Wealth of Flexibility

When facing uncertain times, traditional wisdom says to put your money into hard assets. (Note that gold continues to peak over $900+ this week). But when organizations are facing uncertain times their best asset is flexibility.

Across the legal industry we have seen a number of firms making “FTE adjustments” while recently some firms are actually hiring (albeit small) numbers of lawyers and support staff. (It helps when you have a client portfolio.) A major challenge in a fluctuating economy is the variability of the workflows and uncertain levels of litigation moving through the pipeline.

For firms facing these challenges, the "gold” is being able to take on work as it comes, but not retain large fixed costs to do so. Flexibility has long been a great strategic consideration when outsourcing to an onshore vendor (staffing firms) or offshore vendors (legal outsourcing firms).

As we continue to see how the economic situation shakes out, flexibility is the name of the game. The lean and highly-effective practices will benefit the most as the economy picks up steam.