Your law firm needs a Situation Room
In a chaotic world, you can't sit back waiting for the next bombshell to drop. You need to anticipate, analyze, and address critical new developments — before they affect your firm and its clients.
Let’s do a quick recap, shall we?
The government of the United States is taking punitive action against two large American law firms in retaliation for their current and past representation of high-profile adversaries of Donald Trump. Ignoring warnings that if they don’t all hang together, they will all hang separately, most other members of the AmLaw 100 have maintained a conspicuous silence about this threat to their professional and business independence.
The Trump Administration’s manic cycle of imposition, intensification, and postponement of tariffs against most of its global trading partners, as well as its decimation of numerous government functions and the shutdown of essential government departments, is battering North American stock markets, crushing consumer confidence, and creating all the conditions necessary for a recession.
Generative AI has taken another several steps forward, and is now capable of producing PhD-level research, which normally would take even experienced professionals days or weeks, in a matter of minutes. Legal industry analysts are stating ever more clearly that time- and effort-based pricing systems cannot survive the steady advance of technology that turns billable hours into billable seconds, and that revenue models simply have to adapt.
There’s also the arrival of Big 4 accounting giants in the American legal market, the real-time collapse of the California Bar Exam, the retreat of law firm equity and inclusion efforts in the face of political pressure, the evisceration of American higher legal education, major political events in Germany, the UK, and Canada, and, for those who like their apocalypses fiery, the occasional volcano.
That’s where things stand in mid-March 2025. By May or July or November, the list of developments described as “mind-boggling,” “unprecedented,” and “once-in-a-century” will be different and probably longer. If you find all this bewildering, I can at least assure you that I’m in the same boat. I don’t have a brilliant insight to offer you about what will happen next in the world, or exactly what you should do about all of this craziness.
But that’s kind of the point of this article. You can’t wait around to see which black swan shows up next and then react to it, or to hear what other people think and advise and then react to that. You need to build and install the capacity to anticipate, analyze, and address these developments yourself. And you need to do it right now.
I’m fond of saying that lawyers are much better tacticians than strategists. They’re unparalleled when it comes to helping their clients get from Point A to Point B. But if the question is whether Point B is the right destination, or if the client fully understands what Point A actually is, lawyers are more reticent. They’re fantastic with the what and the how, but not often so much with the why.
The same disinclination towards strategy is evident when it comes to lawyers’ own businesses. Strategic planning, as far as many law firm partners are concerned, is something other people do — a subcommittee of the partnership, or an outside consultancy. I’ve long believed that strategic planning should be an ongoing function within law firms, with senior people appointed to continuously monitor the strategic plan’s rollout, implementation, and measurement.
But useful as that would still be, this sort of function would also be unequal to our present challenges. The chaos and unpredictability that now greet law firms seemingly every morning requires a different response — something comprehensive, big-picture, and open-ended. Law firms need 24/7 in-house access to focused, watchful, geopolitical and macroeconomic expertise. In simpler terms, law firms need a Situation Room.
I don’t mean a “Situation Room” in terms of an actual physical location (unless you’ve got lots of empty office space that you’d love to turn into something out of “The West Wing”). I mean a standing intelligence and advisory capacity within your firm. Call it a Global Analysis Unit, or a Market Disruption and Response Team, if you prefer something less melodramatic on the org chart.
The name isn’t as important as what this capacity is and what its constituent members do. It’s a carefully assembled, deeply informed, and continuously vigilant team of professionals with strategic, predictive, and advisory expertise, whose job is to identify what’s coming, figure out what it means for the firm and its clients, and advise the firm’s leadership immediately.
The members of the team — the permanent occupants of the Situation Room — would include firm lawyers with an interest in and aptitude for global affairs and/or strategic forecasting. They should be supplemented with professionals experienced in government relations, technology developments, or other areas of importance to the firm. The Situation Room needs a leader, a mandate, and a direct line to the firm’s executive committee.
If this sounds like a major undertaking, suitable only for the largest and richest firms, it isn’t. Do sole practitioners and small partnerships need something like this? Probably not. But even firms with a dozen or so partners, serving clients in a large community, are vulnerable to the macro-level forces shaking the world. Maybe your firm is based in a quiet, pleasant, Florida vacation town — but if so, the US-Canada trade war is shredding tourism from Canada and could send many of your clients into receivership. Everyone is vulnerable to our state of global chaos.
Here’s a quick blueprint for what a law firm Situation Room might look like, what it would need to launch, and how it could help.
1. Intel: Start by building an information nerve centre to support the team. Subscriptions to reliable and insightful periodicals are the first step, e.g.,: Wired, The Atlantic, and the Washington Post in the US; CBC and The Globe And Mail in Canada; the Financial Times and the BBC in the UK. Supplement them with analysis from well-placed and trustworthy commentators: My list includes Sam Freedman, Anne Applebaum, Phillips O’Brien, Ethan Mollick, Sean West, Paul Wells, and Adam Tooze. Your sources will vary according to your firm’s unique circumstances.
2. Personnel: Regardless of the size of your firm, keep the Situation Room lightly populated, between three and seven people, because you’ll need agility more than exhaustiveness. Include at least one experienced partner, maybe someone ready to shift career gears, and one up-and-coming leader looking to broaden their horizons. Hire at least one non-lawyer expert in the field of your choice (tech, government relations, journalism). It should go without saying women should be at least half the team: No law firm function needs real diversity more than this one.
3. Activities: Members of the Situation Room would review the latest news and analysis daily (hire a researcher or use AI to produce summaries if the volume is too high), and post their observations and alerts to a Slack channel or similar collaboration platform. Urgent matters merit a meeting or Zoom call, but otherwise, the team gathers once a week to discuss what they’ve seen, how it could affect the firm or its clients, and what steps the firm should take to either respond to an important development or prepare for a rising trend.
4. Reports: Once a week, the team leader reports verbally to the firm’s managing partner, CEO, or executive team; once a month, a written report is submitted. The reports should advise the firm’s leadership of the most pressing external matters and recommend actions or plans the firm should develop in response. A truly urgent matter would trigger an immediate meeting of the leadership and the full Situation Room team. The leadership should strongly consider the team’s recommendations and should follow them whenever appropriate.
5. Variations. Once established, this kind of intelligence team has many potential variations. Sub-Rooms could be spun off for specific industries or geographic regions within the firm’s coverage. The same could be done for the firm’s top clients, with client or industry representatives added to their customized Situation Rooms. Let the associates build one of their own. Consider firm-wide circulation of (edited) versions of the monthly reports. There’s no shortage of options and applications for a law firm’s in-house intelligence unit.
I’ve been saying for awhile now that AI and other forces are going to vastly reduce law firms’ inventory of billed hours for straightforward work, and that lawyers will have to come up with new sources of value for their clients. Well, here’s one gift-wrapped for you. People and businesses will turn to lawyers for their guidance and advice in future — if those assets are deeply grounded in research, intelligence, and proof of significant global trends. Opinions are cheap. Expertly assembled and professionally delivered recommendations have real value. That’s what lawyers will sell.
Your law firm needs a Situation Room — not least because, someday soon, your law firm will be a Situation Room.
Jordan, normally I find myself nodding in agreement with your posts, as they are (sometimes) provocative but always informative. This time, though, I disagree with your position on Situation Rooms. First and foremost, though: I fully support lawyers getting involved with the intelligence process, as many I have worked with - brilliant as they can be - typically don't possess this skill set. Not an insult, just "is." The idea that a Situation Room should be mostly comprised of lawyers and a SME or two, with researchers and/or AI there "if the volume is too high" is surprising and a disappointing take. Teams like mine (competitive intelligence + analytics) exist for a reason, and should have a representative attending as a dispassionate observer of ongoing trends that could affect the firm. In fact, entire books have been written about this very kind of work in the CI field, with one of the best being "Early Warning: Using Competitive Intelligence to Anticipate Market Shifts, Control Risk, and Create Powerful Strategies" by Ben Gilad. I highly recommend it, even if you're not in the field. Thanks for continuing to write about timely and engaging topics!
Love your line of thinking here Jordon. And with your other posts, many of them more generally pertinent to those of us involved in transformational change with clients in other sectors, domains and disciplines. Would love to connect. R. Keith Jones, Victoria, BC.