Problems › Hiring a Strategic Planning Consultant › Law Firms
A plan and a decision are different objects, and the annual process reliably produces the first while the business needed the second. This page works through it for law firms specifically — including an unedited excerpt from a real analysis of a law firm.
A plan and a decision are different objects, and the annual process reliably produces the first while the business needed the second. The version of this question that applies to law firms is not the generic one. 19 of 28 equity partners aged 55 or over with no formal lateral hire programme or associate-to-partner track for eight years — so an answer that ignores 82 % realisation will be confidently wrong. The analysis has to start from 68 % utilisation and £184 k profit per equity partner rather than from revenue.
Annual planning has a shape almost everywhere. Each function proposes what it would do with more resource, the numbers are added, the total is unaffordable, everything is scaled back proportionally, and the result is published as a strategy. Nothing in that process requires anyone to choose between two things they both want, which is what strategy is. It requires them to accept a haircut, which is what budgeting is. Both are necessary; only one of them is being bought.
The consultant is often hired to break that pattern and frequently cannot, because the constraint is not facilitation. The constraint is that the trade-off is politically expensive and the process is designed to avoid making anyone lose. An outside facilitator makes the conversation better organised without changing who has to lose, and the output reverts to a list.
The second common reason to hire one is legitimate and different: nobody internally has the time or the neutrality to assemble the evidence. Somebody has to pull five years of numbers, disaggregate them, and build the cases. That is real work, it is genuinely hard to do while running the business, and it is the part where an outsider adds obvious value — though it is also the part that is now largely automatable.
Corporate Strategy & Transformation (catalog id t5) does the second job: it assembles the evidence, builds the options with their arithmetic, and states what each one costs and what would have to be true for it to be right. It does not run your offsite and cannot make anyone accept a loss. Where the blocker is genuinely political rather than analytical, a good facilitator is the correct purchase and no software substitutes for one.
These three together are the signature. One on its own usually points somewhere else.
✓ The last plan contained no decision to stop doing something
✓ Initiative lists carry forward year to year with the same items unstarted
✓ The plan is written after the budget rather than deciding it
The move that usually makes it worse. Hiring a facilitator to fix a problem of authority, which produces a better-run meeting that reaches the same non-decision.
It is for you if you run or finance a law firm and the last plan contained no decision to stop doing something. It is the situation where the numbers are available but nobody has put them in an order that produces a decision.
It is not for you if Percision is the wrong tool if you already know the answer and only need execution capacity, or if the business is pre-revenue — then the constraint is evidence about the market, not analysis of your own figures. Percision is not a lawyer, tax advisor, auditor, licensed appraiser, clinical or regulatory filer, or an AI implementation shop. It does not do HR casework, creative-only brand work, or impersonate a named consulting firm. It is a strategy analysis engine — not a template library. Also wrong if you need facilitation, politics, or someone to sit with a lender or buyer. Those are human jobs.
Percision is not a lawyer, tax advisor, auditor, licensed appraiser, clinical or regulatory filer, or an AI implementation shop. It does not do HR casework, creative-only brand work, or impersonate a named consulting firm. It is a strategy analysis engine — not a template library.
Below is an excerpt from a real run of this analysis on a law firm. It is a sample profile rather than a customer, and it is unedited engine output — this is the format you get, on your own numbers.
The subject is Ashgrove Legal LLP, a sample company profile used for testing rather than a customer — £24.8 m gross revenue from five practice groups.
Excerpt from a real Percision run · Cost Reduction & Efficiency · sample company profile
The move. Scale the only practice hitting 88 % realisation to fund its own growth and close the succession gap.
| Investment required | £240 k (remaining FY2026 discretionary cap after £180 k IT commitment) |
| Expected return | 1.4–1.6× cash-on-cash within 24 months at current realisation rates. |
| Revenue, year 1 | £25.4–25.7 m firm-wide (+£0.6–0.9 m incremental) |
| Revenue, year 2 | £26.5–27.1 m firm-wide (+£1.1–1.3 m incremental from B&F segment) |
| Revenue, year 3 | £27.8–28.6 m firm-wide (+£1.3–1.5 m incremental) |
| Exit criteria | Strategy must be reversed if, within 18 months, segment revenue has not reached £2.4 m annualised OR cumulative net profit contribution is below £150 k, OR if any lateral hire’s personal billings fall below 1 200 hours in any rolling 6-month period. |
This is one move out of a full analysis. Read a complete report — every page, no email required.
This question routes to Corporate Strategy & Transformation, one of 29 engagements the platform runs. For law firms it works through 82 % realisation, 68 % utilisation, £184 k profit per equity partner and 112 lock-up days, then produces the sequence rather than a list of options — which move first, what it funds, and the observation that would say the sequence is wrong.
You watch the analysis get built before paying anything. Read a complete report here if you would rather see the depth first.
An independent facilitator running an offsite and producing a plan is commonly £8k–£30k. A firm running a full planning cycle with analysis is £60k–£200k. The range is wide because the two jobs are different: one is facilitation, one is evidence. Decide which you are short of before you compare quotes, because the cheap version of the wrong one is still wasted.
Short enough that the trade-offs are visible. A useful plan states where you will win, what you will stop, and the two or three things that must be true. Most of the length in a typical planning document is evidence supporting decisions that were already made, which belongs in an appendix nobody needs to read twice.
Set direction over three and commit resource over one. Three-year financial detail is invented precision in almost every business, and treating it as a commitment makes the plan brittle. The parts that genuinely need a three-year view are capacity, capital and capability, because those are the ones that cannot be changed inside a year.
Materially, yes. 19 of 28 equity partners aged 55 or over with no formal lateral hire programme or associate-to-partner track for eight years — which changes both the diagnosis and the order of the fixes. The metrics that decide it here are 82 % realisation, 68 % utilisation, £184 k profit per equity partner, and an answer built on industry-general benchmarks will usually point at the wrong one first.
Less than most people expect. Your last twelve months of revenue and cost split the way you already split it, plus whatever you hold on 82 % realisation and 68 % utilisation. The analysis is explicit about what it is assuming where your data stops, which is more useful than waiting for numbers you may never have.
Percision is the wrong tool if you already know the answer and only need execution capacity, or if the business is pre-revenue — then the constraint is evidence about the market, not analysis of your own figures. Percision is not a lawyer, tax advisor, auditor, licensed appraiser, clinical or regulatory filer, or an AI implementation shop. It does not do HR casework, creative-only brand work, or impersonate a named consulting firm. It is a strategy analysis engine — not a template library. Also wrong if you need facilitation, politics, or someone to sit with a lender or buyer. Those are human jobs.
Percision is not a lawyer, tax advisor, auditor, licensed appraiser, clinical or regulatory filer, or an AI implementation shop. It does not do HR casework, creative-only brand work, or impersonate a named consulting firm. It is a strategy analysis engine — not a template library.
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