Wednesday, 30 November 2011, 8.00 - 9.30am

Business of Law: Business Strategy

Law firms don’t do strategy. Until 6th October 2011 that didn’t really matter. Now it does. If law firms do not wake up to this fact pretty quickly they will go out of business.

This presentation will look at why it is difficult for law firms to develop and implement business strategy. We will look at what strategy is, where it fits and how law firms can go about developing strategy which works for them.

Do you know who your real competitors are?We will look at your competitors and how to deal with them.
What strategies could you develop and how do you decide which is best for you? How do you build sustainable competitive advantage?

We will then look at the importance of implementation.
It is better to implement a mediocre strategy efficiently than to have a brilliant strategy but implement it badly. Amongst other things you need to make sure you have the capability within the business to implement your chosen strategy.

Finally, you need to build around your strategy to embed it and make it work for you. To do that you need to make sure your people are doing things which support the strategy. We will discuss how.

Phil Jepson

Phil is a senior consultant and the Chairman of Jepson Holt. He specialises in merger and acquisition work for law firms, senior level search and strategic recruiting. His work is closely connected with the development and implementation of strategy. Phil qualified as a Solicitor in 1989 at a top 50 law firm.

He became a Partner in 1992 and an equity partner in 1994. He spent 15 years working in law firms and has experience at 4 firms, 3 of them in the Top 50. He practised in the North West, the Midlands and Yorkshire and led teams, multi sited business groups and an office.

He mostly specialised in insurance litigation work, dealing with large and complex personal injury claims as well as professional indemnity and commercial insurance, contentious construction and employment law. Before setting up Jepson Holt in September 2004, Phil worked as a Director at an established legal search firm. Phil completed an MBA (Distinction) at Manchester Business School in Autumn 2007.

Keynote speaker:

Phil Jepson

Venue:

Deloitte LLP, 2 Hardman Street, Spinningfields, Manchester, M60 2AT