All three are critical to a law firm’s success but never more so than now.
Change
Law firms need to get comfortable with massive iteration and the occasional failure. There is no ideal model for running a law firm but don’t make choices and decisions by looking in your rear view mirror.
Firms need to work more closely with their talent pool, look carefully at the infrastructure, and manage or sweat the facilities to bring about the greatest and most sustainable amount of change.
Urgency
There isn’t enough of it.
Previously, firms had to develop a sense of urgency to deal with the stark economic conditions but now is not the time to take things easy.
Leadership
It is, in many ways, an oxymoron, particularly if you are still part of a general practitioner mindset where the partners manage and are lead by their own intuition. There must be a greater sense of cohesion, collaboration and cross-functional Excellence and that requires leadership by the truck load.
Of course the rent, salaries and suppliers still need to be paid and for a lot of firms they will struggle to see the wood for the trees when it comes to a focused path towards greater revenue and a more sustainable business model. But I guarantee that taking any one of these and driving it forward with all your might, effort and boundless passion will open up endless, (profitable) opportunities. Don’t try to go it alone though: speak to your staff and see how you can get 100% buy in because absent that you will be pushing water uphill. And that is perfectly understandable. Who likes change after all. But without a much greater focus and intensity it could well be that quite a number of firms simply do not survive or become amalgamated into some other amorphous (corporate) blob.
My motto would be: Just do it.
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