THE AUTHORS:
Cécile Roche, Consultant and Head of MCBD Services
Jon Passaro, Executive and Team Coach at Jonathan Passaro Coaching
Many major international law firms require lawyers to draft a business plan as part of the partnership process. However, accompanying lawyers each day as a marketing expert (Cécile) and an executive coach (Jon), has taught us that lawyers should draft their first business plan as early as possible in their careers. Whether you are a young associate starting out in a boutique, a senior partner at a major international law firm or somewhere in between, here is why a business plan is central to building a successful legal career from the ground up.
What is a Business Plan?
The words “business plan” make many lawyers nervous; we have seen it with our own eyes. But worry not: you don’t need an MBA to be able to draft one, and in fact the most effective business plans are relatively simple.
Think of a business plan as your career GPS. It’s a document that tells you where you are going and how you plan on getting there. A good business plan informs your day-to-day choices at work, by helping you to identify opportunities that will bring you closer to your goals, and objectively measure your progress as you work towards them. As a result, it helps you to make decisions about how to allocate your time and energy, including by seeing out certain opportunities and, when possible, saying “no” to work that will not further your career objectives.
A good business plan has a few key components (we’ll go into more detail in a forthcoming article):
- a clear objective;
- a series of milestones that lead towards that objective; and
- a breakdown of these milestones into smaller units, so that you can easily assess your progress on a monthly, quarterly or semesterly basis.
In other words, as long as you have a document that clearly states your objective, and how you will get there, then you have done your job.
But is this really necessary? Haven’t you been getting along just fine without a business plan? Read on.
Clarify Your Goals
The first virtue of the business plan is that it helps you to clarify your career objectives. Where do you want to be in five or ten years? How specific can you be?
Our clients are often surprised that professional goals that seemed clear in their heads needed refinement once they started putting pen to paper. Others realise that they aren’t as excited about where they thought they wanted to go once they see it in black-and-white. Still others realise that it makes sense, for a variety of practical reasons, to alter their objectives slightly once they take the time to think in detail about what exactly they need to do to get there.
The bottom line: forcing yourself to write out your career objectives in a few sentences can be revelatory in itself, and spur important thinking about what it is you truly want out of your legal career.
Set Your Roadmap
As we mentioned above, the key functionality of a business plan is to help you figure out how to attain your professional goals, and to minimise detours as you advance towards those objectives. As with your overarching objective, the pathway there might seem clear in your head but prove muddled once you try to put it in writing.
Drafting a business plan helps you give shape to those abstract thoughts about what you “should” be doing, and to develop more precise targets (“I should do more networking” can become something like “I shall have at least one lunch per week with a senior colleague” or “I shall develop five new solid relationships with lawyers in the MENA region per year”); it also helps you to see how everything fits together.
This holistic view can help you to identify opportunities to capitalise on synergies across different milestones in your business plan, for example by seeking out conferences in locations where you can most easily further your networking strategy, or going after work that will allow you to develop core lawyering skills while simultaneously acquiring expertise in an industry that is key to your strategy.
Conversely, writing a business plan could help you to refine your objectives in order to take advantage of opportunities you notice for additional synergies: for example, you might notice an opportunity to develop some regional expertise based on industries you are particularly interested in serving, or vice-versa.
Reality Check
Once you have your business plan fully drafted — and again, it doesn’t have to be incredibly elaborate — you can take some time to assess whether your overarching goal and your individual milestones are attainable. Some key questions you might want to ask yourself are:
- are the actions you listed in your roadmap specific enough to be measured?
- are your goals achievable in the context of your current job?
- how will potential shifts in the legal market impact your trajectory?
- how will potential shifts in the industries of your key clients impact your trajectory?
- what regulatory actions are on the horizon that you need to take into account?
- how well matched is your roadmap with your working style and personality?
- have you set yourself some deadlines?
In other words: do a reality check.
You may want to enlist the help of others to assist with this task, as they will be more objective, bring additional perspectives to the table, and ask questions that never crossed your mind. They might also have additional knowledge and insights that could assist with your analysis. Trusted colleagues are a good place to start; peers who are not direct co-workers are another potential source of perspective (just make sure you scrub any references to clients before sharing it outside of your firm). Critiquing other people’s business plans is a great way for you to sharpen your approach and gain inspiration from those around you.
Once you are confident that you have a workable plan, consider sharing it with the senior lawyers on your team. This can help lawyers higher up in the hierarchy to do a better job of assigning work or proposing secondments that are in line with your interests. Crucially, they will also likely have key insights that can help you to further refine your business plan.
Hold Yourself Accountable
Now you have a business plan that you have drafted, refined, and stress-tested with yourself and some trusted lawyers around you. Time to pat yourself on the back and file it away, right? Wrong!
You should consult your business plan on a regular basis as a way to remind yourself of your priorities and to assess your progress against your milestones. When you are about halfway through the year, are you about halfway to your milestones for that year? If not, were your goals too ambitious, or not ambitious enough? If the former, what has gotten in the way—how does your understanding of what has happened over the past six months help you to revise your business plan so that it is more realistic? And what lessons does this teach you for the future?
Having a business plan also helps to ensure that you stick to your goals. We can all be tempted to put off certain kinds of work for another day; it is all too easy to do so when you are a lawyer with a constant stream of emergencies to tend to. But there is no hiding from your business plan when it is on the screen in front of you: seeing the impact that falling behind on individual targets will have on your overall professional trajectory can help you to avoid the temptation of putting off that article for another day or cancelling that networking lunch with a key contact.
Minimise Stress
Having a business plan can help you to keep stress to a minimum. This might sound paradoxical: after all, seeing your career plan over the next five or ten years on paper seems overwhelming for some people. But in our experience, the opposite is true.
The reason is that, as mentioned above, without a clear business plan, people often develop ambiguous objectives: doing more networking, publishing more articles, taking a more active role in cases, developing a closer relationship with more partners. These ill-defined goals can be sources of stress because it is difficult to assess how close you are to achieving them, and hard to know when you are ever done. They can also be demotivating because it is hard to see how these milestones actually get you closer to where you want to be.
A business plan helps you solve that by setting out clear objectives and allowing you to see why they are important. Importantly, they can help you know when you have done enough, so that you can feel good about moving on to something else — or shutting down your computer and taking a break with a clear conscience.
In other words, being clear about what you are doing and why helps you to have a clearer view of where you stand in relation to your goal. In turn, this allows you to constantly reassess what is reasonable given the circumstances — meaning you can adjust your goals as you go along, and avoid going too far down paths that will lead to dead ends.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Cécile Roche is a consultant in marketing, communication and business development (MCBD) for the legal industry. After studying law in France and in England, Cécileworked for over ten years in the International Arbitration practice of a Magic Circle law firm in Paris. In 2016, Cécile was awarded an MBA and embraced a career in legal MCBD. She worked at leading business law firms in Paris and Monaco for the next six years. In 2022, she founded MCBD Services, a legal marketing company based in France, where she works as a consultant, putting her skills and experience to the service of French and foreign lawyers working in global markets.
Jon Passaro is the Executive and Team Coach at Jonathan Passaro Coaching, and works with French- and English-speaking lawyers on fast-paced, high-pressure teams around the globe. He works with lawyers at all stages of their careers, on issues ranging from business development to management and leadership. Before starting his coaching practice, he was an associate in the international arbitration practices of two leading international law firms, and then a member of the in-house legal team at the OECD. He has a Professional Certified Coach (“PCC“) credential from the International Coaching Federation (“ICF“) and a JD from Harvard Law School.
*The views and opinions expressed by authors are theirs and do not necessarily reflect those of their organizations, employers, or Daily Jus, Jus Mundi, or Jus Connect.
