WHICH WAY IS THE WIND BLOWING?

Look up from your law tomes and case law to talk to your clients and their businesses. Ask them what problems they are facing and what they expect in the future. Note that for this to work you should have knowledge about the industry so you know what kind of questions to ask and what to make of the things you hear.

It doesn't have to be the Spanish Inquisition or a fill the form kind of thing. People like to talk about what matters to them and you just have to make yourself available to listen as deeply as you can.
They may use actual words or certain behaviours to put across certain opinions and thus you have food for thought to come up with nifty ideas and adjustments and new ways to assist, to earn your value as a firm.

Paying close attention to your environment is part of being a successful law firm. The trends and currents in the business and regulatory environment are usually always gradually shifting. The word here is, gradually, so whenever a new business trend suddenly pops out and everyone is suddenly stampeding in that direction you can rest assured that there had been signs of it in the air.
It did not just happen and catch the law firms flatfooted.
Perhaps they were watching, perhaps they were not but what matters is whether you have built your ark for the flood or you have positioned yourself to move with the flow of what is going on on the streets. Instead of permanently reacting to actions initiated by others higher and lower on the food chain.

If your law practice groups are in impregnable positions and have been for years or are industry leaders then a fundamental shift is what will sweep you off your perch so you have the resources to ignore a few light skirmishes.
But the fundamental shifts do not send advance parties and the certain thing we all know is that no one can predict the future no matter how hard we try.
The next best thing then, is to play future games by monitoring the environment and looking up from our own internal law firm matters to look at the environment with fresh eyes.
Then we act accordingly. We set the new plan in place, put in some belt tightening measures in place and take the hits we need to take to get ahead.
In the end of it, your law firm is only on solid ground if it actively studies the clients, the environment of its clients and the industries it wants to participate in, the competition and all the things that materially affect them and then uses all this to form a detailed plan of action that addresses these issues.
And it puts this plan into play every single day.