In Brief: On Management How Do You Practice Strategy?

Management in law firms often struggle with the implementation of agreed strategies. After an elaborate review that led to a much celebrated declaration of the firm’s future direction, the demands of everyday business on most professionals put the new strategies on the backburner. It is back to business as usual.

Arguably the most successful approach to aligning a business’s activities to its strategy and vision is the Balanced Scorecard (BSC), developed by Robert Kaplan and David Norton in the 1990’s. More than 75% of multinational businesses are said to be employing the BSC in some form. The large auditing and accounting firms were among the first PSFs in the late 90’s to employ the BSC; a good number of law firms followed since then and a number of learnings can be derived from their experience.