CHANGE, CHANGE, CHANGE

This change business is a full fledged industry and whenever some chap wants to push a programme, change is the name he calls it. While there are charlatans doesn't mean change is not happening as we speak or at least on its way. Case in point, in the Old Testament there is the story of a man called Noah ( he was the original change guru) who warned everyone for years that a flood was coming and would drown everyone. They laughed and ignored him showing statistics and beta analysis on why he was talking crap but the floods came and the laughers went.

But for your law practice you need to learn to understand what are fundamental changes (game changers) that you make fundamental adjustments for and others that are the regular heat of battle exchanges.
A fundamental change is that you are now competing with firms from developed economies and when you advise high value clients you will come up against the full weight of these law firms and their developed legal expertise.
The thing with game changers is that you make them or you respond to them e.g. the Apple iPhone changed the way phones were made and most of the other phone makers copied the design except RIM, the Blackberry maker.

So for your law firm, what is happening? and how will it affect the business environment, the attitudes of the people you work with and compete with.
To answer this you must go there yourself, talk to the customers, the government officials and get as close to the source of the information as you need to.

Change really means that access to potential has shifted. For example, when Nigeria switched from a military regime to a civilian one the rules of the game altered and there was a different attitude of 'we are open for more business'
Now it is a notorious fact that legal is resistant or at least slow to change, hundred year old laws are still on the books, law firm behaviour is largely the same with better dressing and technology.

Nigeria is an economy dominated by oil so all the law firms will naturally focus on it with the result that the potential everywhere else will be left unexplored until some law office does the work of searching out the potential and promoting it and thus making it a game changer with the effect that everyone else begins to follow the new direction .
You can now do so much more with less as the regular media has realized with the rise of new media blogs and online news outlets or in the publishing industry where there are thousands of self publishing outlets which have built their own platforms and do not rely on the Big Five so much.