step back and assess the state of the market.

Talking to people in the profession about this, from partners to in-house lawyers, business development directors to IT professionals, through to trainees and law students, one thing is clear.

There is no single opinion on the state of the market right now.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Opinions are strong and polarised.

Is the glass half empty or half full?

The world of pain

One group see the profession as an industry in decline.

Painful struggles with increasing firm overdrafts and personal debt are symptomatic of underlying structural problems with the profession, and the cash flow challenges facing many firms are just another indicator that it’s time to get out before the interest rates rise and bankruptcy looms large.

With lawyers at both small and large law firms working harder than ever, increasing competition from overseas firms and LPOs becoming more visible, and constant talk of a new wave of competition, does not fill them with hope that easier times are ahead.

Small firms worry about hyper efficient, large scale competitors with a resource base, national reach, consumer brand and technology platform  that they simply can’t match. Large firms worry about transactions being disaggregated and large chunks of profitable work being placed with legal service providers with a cheaper cost base. Mid-sized firms talk about being squeezed, with larger firms looking for work in new markets just to keep their associates busy while they weather the current economic storm, and about smaller, more agile firms  punching above their weight.

These people can often see the need for change, but despair of the pace of change in many law firms, pointing out that the culture and consensual nature of partnership often make decisions glacial when they need to be made at the speed of the digital world we now live in.

They look at the management of their firm, and question whether they have the right skills and experience to thrive in such a turbulent environment. Management themselves wonder how they can free themselves from operational fire-fighting to spend time focussing on the strategic questions that will define their firm’s future.

The lawyers lower down the pyramid see equity structures remaining in some firms that encourage low performing partners to sit back and coast, while the best talent works their asses off and often still finds it impossible to break into the club.

Below them are a generation of students who have made a huge financial and personal commitment to enter the profession, and are finding training contracts like gold dust. Those that are lucky enough to find work may be confronted by suggestions that the legal training system is in need of reform and is not equipping graduates with the skills they need to excel in the profession and exceed client and colleague’s expectation.

They may also be confronted with a linear career path, and find that if that’s one they are willing to follow, then the demands made by the firm are at odds with a generation Y philosophy that puts greater emphasis on work/life balance.

Those who see the world in these terms often point to clients showing less loyalty and who have ever increasing expectations in terms of service standards, yet in the same breath are looking to pay less for that service. A widespread rejection of the hourly rate billing model leaves many firms struggling to come up with a viable alternative and without the capability to re-engineer their business model to support these new fee structures.

The downward fee pressure squeezes profit margins further, and even after several rounds of morale-sapping restructurings and redundancies, with economic growth in the core western markets slow at best, there’s no end in sight.

Pretty grim huh?

Now those that know me know that I’m on balance, a pretty upbeat person, so let’s try and bring a bit of balance to the picture.

There are plenty of people out there in the profession who don’t think like that. Who see the current time of change as tremendously exciting. These are the people who see

A world of opportunity

First and foremost they see an incredibly profitable sector that has weathered an unprecedented recession and shown real resilience with relatively few high profile casualties.

They see businesses with the ability to offer a broad portfolio of services that add real value to clients at critical points in their lives or organisational existence. Many of these services are counter cyclical (helping manage difficult economic conditions) and many of which allow the lawyer to genuinely claim that coveted position of trusted advisor.

It’s not hard to point to law firms that have access to senior people at some of the best and biggest companies in the world and advise some of the most influential people who are shaping society.

For those in the UK, having a core competency in the English language and the common law system that underpins many other legal markets means firms are well placed to support global businesses and expand intro higher growth international markets (as indeed many UK firms have done very successfully).

While there would be an acknowledgement that the bar for client acquisition and retention is being constantly raised (particularly by increasingly sophisticated business development professionals and practices) this is raising standards in the profession and represents progress. There is still a huge opportunity to win by being ahead of this curve and setting the pace.

For those with one eye on the future, advocates of the profession will point out that the chance of a career offering not just the potential to earn big bucks, but one that can offer a lifetime of intellectual challenge and stimulation, will always attract its fair share of top talent, and that the training and development opportunities within law firms have improved massively over the last ten years.

Those who see opportunity see the ability to innovate as being a genuine source of competitive advantage, and are looking at technology, process and efficiency as ways of maintaining and indeed improving profitability in a fast changing market. The ability to change quickly is a key enabler, and they recruit the people with the ability to adapt and thrive to make this a reality.

They also see that market consolidation can offers opportunities. Low price acquisitions, the ability to pick and chose individual teams, to make strategic acquisitions of particular clients or relationships, and the clearing out of some of the noise in the market place.

Yes clients are demanding “more for less” but that’s a common refrain across all business these days – the change facing the profession is not unique and in  many other industries there are organisations that came out as big winners.

A somewhat simplistic categorisation, but I urge you to reflect – which messages resonate most, and critically, what are you going to do about it?

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What’s the end game?

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I was with a group of law firm partners from different City firms this week, listening to them discuss a case study about super-profitable US law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. Aside from their phenomenally successful business model and profitability (with the Amlaw100 reporting profit per partner of over $4m), one of the points that provoked most discussion was the idea that many of the partners would retire from the firm in their early forties.

Doris was overjoyed to hear she'd finally made partner

One response from the group was “that’s just coming into your lawyering prime”, which really got me thinking about careers in the legal profession, how they’re changing and ultimately what the end game is for many lawyers.

It used to be simple.

When I entered the profession in the mid/late nineties you joined a firm, did your training contract, hoped you’d get kept on, and if you did took your place on the conveyer belt. In the larger firms this often meant increasing specialisation and more often than not, increasing your hours.

In particular it was understood (albeit often unspoken) that the years between two and five years post-qualification were the proving ground. Where firms got to weed out those who were not suitable for partnership, and consequently lawyers were competing to prove they were up to the job.

This ethos, coupled with the leverage dynamic (with a smaller number of equity partners generating huge fees from supervising and managing junior lawyers) and chargeable hours model saw associates happily prepared to work all hours as they strived for partnership. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Every year their increased experience meant law firms could up their hourly chargeout rate, meaning in turn that as long as their chargeable hours stayed high, a nice chunky payrise was available, thus providing a short-term incentive for the associate to stay in the game.

Now this approach certainly had its faults, but it was largely understood and accepted and as a result it worked. Hell, early in my career I was certainly prepared to play by those rules.

But things have changed.

That model is breaking.

Firstly, the concept of work/life balance arose. Slowly, softly at first, it began to gnaw at some of the Generation Xers. Marriages came and went and at both points, people began to pause for reflection. Children brought matters into even sharper focus. None of these events were new, but society’s attitudes were changing and the legal profession was not immune from this.

With the emergence of Generation Y, the trend began to accelerate. I vividly recall a conversation with a managing partner of similar age to myself a couple of years ago, where he shared his frustration that many of his assistant solicitors wanted to leave work at 6pm. He understood this, but having put the hours in himself at that stage in his career, found this attitude difficult to reconcile with the drive and focus he expected from his young lawyers.

At the other end of the spectrum, change was also afoot. Many of those partners who had put in the hard yards and had been through the grinder were looking round and asking “is this it?”. Some had migrated into management as this was seen as the only upward progression, but either didn’t like it or weren’t suited with it. Others began to see the downside of their high levels of specialisation by craving a broader workload.

The model was also being tested by the market. A growing rejection of hourly rates, and more sophisticating procurement of legal services caused clients to question firstly whether hourly rates were suitable, and secondly, if they were, why they should be paying more for a particular resource than they paid a couple of months ago (simply because they had another year PQE and their rate went up) when the value delivered was exactly the same.

As the career model began to crack, the consequences began to emerge. Moves to in-house roles, into venture capital and private equity companies became more common, and law firms began to adapt by creating different career paths and non-partner senior roles such as “Of Counsel”, “Legal Director” and of course “Consultant”.

But with the structure of the profession fundamentally changing due to trends such as outsourcing, technology, commoditsation and globalization, is this enough?

While the supply of law students far outsrips demand, the answer I suspect is that the slow changes to the status quo will probably be sufficient in the short term, but ultimately as the profession reconfigures to meet the changing needs of the market, new and better career structures must emerge or I believe traditional law firms may begin to lose heavily in the global war for talent.

 

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The Joy Of Secs (secondments)

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I’ve been hanging out with a lot of in-house counsel recently, and one thing’s clear.

They love their secondees.

Really love them.

The working environment on secondment wasn't quite what senior corporate associate Sarah was expecting

Whether it’s a GC who is relying on a specialist skill set that he or she can’t quite find the budget to recruit, a mid-level corporate counsel who is working with a junior lawyer from private practice who helps with the “heavy lifting” on a big deal, or a small in-house team that find having a secondee gives them much broader access to their external law firm’s resources than their usual interaction – the sentiment is unanimous.

For law firms, secondments offer some incredible benefits too. Time and time again, clients point to knowledge of THEIR business as a critical factor in selecting their external lawyers. The insight secondees getting living and breathing in that environment can’t be gained from market research or reading up on the company. Plus, alongside the knowledge of how a client works, their culture, their pain points comes the opportunity to build broader and deeper relationships – not just with the in-house teams, but with their internal clients too.

Where a secondment programme has a rolling element (whether trainees or more experienced lawyers) and the firm puts in a continuous series of lawyers over time (for example a change every six months), this can build an incredibly strong connection over time between firm and corporate team and build a powerful competitive advantage for an incumbent law firm.

Outside of the particular secondment relationship, lawyers often return to private practice with a broader skill set and a better understanding of clients at a more general level, and are much better placed to empathise with the in-house community as a result. Plus in-house experience, even at a secondment level, really does does count when pitching for work with corporate counsel.

So it’s all sunshine and light?

Hell, let’s try and stick everyone on secondment and then we’ll never lose a client. Right?

Alas, it’s not quite that simple.

The major challenge law firms face is economics.

The basic premise of a secondment being that if a client has enough of the right type of work (generally consistent in terms of volume, skill and experience required), but not enough to make permanent recruitment an option, then taking a single lawyer on secondment will be cheaper than paying for that resource on an hourly rate basis. In return the law firm gets guaranteed utilisation of the lawyer, a degree of certainty of revenue and predictable cash flow.

But the world has changed. Because the competitive intensity in the legal market is increasing rapidly, and because firms have wised up to the broader benefits of secondments (set out above), the price that in-house teams have had to pay for a secondee has fallen rapidly.

As the economy tightened, putting secondees in “at cost” became more prevalent. At a superficial level, this again made sense – with firms restructuring and struggling to find work to keep all their lawyers busy (and therefore employed), farming them out to clients allowed them to retain their good people while keeping clients happy.

But in reality, often the exercise often ended up costing the firms more than they anticipated. Questions arose to what “at cost” actually meant. Was it salary cost (and if so did that include benefits, bonus etc)? What about a proportion of overheads (often asked as the finance director walked past the secondee’s empty desk in an expensive City location)? Who picked up the tab for the upgraded laptop that was required to get on the client’s network? What about the opportunity cost when another project turned up unexpectedly and the firm was struggling for a particular resource profile to do the work efficiently?

As the requests for secondments increased, difficult decisions had to be made – who can we say “no” to? If we say “no” will another panel firm put someone in? Is it an investment rather than a revenue stream, and if so, how do we calculate the return on that investment?

Competition for resource within firms, already fraught with politics in many cases, heightened.

The pressure on resources is made worse still when a secondee doesn’t return (not as sinister as it sounds!). Two common outcomes are that the secondee “goes native” and is simply recruited by the client. If the relationship with the law firm is financially material, the firm will have limited ability to negotiate any form of compensation, irrespective of terms in the engagement letter. The other alternative is that the secondee gets a taste for in-house life, and after returning to the law firm simply finds another job with a corporate legal team as quickly as possible.

Speaking from experience, while I had already decided that an in-house role  was probably the next move for me, three months I spent on secondment a year before I made that move did help to crystallise my thinking when the time was right to make the change.

Another challenge is for longer term secondments, how does the law firm effectively keep the connection with the secondee? I’ve seen this challenge at several levels – from the junior associate living out of a hotel for nine months, disconnected from her peers and far from her family, to the partner slowly becoming marginalised in the partnership and losing the emotional connection to the mothership.

Pros and cons.

Swings and roundabouts.

To my mind however the overall value equation is clear. If the engagement is structured well, the economics thought through and the fit between secondee skill set, personality and appetite with the in-house team’s culture and need is good, a secondment is a winner every time. The key is not to assume every secondment fits this model and to put the time in up front to get to a working relationship rather than to simply react and throw resource in at every opportunity that comes along.

Happy seconding.

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Why sorry is the hardest word

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I had a very interesting conversation with a colleague yesterday around a workshop he was facilitating for a fairly sizeable group of lawyers. As part of the discussion he asked the question “how many of you have ever been the subject of a client complaint”.

Our subsequent discussion centred around the fact that the solitary hand that was raised did not seem representative of the either the statistical probability of the number of complaints from the group (there was probably well over 150 years of cumulative PQE in the room) or the amount of unspoken discomfort in the room.

Adam readied himself to discuss his drafting mistake with the head of department

I’ve written before about why lawyers find it difficult to admit they are wrong (a training based on hiding weaknesses in your client’s arguments and exploiting your opponents, and a pathological fear of negligence claims), but the point I want to explore here is how much harder it is to deal with the consequences of a mistake, if you can’t admit it in the first place.

My starting point is that mistakes will happen. I don’t care how good you are as a lawyer or a law firm, while legal advice is predominantly a human activity (as opposed to automated or process based), the human factor remains fallible.

You, me, none of us are perfect.

Now of course you can minimise the risk of mistakes – quality checks, supervision, training, best practice etc, but at the moment I’ve yet to come across any law firm partner that can hand on heart tell me the firm has not made a single mistake in the past 12 months.

And as work becomes more complex and has to be done at ever increasing speed, the possibility of mistakes may well increase.

So mistakes are going to happen. The question is, how are you going to deal with them?

The majority of larger law firms and corporate legal departments have some type of relationship. Some are more transactional than others, but I’ll make an assumption that the mistake happens in the context of some type of broader relationship, not least because that’s when both parties are likely to care more about it.

My experience both in law firms and in-house tells me firms can deal with mistakes really well, or get it spectacularly wrong.

Let’s deal with some classic unhelpful responses ( Twitter would categorise these law firm #custservfails) first:

  • Refusing to the acknowledge the problem – “advising around it” – effectively providing remedial advice to sort out the problem before the consequences become significance (“I see your point, we’ll add some additional wording in here, just to clarify that”)
  • Blaming the client – implicitly or explicitly (“well, if they’d given us clearer instructions this never would have happened”)
  • Glossing over the problem (“lucky we caught that in an early draft”).
  • Sorting the problem out without any sign of good grace or contrition (“leave it with us”)

Perhaps my favourite example was a conversation I had with a law firm where I’d had a repeated breach of my company’s outside counsel policy (which explained among other things, who in the business could instruct external lawyers, and what involvement the legal department had to have with a matter). After the third clear breach since I drew the point to their attention, I asked for a meeting with the relationship partner to get to the bottom of the issue.

I have to admit to being amazed when the partner turned up with two of his peers from different departments, with a clear plan to try and turn the meeting into a cross-sell pitch. I was certainly expecting the “S-word”, but it wasn’t “sales”.

  • No apology.
  • No self-awareness.
  • No more instructions.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Several firms I worked with were very good at managing the occasional mishap.

One of the most telling signs was where the law firms brought a mistake to my attention, particularly as there was a chance the error might not have got noticed. For example, I’ve had that happen when there was no chance at all of me noticing, because the error arose as a result of a translation from Arabic (where the law firm had arranged the translation).

This builds a huge amount of confidence, and in every case where that has happened, the firm also presented an explanation of why the problem arose, and (critically) a plan to make sure it didn’t happen again. Viewed in this light, problems can be an opportunity to improve the service for the future, and build genuine trust with the relationship.

To me, as a client, that open dialogue is critical.

It works both ways too. Rather than bitch and moan about poor service (which can be more than a simple mistake, as it involves performance measured against expectations, which in some cases may not be explicit), I believe it’s in both parties’ interest for the client to raise the matter with a law firm, and to do so in a clear and specific manner which allows the firm to take action.

I’ve done that in situations where this has helped the law firm have difficult performance management discussions with under-performing staff and also improve processes that have benefitted multiple clients.

Now if this sounds like some sort of rose-tinted utopia, let me be clear – it’s not. Not all of these conversations are easy, (“Difficult conversations – how to discuss what matters most” is a great read by the way) and at times can be uncomfortable, but I do believe that putting in the effort beats the alternative for both parties – a dysfunctional relationship benefits no-one.

There are also times where the scale of the screw up is so monumental, that the relationship simply can’t be saved (for example the reputation damage to the law firm within the client business is so great that the in-house lawyer would lose the confidence of his or her clients by using the firm again), but those cases are few and far between.

In most cases, starting an open, honest and productive dialogue is the best way forward, and saying “sorry” might be a good place to start.

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Lawyers – Just. Do. Something.

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It seems like there was some sort of psychic alignment in the UK legal blogging community last week.

James took a break from his corporate finance practice and went down to the firm's somewhat impressive atrium to think about what was happening in his market

As the news came rolling in on changes facing the UK market (Neil Rose’s site Legal Futures is often a good place to start), the Entrepreneur Lawyer   Chrissie Lightfoot wrote a great post about the disruption and fear facing the profession. Julian Summerhayes then followed up with a thought provoking piece on the need to avoid apathy in client relationships.

All the time my mind was whirring with two related themes – massive change, and the need to do something.

The first message that I really (really) want to get across is that change in the profession is happening NOW. I mean right now.

Many of the lawyers who are waiting for the full implementation of the Legal Services Act with a “let’s just wait and see” attitude are either deliberately burying their heads in the sand, or are sleepwalking through a time of significant change, leading to both opportunities and threats.

Just look at the recent headlines:

Take a step back and take a fresh look.

This is change that’s happening right now.

It’s not round the corner.

It’s not things that might happen.

It’s happening.

Now.

The other point that’s really important to grasp, is that the change is affecting the whole profession. It’s not just a B2C issue, there is fundamental change going on all through the profession. From the sole practitioner whose livelihood is threatened by consumers being offered quicker, cheaper and easier solutions from competitors that didn’t exist three years ago, to the multi-million pound law firm facing disaggregation of the large scale projects that used to be the foundation of the partner’s seven figure salary. The change is real and far-reaching.

Finally, please trust me when I say that there is much, much more going on which is not public at the moment.

Since I left practice as a lawyer, I’ve been fortunate to be involved in the profession in a number of different roles, including consultant and LPO provider. Some of the conversations I’ve had with law firms, in-house teams and other consultants have shown me that there is some really forward thinking going on in the background, leading to business models being re-engineered and investment being secured.

So why are so many firms not doing anything?

Well, putting aside the difficulty many law firms have with change generally (which I’ve written about before), and some of the negative behaviours driven by the hourly rate billing model,  I think there are a number of other reasons why it’s not top of mind for every law firm partner.

The first is that there are more pressing short term challenges. Cash flow being one of them. The last two to three years (depending on the make up of your practice) has been incredibly tough, and amidst the restructurings and insolvencies, there are plenty of firms that quietly weathered the initial storm but  are finding things getting harder and harder as the road out of recession continues to be a slow one. Whether it’s cash flow, refinancing or opportunities for consolidation, short term survival is often the top priority.

Another reason is that it’s just plain difficult. The market is moving at a tremendous rate now, with new competitors, new technology and regulatory change coming in waves. Just keeping on track of the environment is tough enough, let alone analysing it and working out how to respond. Many firms don’t have strategy experience in-house (and there was a great article this week on how forcing strategy work on non-strategic thinkers doesn’t often work out) and I suspect many just don’t know where to start.

But whatever the reason, now is the time to act. The speed of business these days is too fast to wait and see.

Much has been written about the change in the product development world and the speed to market imperative (“fail fast”) – how it’s no longer realistic to test extensively to get a product perfect before launching.

The parallel I’d draw here is that now is not the time to assess the market to nth degree, and then craft a perfect strategy over the coming months, before pulling together a detailed project plan and implementing through the annual budget cycle. All of these steps may well have merit, but given how fast the market is moving, it’s more than likely that by the time you’re done, you’ll be too late. The opportunities (of which I believe there are many) will have passed, or the threats manifested.

So to wrap up, now’s the time to act. Block out an afternoon and at least do some thinking, or if you’re not at the thinking stage, some sensing to find out what’s happening in your market segments. Then take the lead and turn thinking and dialogue into action.

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