Asked and Answered By John W. Olmstead, MBA, Ph.D, CMC Q. Our firm is a 25 attorney IP law firm located in Washington D.C. Metro area. We are planning our year-end firm retreat to plan for next year. This will be our third retreat. While we believe we have achieved some positive results from the last three retreats - we believe that we need to accomplish much more. What are your ideas or thoughts on the matter? A. We find that many law firms try to use their retreats to be an extended version of their regular partnership meetings. They simply try to do too much. The agendas are loaded down with far too many topics. As a result there is a lot of debate and discussion on often day-to-day operational items and no focus on the more complex-strategic issues that often have been ignored or pushed under the rug. This year try to do less and achieve more! Consider narrowing down the topic agenda and focusing on one of the following areas of concentration:

• Solving problems
• Evaluating internal procedures
• Designing long range plans
• Formulating marketing plans
• Determining where the firm is and where it is going
• Practice Expansion and Diversification
• Partner Compensation
• Competition
• Innovative and New Business Models

Concentrate on an area and come out of your retreat with specific action plans which can be implemented and put in place. Click here to read my article on planning law firm retreats Click here to access our management tips area John W. Olmstead, MBA, Ph.D, CMC, (www.olmsteadassoc.com) is a past chair and member of the ISBA Standing Committee on Law Office Management and Economics. For more information on law office management please direct questions to the ISBA listserver, which John and other committee members review, or view archived copies of The Bottom Line Newsletters. Contact John at jolmstead@olmsteadassoc.com.