For those involved in the legal services marketplace, a wide variety of delivery options have become available. Expanding the range or reach of your services will provide you with additional skills and resources as well as a potentially wider client pool. However, expansion requires enhanced leadership and management skills to make the new, larger entity more successful than the sum of its individual parts.

Before you move into new ways of operating, you need to be sure of a number of issues. Implementing changes will put considerable demand on your resources, time and energy. It is important therefore to check that you are using this strategy for positive reasons and that you have a sound base to expand from. Too many people think that expansion will provide the panacea to all of their current problems. As a result, they spend a lot of time and money chasing rainbows rather than making sure their existing business is solid and secure. Expansion can be risky, as it will require a stronger and deeper resource base as well as a different set of skills. You need to minimise the risk by being clear about what you want to achieve and how you plan to go about it.

These changes may involve new services and new ways of operating. It will certainly involve relationships with people who you will be trusting with your image and reputation. Any new enterprise will require you to develop and sustain trust quickly, so it is important to choose partners who share your core values.

To make the most of new opportunities, you need to: -
1. be positive about yourself, know what you excel at and what you enjoy doing,
2. be able to articulate your core values and what is important to you,
3. be clear about what you want to achieve,
4. have a secure resource base,
5. listen to your clients to find out what they will want from you in the future,
6. be passionate about what you do and want to do so that people will feel inspired to work with you,
7. be constantly on the look out for opportunities,
8. look for obvious synergies between services and/or clients,
9. talk to as many people as possible to find out what they have tried, what worked well and why, what did not work well and why, and
10. always be willing to listen and learn.