Intelligent Office UK: Post-pandemic operations strategy for mid-market UK law firms

The start of the calendar year is traditionally when leadership teams in law firms turn their attention to budgets, analyzing current performance and practice area trends to build business plans. Extrapolation of past performance over 2-3 years often provides the foundation of that analysis. From a strategy and planning perspective, 2021 marks something new. Trend analysis is not the guide it was and decision makers are trying to balance negative short term economic and pandemic news flow with forecasts of strong economic growth overall in 2021.

Intelligent Office works with many law firm clients to deliver new operational strategy. We find there is no substitute for detailed evaluation of client-specific factors, however using financial data collected from those firms by The Lawyer, and adding our own research and benchmarks, we have set out some major differences in profitability, structures and strategies between those firms based primarily in London to those based primarily out of London.

In our report we explore

• Why scale matters, particularly for regional law firms
• Whether RPL is a barometer law firms’ profitability
• Why over-focusing on real estate costs in the short term might be a barrier to growth
• The key operational initiatives that if delivered successfully can support greater fee earner productivity and reduction in overheads

Use this link: https://intelligentofficeuk.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/IO_Path-to-Recovery_Operations-Strategy-Report_2021.pdf