The Transposition of Porter’s Five Forces Model to the Law

Abstract

Following the success of Michael Porter’s five forces model as an analytic tool of companies’ business environments, scholars have endeavoured to study the links between Law & Management and how the law can be used by firms to achieve business goals. After a brief introduction to the notion of strategy and the five forces model, this chapter will provide an overview of some of the most influential works that have been devoted to the study of Law & Management. It will focus on the two main schools known as the resource-based view of the firm and the proactive law movement, and outline several major findings developed by scholars to help managers understand how the law can be seen as an asset for their firms. As Porter’s model enables managers to understand how each of the five forces can shape the industries their firms are evolving in, this chapter will focus on how the law can be used as a factor of influence that can be leveraged to act on those forces. Building on that conclusion, it will then endeavour to study how different areas of the law can be used to achieve strategic goals in conjunction with a firm’s business strategy.