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The Cultural Calculus of Competitive Advantage

By Eric Dewey
April 28, 2008

Strategic planning is a firm's process of defining its strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy, including its capital and human assets. It is the formal consideration of a firm's future course. All strategic planning deals with at least one of three key questions:

  • What do we do?
  • For whom do we do it?
  • How can we do more of it?

For most firms, the answer to this third question results in the decision to grow the firm geographically, through the development of niche practice areas, through industry focus, through practice specialization or through some combination of the above. Strategic options typically fall within two choices: Buy it or build it. Grow inorganically or grow organically. The emphasis in many firms is weighted toward buying growth (inorganic growth) through laterals, acquisitions and mergers, primarily because this growth path is quicker, more manageable and returns on the investment easier to substantiate.

Inorganic growth strategies accept the premise that clients benefit from a law firm's faster-than-market growth and bigger-than-average size, and in many respects they do. But in numerous ways, clients do not benefit from an expanding and increasingly complex law firm. In fact, one could argue that a lack of attention to organic growth initiatives in firms is at the heart of the disconnect many in-house counsel feel for their outside law firms.

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