But the law firm’s most productive assets are essentially knowledge workers free to go on a short notice. How will capital markets be as willing to finance wages as when they invest into machines, patents, mines, roads and other property?

In terms of competitive innovations that would require major capital expenditures, here are three off the top of my head:

- financing a scorched-earth recruitment and retention policy: immediately announce starting associate salaries of $300,000 a year with huge bonus potential, or some similarly mind-boggling figure to establish your firm once and for all as the kings of compensation and to win any future talent competition in which money matters more than slightly. The gradual salary escalation we’ve been seeing at large firms for the last few years is the same basic strategy, but played out in slow motion and in piecemeal fashion: this strategy would simply be entering and ending the competition all at once.

- building a major IT-based client service mechanism. Linklaters developed Blue Flag several years ago at an astronomical (for law firms) cost, and no firm has been willing to make that kind of investment since. But Blue Flag is a client magnet for Linklaters, providing services and making money 24/7 for several years. With a massive capital infusion, I’d go out and build about five of those things, reinventing client expectations of when and how process-intensive legal services can be accessed and changing the entire competitive landscape on which my competitors have to play.

- acquiring a competitor’s entire office. In the early versions of the Civilization empire-building game, a successful strategy for rapid growth was to build up your coffers to great heights and then bribe entire cities of rival nations to defect and join your civilization. Why wouldn’t that work in a law firm environment? Your competitor has assembled what consensus agrees is the best office in Abu Dhabi? Buy it. Offer each and every employee a 50% salary increase to start using your letterhead and put your nameplate on the front door. It happens in other industries, especially the technology industry, all the time. I’m exaggerating for effect, obviously, because there are unique ethical issues to consider in law, but no law firm has yet adopted a strategy of making lawyers offers so lucrative that they simply can’t turn them down. With capital infusions, you could.

It almost goes without saying that tons of money alone won’t buy you a great law firm. But tons of money plus great management is an almost unbeatable combination — the Boston Red Sox are as good a recent example of that as any other. Few firms have great management and hardly any have cash to burn — give a firm those two traits and watch it conquer the world.