A successful journey requires a detailed road map: one firm's path to a strategic plan.

A decade ago, when I was first elected to our firm's board of directors, our ranks held around 50 attorneys housed mainly in a single office in our state's capital, with a branch office in the western part of the state. As of my recent departure from the presidency of the firm to resume my commercial real estate and finance practice full-time, we had increased our size by 50 percent and now practice law from five offices spanning two states.

While many might ascribe this success to the person or team who held the reins of management, my belief is it was due almost solely to our rigorous commitment to strategic planning. One of my favorite maxims is "Chance favors the prepared." Even instances of fortuitous circumstance were compared to the goals of the existing plan before we would respond. The rewards of this discipline are self-evident.

Size Doesn't Matter

Whether a firm is a small geographic practice in a specialized niche of the law or a wide-spread enterprise with hundreds of attorneys, strategic planning makes remarkable sense. Its power lies not just in the words that end up on the document. Strategic planning, when done thoughtfully and thoroughly, will:

* Disclose whether a firm is simply a group of individual practitioners or a cohesive team sustainable to future generations;

* Establish criteria that aid in evaluating future opportunities for growth;

* Require partners to define the economic limits of their practices and expectations for each other and the group;

* Force decisions about difficult economic realities, unproductive lawyers and declining practices;

* Create priorities for investing in human, financial and technological resources;

* Avoid the need for frequent internal sales efforts to induce owners' consent; and

* Enable firm leadership to think of longer-term trends, opportunities, threats and issues otherwise lost in the daily rush of business.

Our corporate clients have a well-known appreciation and deep respect for the technique. However, some myths persist among lawyers and law firms. I've heard it dismissed as unimportant compared to "old-fashioned client development," as a distraction from billable hours, as only aspirational, to be tucked into the bookshelf and forgotten.

This has not been our experience. Not only has strategic planning given us a specific route to follow and increased our productivity in recruiting and client development, but it has effectively expanded our billings and inspired our leadership to seek nicely focused practice niches where opportunities and rates can be maximized. To be sure, we can't say we've "arrived" at the end of the road, but we can look back and be proud that we haven't been led astray often.

Self Analysis Must Be Fearless

In the several iterations of our strategic planning (we are implementing our just-completed, third formal plan over the next few years), one of the hardest parts of the process is an unflinching look at the firm's capabilities, capacities and culture. Two components have been important to our success at this stage: a carefully chosen strategic planning task force and a commitment to full involvement of our owners' diverse views. Upon appointing the planning group, selected by the board to contain a balance of practice depth, partner seniority and strategic talent, we always conduct an all-partner survey. This concentrates on identifying individual views on strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Responses direct the strategic planning task force's deliberations, research and discussions.

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This process may be consultant-directed or not. If a consultant isn't desired, a firm needs a strong and motivated force to drive the process. This might be either an individual or small group, such as a managing partner or executive committee. One thing is guaranteed with any strategic planning process inside a law firm, if our experience is any gauge: Eventually, and sooner rather than later, the process will bog down as it is overwhelmed by the press of matters, operations and client development. Having one influential person or a cohesive handful of committed owners to stoke the fire will help make these slow periods short-lived.

Planning Begets Planning

A comprehensive strategic plan sets goals that broadly state what the firm is and wants to be, the type of clients to target, the practices and geographies to grow, the people and work to be welcomed into the firm and how profitable the firm wants that work to be. Take care that these four or five overall goals are not incompatible. Developing a mission statement is a useful management tool, but it is not a replacement for a strategic plan, so don't let it hang up the process.

Chance favors the prepared.

The plan should include strategies to reach these goals in a companion document and the task force should certainly devise these. However, the tactical execution is largely in the practice groups (the way we are organized because of an earlier strategic plan), or at the attorney team level, with some guidance and motivation from the management team. So, once the strategic plan is prepared and has the buy-in of the owners, these tactics to accomplish the plan primarily become the planning responsibility of the groups. Most of our tactics responsive to the strategic plan were hashed out at practice group "mini-retreats," within a couple of months of the plan's roll out.

Over time, strategies may need adjustment, but the overall goals remain fixed. They become the measure against which all further strategies, tactics and ideas are evaluated. If the strategic planning process gets the right amount of gravity, substantive focus and high-level thinking, it will be worth its weight in gold. While success might be measured by riches or range or client roster, our experience demonstrates getting there is immensely more likely to occur with the steady sense of direction provided by the definitive road map called a strategic plan.

C. Thomas Ebel is former president of Sands Anderson Marks & Miller, a mid-sized law firm serving the mid-Atlantic region from offices in Virginia and North Carolina. He can be reached at [e-mail] or 804/783-7202.