How to Create a Winning Legal Strategy

Your legal strategy is essentially your firm’s guidepost. It’s the document that details your goals, plan of action, and measurements for success. Think of it like a mission statement, with all the steps needed to keep you on track.

But is putting forth the effort to create a strong legal strategy worth it? According to some, it certainly is.

“When handling legal cases, it is helpful to follow a steady and straightforward process from the outset,” says Aaron Silvers, personal injury lawyer at Schilling & Silvers. “One of the most effective ways to stay on track is to gather all the essential documents as early as possible. This includes medical records, reports, photographs, and any other relevant paperwork that documents the events. Gathering everything together at the start provides a stronger foundation for the case and helps avoid problems later.”

If completed correctly, your legal strategy will always be there to guide you to a successful case outcome. It can help you identify and mitigate risk, assign the right resources in the right places, and make sure the entire firm is aligned toward its collective mission.

Legal strategies can take many forms. Advanced legal strategies for corporate lawyers can look a lot different than, say, a small, local firm that specializes in medical malpractice. But while individual case law strategy can vary widely from firm to firm, the broad strokes of creating a legal strategy are somewhat universal. A good legal strategy can provide guidance for, but isn’t limited to: 

• Overall direction for the firm or team
• Performance measurement
• Risk management
• Resource management
• Ensuring goals and strategies remain in alignment

Here are a few steps to follow, including how to stay on task, what tech to incorporate, and how to know if your strategy is working.

1. Decide on a Legal Strategy Framework 

The first thing you need to do is decide how to create your legal strategy. A strategy for your strategy, if you will. This step is essentially deciding on parameters for your strategy creation, so that you aren’t just throwing ideas at the wall without direction. There are a number of tried-and-true strategic business frameworks you can adapt to legal strategy, but here are some of the most popular:

• Porter’s 5 Forces helps a business determine its place among competitors and develop strategies to nail down a unique position.
• Blue Ocean Strategy outlines strategies to create your own space in an overcrowded market.
• The Five Pathways of Corporate Legal Strategy include avoidance, compliance, prevention, value, and transformation. By using them together, you can think about the law strategically and identify value-creating opportunities.

2. Choose Your Legal Strategy Team  

Just as you assign specific teams to each individual case, you should choose a dedicated team to focus on completing your legal strategy. Others can, and should, have input on law firm strategic planning, but this team will be the people who are dedicated to getting things done. From overall strategy to next steps to actual implementation, set clear goals and responsibilities for each team member regarding the creation of your plan.

This team shouldn’t be limited to leadership or “big thinkers.” Project managers, finance specialists, and others who understand day-to-day operations (even if they didn’t go to law school) can provide valuable insight, and even run the project from a certain standpoint.

3. Host a Strategy Session

This is where the real work begins. With a strong strategy framework in place, you can now assemble your principals and start talking strategy. Many of the items on this list can be checked off in your strategy session (or sessions) simply by having in-depth conversations about your goals and how to complete them. 

Here are a few ways to get the most out of your strategy sessions:

• Have an agenda. Strategy sessions can be freewheeling conversations, and they often should be. Creating an agenda before every legal strategy session lets everyone know what you’re striving for in the meeting and can help keep the conversation from careening off the rails.
• Record your meeting. By recording the audio of your meeting, you create a living record of events and you free someone up from having to take comprehensive notes. This means that you both save potentially billable hours for something more important, and let everyone in the meeting engage in the conversation.
• Transcribe your audio. Recording your strategy session is a must, but combing through those recordings can be cumbersome. Having your audio transcribed by a reliable transcription service, you can instantly create a scannable, shareable text document that can act as your official meeting minutes.
• Use an AI assistant. Your AI assistant can complete all of these tasks automatically, as well as send invitations, schedule subsequent sessions, and offer summaries and highlights of the conversation. 

4. Assess Your Current Status

The only way to get where you want to go is to assess where you’ve been and where you are currently. If done correctly,  at the end of the assessment, you should know exactly where you are today. Look at items like:

• Current scope of services
• Current caseload/available manpower
• Gaps in current service offerings
• Areas of expertise vs. incoming casework 
• Budgets and KPIs
• Billable hours against nonbillable hours
• Staffing needs/workloads
• Talent acquisition

You can also use tools like Porter’s Five Forces to analyze your place in the industry compared to your competitors. Every firm will have its own “where are they now” criteria, but before a law firm’s strategic planning session can begin, you need to establish this baseline. 

5. Align on Your Goals

This is another step that can be accomplished in a strategy session, and while it should go without saying, it’s vitally important to make sure everyone in the firm or on the in-house legal team is on the same page with the overall direction. 

What, specifically, are you trying to accomplish at the firm in general, and how will this legal strategy help reach those goals? Drilling down a little bit, does the firm’s overall agenda match up with each individual client’s goals? By knowing those goals, you can adjust your legal strategy to realize them, and hone them for each specific case’s strategy and each client’s best outcome.

6. Analyze Your Strengths and Weaknesses

Conducting an analysis of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) is commonplace in many industries, especially before creating any strategy that will impact ongoing operations or success rates, and a SWOT analysis can certainly inform your legal strategy. 

A SWOT analysis can be as formal or as informal as you want; you can do it via a strategy session, a company-wide survey, or by smaller, case-specific strategy sessions. The idea is to form a 4-quadrant matrix with lists of items in the four categories. If many people are involved in the SWOT analysis, the items placed in these quadrants can be whittled down to the ones that appear the most often.

Here is a rough breakdown of the four quadrants:

• Strengths. Things your firm or team does well, services that are the most profitable, cases that your team tends to consistently win, internal items that are successful like culture, etc.
• Weaknesses. Places you’ve failed or need to improve upon. Overworked or stressed staff, missed deadlines, lost cases, or overdue bills.
• Opportunities. Ways your firm can grow, expand services, be more profitable, and achieve strategic goals.
• Threats. Things that can prevent you from reaching your goals. Perhaps a new firm is poaching clients, or there are new regulatory challenges. For example, if your firm deals with tax law, how would a new tax code impact the firm and its clients?

Your SWOT matrix is a good visual representation of what your legal strategy needs to do. You can ensure it leans into the stuff you do well while fixing the areas where you might need improvement. 

7. Solicit Outside Input

There’s certainly a point where “too many cooks” can hinder the creation of a strategy for your legal team, but you also need input from people outside of the strategic planning team, and possibly the entire organization. 

A junior project manager might have the fresh insights that the planning team is missing, or a legal investigator might see things others don’t. Stretching beyond leadership and the C-suite can result in fresh outlooks. 

You can solicit input from clients, outside counsel, and anyone who might have a different take that the legal strategy team might have missed. That’s not to say that you have to take every piece of intel as gospel, but it can be very informative to get wide-ranging views of your strategy and the issues you are trying to solve. 

There are a few ways you can solicit input from outside of the core team. If you want input from a small roster of people, you can invite them to a strategic planning session, or even to an informal in-person conversation. For more control over the answers or a larger roster, you can create a survey with closed-ended questions and send it digitally.

Whether it’s transcribed meetings or digital surveys, the data can be analyzed and used to inform your strategy.

8. Set a Budget

The bottom line is that the bottom line, in the end, is all that matters. Part of any legal strategy is determining how to be and stay profitable, and that effort should start with the strategy itself. There are only so many hours to go around in the workday, and certain projects or cases can be major timesucks if they’re not managed properly. 

Treat your strategic legal plan like you would any other project; set a budget that includes both time and money spent. If your billable hours on a case are spiraling out of control, step in and make the needed changes. Do the same when creating an internal strategy document. It’s the best way to stay efficient as a team.

9. Set a Deadline

When workloads get heavy, internal projects and smaller cases are the first projects to fall by the wayside. You can avoid this by setting hard deadlines and benchmarks and sticking to them. Again, treating every project like it’s billable work—even when it’s not—is the best way to get it done on time and within budget.

If deadlines get blown, examine why they were missed and how to get back on track so you don’t miss the next one. This exercise can also inform part of your legal case strategy as it’ll teach you how to efficiently solve problems.

10. Choose a Format

Once you have a draft of your plan created, it needs to be presented in a manageable and easily editable format. Using a templated document like the ones offered by Cascade or Rev can make a long, involved document easily absorbable while keeping every page consistent in format. It can also help people outside the industry, like clients and investors, understand your strategy by using less jargon and more easily understandable language.

Creating a layout from scratch often requires a graphic designer and many billable hours, so using a ready-to-go template designed for legal strategy is a much more efficient way to go.

11. Don’t Forget to Integrate Tech

Incorporating tech platforms into your day-to-day at the firm isn’t anything new; if you use case management platforms, transcription for investigations, or AI tools for tracking and organizing digital evidence, you’re already well-versed in using tech for legal matters. But don’t forget that tech can help you when creating your case strategy. 

You don’t need legal technology consultants​ to tell you that AI and other tech platforms can make this whole process easier. Here are a few platforms that can help streamline the process:

• Transcription platforms
  
  • An all-encompassing legal transcription platform like Rev can make many parts of your strategic planning more efficient. In the same way that transcription for depositions can turn hours of audio into easily usable text documents, it can also capture every conversation about your legal strategy and turn it into sortable, searchable data in minutes, saving hours of legwork. Rev also provides customizable templates that make your transcription even easier to use cross-functionally.
• Project management tools
  
  • Chances are, you’re already using case management platforms like Clio, so incorporate those tools into your strategy tasks. The project management aspect alone can keep everyone assigned to the job on task and accountable by setting clear deadlines and next steps. “We rely on our case-management platform to tag and search documents. It’s faster than digging through paper,” according to Adam Dayan, immigration attorney and founder of Consumer Law Group, LLC.
• AI assistants
  
  • A good AI assistant (like Rev’s!) can do everything a human assistant can do, but much more efficiently. It can schedule meetings, summarize those meetings, create next steps, schedule follow-ups, and even write agendas. Though there have been some hesitations regarding the use of AI in stenography and other legal situations, with a reliable AI platform that values security, AI is perfectly trustworthy and can make your legal strategy creation much easier.

12. Keep Your Plan Updated

Times change, plans change, and available tools and resources change. The strategy you create today might not be fully applicable tomorrow, so it’s vital to periodically review your strategy to see where it falls down and where tweaks can be made.

Before your plan is complete, set hard check-in dates for review. Start at six months post-completion and then annually after you make any necessary updates. 

When reviewing, gather the same strategy team that worked on the project initially, for consistency. Review any processes you installed to ensure that they’re still working. Look at progress toward your set goals, KPIs, and any other measurements that you put in place. Then, make any necessary changes to your plan to help keep your team productive and efficient. 

How to Analyze the ROI of Your Legal Strategy

Creating your legal strategy is important, but finding out if it’s working is even more important. Are you getting a return on your investment? 

At your six-month check-in, examine a few key metrics:

• Cost per case pre-strategy and post-strategy
• Number of case successes pre- and post-strategy
• Client satisfaction
• Overall business growth
• Firm or company profitability 

Your specific ROI is based on the goals you set before creating your strategy, but in the end, it comes down to profitability and client satisfaction. If those numbers aren’t improving since the implementation of your plan, it might be time to refine.

This is another area where AI software can help. If you’re using a firm-wide case management platform, you already have available AI-based tools that can analyse every aspect of your business to see if you’re hitting your KPIs.

Legal Strategy Examples, Templates, and Resources

Diving headfirst into a legal strategy can be daunting, but luckily, there are plenty of resources out there to help.

• Cascade’s legal strategy templates are great starting points when creating your strategy, but also perfect for presentation purposes. 
• Duke Law Journal published an in-depth, persuasive paper about why legal strategy matters.
• SSRN has broken down the impact of legal strategy in a peer-reviewed study.
• Quantitative offers a comprehensive list of strategic frameworks that can be adapted for legal use.

Rev Makes Legal Strategy Efficient and Effective

Whether you’re creating a legal strategy from scratch or updating your existing one, Rev can help. With the most accurate transcription in the industry, you can trust that every important idea and question will be properly documented. And our PCI- and HIPAA-compliant, SOC2-audited services are safe and secure, so you don’t have to worry about your data leaking. 

Add in the Rev AI assistant that can automatically take notes, record, and transcribe every session, and part of your strategy will include wondering why Rev wasn’t involved a long time ago!

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