There are two things that you can depend on with each New Year—first, that your newfound resolutions will fall by the wayside on or before the spring flowers blossom; and second, that your well-intentioned strategic planning will dissipate as well. In some cases, they are one and the same.

Strategic planning has been around since Adam & Eve and Moses—although neither was terribly effective or efficient at it. Think about it: Whatever you do, don’t eat the apple. Egypt to Israel in just 40 years (even in a pre-GPS land). Things worked out anyway, but they probably could have turned out much better with a stronger game plan. Law firms are very similar. Most will succeed anyway, but things could have taken far less time and been far more profitable.

Why is it that strategic planning just is not well executed at many of our top law firms? There are plenty of reasons. The hierarchical setup is not based on best business practices. There are too many owners with differing opinions on where things could or should go. The culture—from origination and billing to promotion and expansion—is counterintuitive to objectively sitting back and examining business—past, present and future. I’ve witnessed strategic planning arguments in two-owner firms with totally divergent partner concepts, and in 1,000-plus-attorney firms that are so removed from reality that it is scary. In the end, things do typically work out, but once again, not in the best way fathomable.

In law practice management, we love to throw around the term “best practices,” as if that is what we are actually doing. What we really engage in is “best practices under the circumstances,” which is different from the strategic plans they might concoct at Coca-Cola, Starbucks or Disney. In many of our households, we put together very well thought-out and defined long-range strategic plans built around the future of ourselves and our kids. There is really no justification for not doing the same at work.

Here are five suggestions for your law firm’s first strategic planning session of 2010:

• Do it yourself. The reality is that you can pay for reports, statistics and “direction,” but the only ones that really turn out are those that involve the owners in a room. You know your business better than anyone else, even if you have your doubts.
• Schedule follow-up from the start. Whether your plan includes this year, next year, five years and ten years … regardless of the time line, you need to revisit the plan repeatedly each year to tweak, adjust and confirm. Those meetings do not schedule themselves.
• Make sure the planners themselves represent the past, present and future. And use sharp business minds as selection criteria over seniority or books of business.
• Don’t rush it. Your firm may well have operated without a strategic plan for the past 30 years; do not make it something you need to get in writing in the next 30 days.
• Be true to yourself. Every firm, lawyer, client and case is a little bit different. Worry about what you are doing and not what others are saying.

A strong strategic plan needs to be flexible and fluid. None of us really know what tomorrow will bring. But we can guess the best way to get there. An educated guess is better than no guess at all. I have a phrase that I throw around every week when a client wants to do something that I push back as “off plan.” When I can cite a written plan and then use that as my argument for why we are not going to just go astray on a whim, it helps solidify the business model and makes time and spending that much more efficient. Strive to be able to say “Sorry, that is off-plan,” because that will mean there is actually a plan to go off from. And that would put you ahead of most.

Have a happy and strategically sound new year.