Businesses of all shapes and sizes often spend time at the end of each year developing, reviewing and/or updating their mission statement, strategic plan and operational plan. Many attorneys still view their law firm as a professional practice and not as a business, and thus they do not use these particular business planning tools – unfortunately, to the firm’s detriment.
One particularly valuable aspect of this type of year-end planning is the overall vision that can result. Businesses and law firms that have a mission statement, a strategic plan and an operational plan usually have a clear direction in which they are heading. I refer to this business direction as the business "vision." These law firms or businesses have a vision of whom and what they are, and where they are going. Most importantly, the employees share and understand this vision.
Regardless of your firm’s size and whether you develop a formal strategic plan and operational plan year to year, it is valuable to know who you are as a business and where you are going in the long term. Simply put, a shared vision is valuable to your firm’s operation.
Over the years, I have visited a number of firms where workloads were well beyond expectations, the retirement plan was never fully implemented, and/or the clientele were not ideal. The firm’s attorneys will tell me that their law practice was not what they expected it to be. They had imagined that their law practice would be something other than what it turned out to be.
Usually I observe that the attorneys in such situations were not actively managing their law practice, and instead merely were reacting to the events that can shape a law practice. If you want to reach your desired goal (or goals) you must have a plan, even if it is an informal plan. Otherwise, your law practice lacks a shared vision, and essentially is growing without direction.
My point is not to tell you that you must develop a formal mission statement or establish a management committee charged with strategic planning for the firm. Rather, I want to urge you to create a business vision to enable everyone in your law practice to see and understand where the practice is going. Without this "road map" no one is able to see where the practice is going, and in the end the practice never reaches your goals.
If your firm doesn’t have a shared sense of vision, take the time to develop one. Define what and where you want your practice to be in 10 and 20 years. What type of clients do you want? How many hours a month do you want to work? Where do you hope to be financially? There are no set items that must be considered in this process. Instead, you just need to define what and where your firm should be after a certain number of years. The real value of creating such a vision is that it enables your firm to plan toward achieving that vision. Once you know where you want to go, developing the road map is much easier.
Let’s say that your firm’s vision includes a need to reduce workloads, in order to regain a balance between professional and personal lives. Your firm could choose to stop taking in new matters until caseloads reduce to the desired number. Of course, this strategy has some negative features. One possible negative is that more prospective clients will seek your firm’s services because they see that your firm’s clients are willing to wait in order to be accepted as a firm client. But I think we would agree that such a "problem" really isn’t a problem at all. Your firm now is able to be more selective in choosing clients, because the pool of prospective clients now is larger. This is one way that risk can be reduced through vision.
Also, consider the "problem client." These clients tend to occupy more of your professional time (and sometimes even personal time) than other clients. Problem clients also tend to occupy excessive staff time and often create fee collection problems. I have heard some attorneys observe that problem clients create 80 percent of their stress and take 80 percent of their time, but generate less than 20 percent of their income. Viewed in this light, problem clients are not worth the effort that they require. If you can significantly reduce your stress and time load simply by no longer working for problem clients, your loss of income, reduction in stress and newfound time is well worth your efforts. The highlight of this strategy is that your newfound time can be used for personal time, or for seeking better clients who can pay and are not a problem.
These two examples show how developing a vision can clarify where your firm’s practice is going. Without a firm vision, you will find that controlling and planning your firm’s future is very difficult. The best part is that creating and implementing that vision is relatively simple. Start by asking where the firm is today. What does the ideal client look like? How many hours do we wish to work in an average week or month? What is the ideal caseload? You can finalize your firm vision with where you wish to be in 5, 10 or even 20 years. From that point, you determine how to reach those milestones.
In the end, creating and implementing a firm vision can reduce your firm’s risk of a malpractice claim. Your firm and its employees can have greater control over the firm’s daily operation. Professional decision-making can be improved because personal satisfaction is higher. Of course, I can’t guarantee this result. However, I have talked with a number of attorneys who have developed a business vision, and every single one has said that it made a huge difference for them and their law practice.
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