Gestão estratégica em serviços profissionais: um estudo no campo advocatício

Abstract

Professional services firms – PSFs – are characterized by the provision of personal service with a high level of specialized technical mastery, to be applied in order to solve specific problems. This category includes liberal professionals, such as lawyers, whose service demands scientific studies given the transforming role of Law, the judicialization of contemporary life, the normative barriers of the profession, high competition and the absence of management knowledge in the academic training of the lawyer. Indeed, a research gap is identified on strategic management in the context of PSFs, as national and international studies focus on specific aspects of these organizations without going into strategic management itself. Thus, this work investigates how the strategic management of PSFs in the legal field occurs, under the integrative model proposed by Skjølsvik, Pemer and Løwendahl (2017), composed of nine elements divided into internal, external and intermediary focuses of the organization. This is a qualitative study in terms of procedures: exploratory and descriptive, with a multiple case study strategy. Data collection made use of a semi-structured interview directed to lawyers managing 9 offices in Ceará. Data analysis used the content analysis technique, systematizing the main management practices. The results showed that in the internal focus there is an internal organization with a broad structure of functions, based on the division of work, routine flows and organizational culture, factor that ramifies into various actions that dictate the operation of the business, impacting on the knowledge management and human resources strategies, elements that together form the archetype of organizations, bringing them closer to the P² or MPB model.In the external focus, the institutional environment did not exert as much influence as pointed out by the literature, so the subjects emphasize market factors that surround them, since from them the strategic customer profile and the way of relating to it is defined, be it directly or with partners. Finally, there is the intermediary focus, as a result of the previous ones in the theoretical model, in which the strategic analysis sets the strategic factors for the achievement of the organization's intended success, which can occur with the adoption of innovations. As a result of the confluence of internal and external elements of strategic management, business opportunities arise that, if perceived by PSF, will enable the planned expansion of operations.Thus, the contributions of the study, in the theoretical scope, are the conceptual systematization of the elements of the integrative model strategic management of PSFs, which culminated in the elaboration of the interpretative framework, as well as, from an empirical perspective, the application of this international theoretical model in the Brazilian context, generating a categorization of managerial experiences of different organizations in the legal market, with the potential to provide reflections that generate insights that contribute to the improvement of modern management in the organizational routine, so that the law not only survives in the competitive market, but also finds success that he craves, in whatever connotation it may be.