These ideas will work - you can use them to make you and your firm radically different from (and better than) many of the alternatives.
Organise around clients - rather than narrow, discipline-based silos, structure your firm around your clients and their interests. Concentrate on what clients want rather than what you have to sell. Know as much about your clients, and their needs, as you do about your professional discipline.
Invest in clients - use research tools (surveys, interviews, focus groups, etcetera) and allocate resources to communication to acquire, retain, and grow clients. If you can afford only one marketing activity this year, do some quality research.
Upskill your people's client contact capabilities as a high priority.
Measure what really matters - develop metrics for the behaviours which drive business development - don't confine measurement to fees and billable hours.
Recognise the reality of client control in many market segments - quite apart from radical changes to the supply and demand balance in some areas (e.g. personal injury) tune in to increasingly sophisticated consumers who define and manage lawyers’ work in many segments. If your clients are experienced consumers of expert professional services, chances are they'll want a high degree of control over exactly what is done for them, and how.
Don't be prisoner to precedent - just because you've done it in a particular way in the past, don't assume that's the way it should be for the future. We often succeed in spite - rather than because - of what we did.
Open possibilities with fresh ways of doing things. Help clients avoid the financial and psychological costs of litigation by embracing new and better models for dispute resolution.
These simple ideas may be radical to some - even threatening. But if you can opportunistically embrace this radicalism, you'll put yourself ahead of most of the rest.
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