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25 January 2007 / Simon Young
Issue: 7257 / Categories: Features , Profession
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Survival strategies

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Simon Young considers how firms can prosper in a changing legal landscape

Many managing partners will have spent some of the quiet moments of the festive season pondering on the survival strategies for their firms in the brave new world which will follow the implementation of the Legal Services Bill, which is likely to receive Royal Assent this summer. What they will hope to do, in addition to identifying the threats and opportunities the new legislation will bring, is to work out how they can best configure their current offerings to meet those challenges.

The likelihood is that, to do so, they will have to forsake some of the goodwill which may linger from Christmas, as some hard decisions may need to be taken; any firm which wants to survive the onslaught of the next few years will have to be in as efficient a shape as possible.

Cross-subsidisation of different service offerings is a hangover from the days when those of us who qualified as generalists expected our firms to be able to cope

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