Having personally failed to find much evidence that Linklaters will face more than the flakiest class action litigation for its walk-on role in the Lehman Brothers collapse, I'm instead returning to the theme of a recent leader, which argued that many law firms don't have a strategy but pretend they do. So, in no particular order, I've come up with the following handy elements for the 'doesn't suck' strategy:

*Be self-critical

A plan that starts from the basis that everything is great, unsurprisingly, isn't much use. Even if the basic structure and model of your business needs only to be renewed, rather than substantially overhauled, you won't achieve much without being honest about the weaknesses and potential threats to your business. Worse, if your firm is plainly deluded about the quality of the business – which happens a lot at partnerships as they are not challenged by external shareholders – you will fail to take action to improve the situation. Who can't name half a dozen firms in the UK top 50 that are held back by lack of self-awareness and complacency? The shrewd managing partner may want to try polling partners on who they think their peer group competitors are and then try getting an external view. (Someone once told me of a handy yardstick for how your firm is seen by junior recruits: look at the second-choice firms of those applying for trainee contracts. If they are firms well below your supposed weight-class, you have a problem).

*Keep it simple

Achieving change in any organisation is a pain, and that goes double for law firms. Businesses are complex beasts made up of a mass of teams, systems and individuals, all operating with widely-varying agendas and priorities. You have little hope of breaking through that noise and effecting change without a strategy that is fairly simple and easy to understand in its broad strokes. There will be plenty of complexity in the measuring and implementation of your strategy, so the actual road map should have clarity. The other benefit is that clear strategies typically show where a business has come up with priorities rather than just chucking in loads of guff on the basis of keeping everyone happy. These messy strategies aren't really strategies, just statements of the status quo.

*Work out what makes you successful

Maybe it is that you attract the best candidates, or more likely it's because you attract the best candidates in a certain field or geography. It could be that clients like your service standards, or just that you are really cheap. Whatever it is that makes your firm successful – that which drives profits and on which the brand is built upon – it makes sense to identify it, work out if you can do it more and, just as importantly, identify the potential threats to your firm if you continue to do it. And, of course, working out what makes you successful will also provide ideas about what you're doing that has very little to do with your success. In many law firms, that will be a lot of stuff.

*Set goals and measure your achievements

A good strategy will have some fairly clear goals and, ideally, key performance indicators to let you know if you're making progress. Be careful though – there's not much point in measuring indicators if they are only weakly linked to what they're supposed to measuring. Your profits target may have been met, but that means very little if it happened because the market was booming.

*Get it done

In many ways, the big one. A bog-standard but workable strategy that is decently implemented will always trump a masterful blueprint for success that is badly implemented. No one comes up with a business strategy because they love meetings – they do it to make change happen. If you've failed this test, you've failed the whole thing.

For more, see Editor's comment: Gameplan needed.