• Review and update all client contact lists, including “dormant” clients that you haven’t worked with in over three years.
  

• Maintain rigorous financial hygiene by recording and posting hours billed on a daily basis.  Smart phones, such as RIM’s BlackBerry products, in tandem with custom applications such as BigHand and PensEra’s TimeKM, can play a major role in the firm’s billing and collection process.
  

• Contact all potential clients whose work you did not earn to determine reasons why; carefully review and revise all presentations based on client feedback.
  

• Update your individual and practice group business development plans to reflect clients’ latest expectations.
  

• If your firm has reduced its headcount, review case assignments and quality of work produced by remaining associates (and partners).
  

• Implement training programs for business development, practice group leadership, etc., that the firm was “too busy” to conduct a year or two ago.
  

• Meet with clients for an hour or so with the sole reason of gathering feedback on quality, work product, responsiveness, and — perhaps especially — pricing.
  

• If the firm has canceled its annual retreat, reconsider.  It could be done in your offices or nearby instead of Bermuda.  But there has been no more important time to review the firm strategy in light of the current economy and client expectations.
  

• Does your firm have a plan for the up cycle as well as the current down cycle?  While things will improve in the future, most of the changes that clients are mandating now will remain in the future.  Your firm’s leverage, technology, client relations and just about every other factor will be very different than they were last year.  This will take review, planning and implementation.
  

• Use downtime to discover useful technology tools that exist in software the firm already has.  It’s estimated that firms use only 10-15% of the capabilities of software that have in house.
  

• Use Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to keep in touch with clients, prospects and referral sources.

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