Creating a Fast-Track Strategy Toward Your Preferred Future

Urgent and Important: your firm’s future is not waiting for you! It’s marching on, and you need to choose a sensible strategy to guide it. But you can’t wait until it’s convenient or comfortable — or worse, until the conditions are perfect — or it will simply never happen. In this context, procrastination can be lethal.

Strategy is all about focus and direction; often, it’s about what your firm does not want to do as much as what it would love to do. Without a strategy, even good law firm leaders find themselves steering around the icebergs without a clear destination, while more strategic competitors are striking out into the deep. So if a strategy can create a competitive advantage, why do so many firms wander around directionless? I believe that as lawyers, it’s precisely our intelligence and practice experience that get squarely in our way. Here are six examples of the lawyer-specific propensities that work against us when selecting our strategy — I’ll wager that more than one of these will resonate with you.