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CCCA_V7No2_Q&ARoger Martin-FIN_CCCA 13-05-16 4:21 PM Page 32 Feature — CCCA 2013 National Spring Conference what makes it hard. What makes it easy is to say: every department of every company, every company, every non-profit, can make those fundamental choices. So an in-house legal department has a choice of where to play, right?… We’re going to be better than outside counsel on that, but everything else, we’re going to let outside coun- sel do it. So we’re going to win, in the sense of creating lots of value for the corporation, by focusing on issues that are super important to the company and not doing everything else. Those are all open “where to play,” “how to win” choices that every internal legal department can make and I would argue that many of them don’t. Why don’t they? It’s because they don’t have a clear enough definition of strategy and what it can do to help you. CCCA How can law firms, with their unique partnership structures, go about this? RM Strategy in law is absolutely underdone and desper- ately needed. I’ve actually consulted to a bunch of law firms in my life and the problem in the law business, gen- erally, is that it’s a fragmented industry. Think of any city, the Toronto legal community versus Cola Beverages. There are two Cola companies that have 80 per cent of the market and a few others. In law, there’s probably nobody with one per cent market share. It’s fragmented and in fragmented businesses, people tend to not make “where to play,” “how to win” choices explicit. They just sort of say, ‘well, we’re a law firm and we’re going to do law.’ Or, ‘we’re a corporate law firm and we’re going to do corporate law.’ But they’re still very diffuse and… the law firms that are going to win are the ones that say, ‘no, no, no, we do this kind of law, and we do it in this way and we’re not going to do anything other than that and we’re going to get great at that.’ And I would argue that the lack of actual strategy in the major law firms in this country is now in part responsible for the global practices buying up firms [here]. This is what happens to uncon- solidated businesses; in due course, there’s a consolidating force and the consolidating forces tend to be companies that have a strategy that involves being great at some things. And in order to be great at those things, they need to develop great scale to build their resources. And when they do that, they start beating up on the little companies and eventually consolidating the business. So, there has never been a more important time for law firms to think really carefully about what’s their winning aspiration, where’re they’re going to play, how they’re going to win. 32 CCCA Canadian Corporate Counsel Association SUMMER 2013