Keeping Your Practice Up-to-Date
An initial question is why an attorney or law firm should prepare for the future of his, her or its practice. This article, in large measure, is premised on the notion that at least some lawyers will consider planning in order to maintain, improve or prevent a serious reduction in the profitability of their legal practices. Certainly, there may be other reasons an attorney should plan for his or her future practice such as being able to obtain or maintain intellectual or personal (emotional) satisfaction (for example, “standing in the community”) from rendering legal services. In some cases, profitability and these other non-financial “rewards” a lawyer obtains in practicing law will conflict. However, even for those whose principal purposes in practicing law include non-financial reasons, preparation for the future likely will be necessary to allow those purposes to be achieved.
Preparing for a legal practice to be sustained over the next few years includes, of course, forecasting the future, which usually is difficult to do. However, many businesses, whether publicly or privately owned, do so. They do that to try to maintain or improve profitability. Non-profit organizations also plan. Although not-for-profit entities do not seek to achieve profits in the sense of financially rewarding their owners as for-profit businesses do, their goals almost always involve sound financial resources and, in that sense, must be profit motivated which suggests attention to planning. In any case, business forecasting, whether of a for-profit or non-profit entity, involves many aspects from anticipating demand from customers in the marketplace in which the business operates to determining the needs to operate the business (such a “working capital” and employees), among many other factors. It seems likely that those businesses that plan are more likely to succeed (that is, have greater profits or smaller losses) than those that do not plan.
Winston Churchill once remarked, “The farther back one can look the better able to see the future.” We will look back to about 1970 to attempt to forecast anticipated changes in legal practice up to around 2020.