By Ed Wesemann, the Executive Director of Arter & Hadden LLP, a 500 attorney law firm with offices in Ohio, California, Texas and Washington, DC. He is a frequent author and speaker on a variety of legal management topics. This article is reprinted with permission from the Edge International web site.  Based in Savannah, Georgia, he can be reached at 912.598.2040 and wesemann@edge.ai.

Strategic planning has been the subject of universal acclaim but has been comparatively unsuccessful for law firms. The reason lies in 10 inescapable truths about law firm strategic planning.

It is difficult to find a law firm of any size that has not made some attempt at strategic planning. Indeed, most law firms have devoted hundreds of hours of partner time and thousands of dollars for consultants in strategic planning efforts. Yet, when viewed in the cold light of actual accomplishments, it seems that few firms would rate the strategic planning process as truly successful in accomplishing the firm's objectives.

Why has the process of strategic planning, which has been the subject of such universal acclaim been so comparatively unsuccessful in many law firms? I believe there are ten inescapable truths about law firms' approach to strategic planning that make the process harder and less rewarding than it should be.

1. Law firms often have trouble agreeing on their core business objectives. It sounds silly to say a law firm doesn't know why it is in business, yet many law firms struggle with this core issue. In any business the primary objective is to increase shareholder value. But when the shareholders all come to work at the business everyday, a whole new set of cultural values come into play which may or may not be compatible with profit objectives.

If a firm's culture espouses the willingness to do anything, including the subservience of all family and personal interests in the ruthless pursuit of profit, strategic planning is easy. It is equally easy if a firm places collegiality, professional standards and ethics, family and avocations as its foremost objectives, and profit, if any, is viewed as a pleasant by-product. Few, if any law firms are so polarized in their perspective. Instead, the objective of most firms is an acceptable mix of profit and culture. For some firms with a homogeneous partnership and a well established culture, this may not even be an issue. But for most firms, without coming to grips with this mix, it is virtually impossible to do any form of effective strategic planning.

2. Strategic planning is not a democratic process. Strategic planning is all about defining a vision and creating a road map to realize that vision. Vision is a function of leadership and, therefore, strategic planning is by its nature a top-down, management driven process. The leader (or a small group of leaders) of the organization, after seeking reasonable counsel and input from as many sources as possible, makes the critical decisions about what the organization wants to do and the basic strategies necessary to accomplish those objectives. Then the leader turns to his or her management team and says okay, how are we going to accomplish this.

Law firms turn this upside down. Most law firms aspire to be democratic inclusive organizations. They create large strategic planning committees, carefully designed to have a representative number of members from all offices, practice areas, genders, races and any other stratification they can conceive. It is usually a group so diverse in opinion and agenda that, by their make up, any plan on which they can achieve consensus will be either sufficiently vague to cover all view points or so fragmented as to be self-defeating. Can you picture Jack Walsh at General Electric putting together a strategic planning committee of engineers, production foremen, union representatives, and managers from every product line and asking them to determine GE's strategic objectives?

3. Mission statements are a waste of energy and enthusiasm. Without question mission statements have a value in strategic planning to the extent that they clarify the firm's objectives and values. But too many law firms spend dozens of committee hours trying to draft the definitive aspirational mission statement and, when they finish, publish the statement and think they have accomplished something. In most cases, what they have accomplished is to sap the energy and enthusiasm of the participants for the process with what turns into a meaningless exercise.

It would be far better for the group, or better yet, a couple of firm leaders, to spend half an hour picking five or six statements that represent the firm's core values and vision, especially as they deal with the issues of culture and those things they are not willing to sacrifice to achieve increased profits.

4. Strategies and tactics are confused. It is both the beauty and the curse of the lawyer mind that it constantly wants to identify the next action step. For this reason lawyers usually want to skip discussion of strategies and move immediately to tactics.

The strategic planning process is a disciplined way of thinking about planning which forces the planners to consider the optional means of achieving an objective. For example, early on in a strategic process it would not be unusual for some one to suggest that a good profitability strategy would be to open a Paris office. If a firm's strategy is to increase revenues from existing clients and their clients have significant interests in Europe, then a tactic might be to open a Paris office. But to immediately jump to opening an office without going through the process of clarifying the strategy often leads law firms down dangerous and expensive paths.

5. Planning involves precluding options. Lawyers, especially business lawyers, are in the business of maintaining options for their clients and they bring that mindset to the strategic planning process. But often the truest measure of the success of a plan's implementation is not what the firm does but what it decides not to do.

The simple logic is that any business has a finite amount of resources to bring to bear on their plan. Resources involve not only money but include management time available and sometimes even such abstract issues as the amount of change that partners can tolerate and the amount of political capital the firm's management has available to implement initiatives. To use those resources to take advantage of unforeseen opportunities means that, by definition, fewer resources are available to implement the plan.

Does that mean that the plan can never be changed to take advantage of opportunities? Of course not. But, the firm must recognize that diversions from the plan sap resources and, therefore, the benefit of the diversion must be weighed against the risk of not fully implementing the plan.

6. Too much planning effort is spent worrying about compensation. Law firms often spend more time debating who will get the spoils if the plan succeeds than implementing the plan. Indeed more than one firm has never gotten around to completing a plan because they got mired in compensation discussions. Appropriate incentives and rewards are important, but the purpose of a strategic plan is to increase the size of the whole pie, not worry about who gets what piece.

7. The obvious is often overlooked. Strategic plans often get so involved in sexy issues of new offices and exotic practice areas that they overlook obvious problems. The basic blocking and tackling of law firm profitability improvement is serving clients with good work, working hard, charging appropriate fees, watching costs, maintaining necessary leverage and all the other issues covered in Law Firm Management 101. The first step in any strategic planning process should be a self appraisal of how a firm is doing on the basics.

8. No one is accountable for implementing the plan. In order to implement a plan, managers need the authority to manage. Management involves getting people to do things that they don't do on their own and at some point in the implementation of a plan, managers need the authority to compel people to take action.

This means that partners must be accountable to a firm's managers and ultimately to their partners for taking the actions necessary to implement the plan. This is a tough concept for law firms because many partners view themselves as individual professionals whose only responsibility is to their clients. They believe that if the firm decides to do something they disagree with they can simply not participate. But accountability means that all members of the firm are responsible for implementing the plan. No one is allowed to opt out. It also means that if people do not meet the standards and actions required of them, there are consequences. If a law firm has problems getting partners to submit their time charges promptly or get their bills out, it should come as no surprise that the firm can't get a plan implemented.

9. Plans are too aggressive. Once bitten by the strategic planning bug, some firms attempt to implement so many diverse strategies that if every partner devoted their full time efforts to implementation for five years, the objectives could not be achieved. Aiming high is one thing, but a firm only has so many resources.

10. Objectives are not measurable. The test of a strategic plan's objectives is whether the firm can look at the plan a year or two later and determine whether they have accomplished anything. Unfortunately objectives such as improve the quality of our client base are meaningless if the firm doesn't define what represents a quality client and create a metric to measure comparative quality over time.

Having said all this, law firms are unique entities in which a corporate style of management, much less strategic planning may not be realistic. Law firms must operate in the environment of what is culturally and politically possible. But, to the extent that a firm can avoid even a few of these terrible truths, the likelihood of producing a plan that can be implemented will be tremendously enhanced.