The Right Goal at the Wrong Time Is Still the Wrong Move 

By mid-July, most law firm owners already know how the year is going. You know whether revenue is moving in the right direction. You know where the team is struggling, which projects have stalled, which problems keep resurfacing, and which decisions you’ve been avoiding. You don’t need to pull up the goals you wrote in January to feel where the firm has momentum and where it’s dragging. 

The instinct at this point in the year is to ask a big, familiar question: are we on track? It sounds strategic. It usually isn’t. On track toward what, based on which assumptions, and is the destination you picked in January still the one that matters most now?  

I’m Stephanie Everett, founder of Lawyerist Lab, where we work with small firm leaders on implementing the right business strategies for their business. A better question for July is smaller and harder: what is the next right step for this firm—not the full plan for the rest of the year, not the six initiatives that would eventually make the business better, just the one move that matters next. That question forces a choice, and for a lot of firm owners, making the choice is harder than doing the work that follows it. 

Why Do Law Firms End Up With Too Many Valid Priorities? 

Most law firm owners aren’t short on ideas about what needs fixing. You could strengthen intake, raise rates, hire another lawyer, improve collections, document your processes, develop your leadership team, adopt AI, fix delegation, build a better marketing system, improve the client experience, review your compensation model, or finally deal with the practice area that produces revenue but makes everyone miserable. Any one of those is a legitimate priority on its own. That’s exactly the problem. 

When several things are genuinely important at the same time, firm leaders tend to avoid choosing among them. Instead of picking one, they launch a little bit of everything: a marketing meeting here, a software evaluation there, someone told to draft an SOP, a candidate interviewed, a promise to review pricing “next month.” The firm becomes highly active without becoming meaningfully different. That’s not a goal-setting failure. You already have goals. It’s a sequencing problem. And sequencing is a strategic skill most firms have never had to build, because most firms have never had to choose between good options before. 

How Do You Know Which Priority Is Right for Your Firm Right Now? 

Business advice often treats growth like every firm should follow the same checklist in roughly the same order: build the brand, generate leads, hire people, create systems, adopt technology, develop leaders, scale. Firms don’t actually grow that way. They develop unevenly, and the unevenness is the whole story. 

A firm might have sophisticated marketing and terrible intake. It might have more demand than it can handle and no one who can supervise the work. It might have strong people and no financial discipline, or excellent systems built around a service the market no longer values. In each case, the next right step is the one that addresses whatever is currently limiting the business—not whatever is next on a generic checklist.  

If the firm needs more qualified matters, improving internal workflows won’t touch the real problem. If it has plenty of leads but converts too few of them, spending more on marketing just pours more opportunity into a broken intake process. If the team can’t make routine decisions without you, adding more employees increases your workload instead of reducing it. If the firm is busy but unprofitable, growth may be the last thing it needs. The same initiative can be exactly right for one firm and an expensive distraction for another. Or, it can even be right for your firm eventually and wrong for your firm now. A good idea pursued out of sequence still costs you time, money, and attention you don’t get back. 

Why Urgency Is the Wrong Way to Choose Your Firm’s Next Move 

When leaders haven’t clearly named the firm’s next priority, urgency ends up making the decision for them. The loudest client gets the attention. The project with the enthusiastic internal champion starts moving, whether or not it addresses the firm’s biggest constraint. That’s a business run by incoming pressure instead of strategic direction, and it feels like leadership right up until you look at what changed. 

Urgent work will always exist. But urgency isn’t the same as importance, and irritation isn’t the same as impact. Being tired of a problem doesn’t automatically make it the right problem to solve next. A project being exciting doesn’t make it strategically useful. And someone being willing to own an initiative doesn’t mean the firm should pursue it. Leadership means deciding which problem deserves the organization’s limited attention before the day decides for you. 

How Do You Find the Real Problem Behind the Problem? 

The most visible issue in the firm is rarely the actual constraint. Say the firm is missing deadlines. The obvious reaction is to implement a new project-management system. But why are deadlines being missed? Maybe assignments are unclear. Maybe lawyers are holding work too long before handing it off. Maybe no one has the authority to adjust priorities when new matters land. Maybe the firm has taken on more work than the current team can reasonably deliver. Software will make the missed deadlines easier to see. It won’t necessarily prevent them. 

Or say you feel buried in questions from your team. The apparent fix is to tell people to take more initiative. But maybe the team doesn’t know what decisions it’s allowed to make. Maybe you’ve corrected people so often that they’ve learned to wait for you. Maybe you’ve delegated the tasks without ever teaching the judgment behind them. The useful question isn’t “what problem are we experiencing.” It’s what condition keeps producing this problem. And that condition, not the symptom sitting on top of it, is usually where the next right step actually lives. 

What Is the Next-Step Test for Law Firm Strategy? 

Before naming your firm’s priority for the next 60 to 90 days, run the candidates through four questions:  

1. What is the firm actually trying to accomplish? Be specific. “Grow the firm” isn’t useful, and neither is “improve operations.” Are you trying to increase qualified consultations? Improve conversion? Build enough delivery capacity to accept more work? Increase profit without increasing volume? Reduce the number of decisions that require you personally? A priority can’t be evaluated until the outcome is named. 

2. What is most likely to prevent that outcome? This is the constraint—a lack of demand, capacity, skill, leadership, systems, cash, information, or decision-making discipline. Don’t choose the most visible problem. Choose the condition that will keep limiting progress even after several smaller issues improve. 

3. What decision or change would actually reduce that constraint? This is where leaders jump too fast to a project. “Implement a new intake system” is a project. The strategic decision underneath it might be defining the types of matters the firm wants, setting qualification standards, and assigning one person accountability for conversion. “Train the team on AI” is a project. The strategic decision underneath it might be identifying one workflow where faster or better work creates measurable value. The next right step is usually a decision before it ever becomes an initiative. 

4. What are we willing to stop or postpone? A priority that just gets added on top of everything else isn’t a priority. It’s another demand on an already overloaded organization. Choosing the next right step means deciding what won’t get attention right now. 

What Should Change After You Choose the Right Priority? 

A useful priority does more than generate activity. It creates a real, visible change in how the firm operates. At the end of 90 days, you should be able to point to something concrete: the firm accepts a narrower and more profitable mix of cases; the intake team converts a higher percentage of qualified prospects; associates independently handle a defined category of decisions; you no longer approve every routine expense or client communication; the firm understands which practice areas produce profit rather than just revenue; a recurring operational problem gets solved at the source instead of managed again. 

Your next step doesn’t need to transform the entire business. It needs to improve the firm’s ability to take the step after it. That’s the actual point of sequencing: each move creates the capacity, information, or stability the next stage requires. A firm that sequences well doesn’t move faster in any one quarter. It stops losing quarters to initiatives that never had a chance of sticking. 

Is the Constraint Really the Strategy—or Is It You? 

There’s another possibility worth naming: the firm may already know what to do next, and the owner isn’t prepared to change how they lead. Maybe the next right step is developing another leader, but you keep making every meaningful decision yourself. Maybe it’s narrowing the firm’s focus, but you don’t want to turn away work. Maybe it’s improving profitability, but you avoid conversations about pricing, productivity, or underperformance. Maybe it’s creating operational discipline, but you keep making exceptions that quietly undermine the systems your team is trying to build. 

Sometimes the firm’s constraint isn’t a missing strategy. It’s the leader’s attachment to the current way of operating. That’s useful information, not a verdict on you as an owner. The next right step for the business may require a next right step from you first. You can’t read the label when you’re inside the bottle, and most owners can’t see their own bottleneck without someone outside the firm pointing at it. 

What to Do Before the Rest of 2026 Slips By 

There are still more than five months left in 2026, which is enough time to make a meaningful change in your firm, but not enough time to pursue every improvement you can imagine. Look at the goals you set in January. Look at what you’ve learned since then. Look at the work you’ve delegated and the leadership capacity you’ve built. Then name the one condition most likely to limit your firm’s progress for the rest of the year, and choose the move that addresses it. 

You don’t need perfect certainty to make that call. Strategic decisions are rarely made with complete information. You just need enough clarity to commit the firm’s attention, and enough discipline to protect that choice from the next attractive distraction that shows up in your inbox. Stop asking whether you’re on the right path, as if the path were fixed back in January. Ask what your firm actually needs now, and take that step next. 

If you want a second set of eyes on which constraint is real and which one is just loud, that’s exactly the kind of question Lawyerist Lab exists to work through with you—not as a rescue, but as the strategic infrastructure most firms never built for themselves. 

Stephanie Everett is the founder of Lawyerist Lab and co-author of The Small Firm Roadmap and Be a Next Level Leader: The Four Cornerstones of Leadership for Law Firms. She works with small firm owners on the strategic and operational decisions that determine whether a law firm scales or just stays busy.