It’s common that the type “A” personality attracted to the practice of law would similarly be enticed to take on leadership positions when on offer. These may be external – such as a board opportunity, or internal – such as a chance to serve on a committee, as head of a practice group or client [...]
Planning - any planning - is better than doing none at all. For this reason, I encourage lawyers to engage in whatever level of complexity of planning they can muster. If that means spending a lunch hour talking about business goals with your partners, or writing down a few goals on a napkin, so be [...]
If you aren’t preparing for every interaction with a client or prospect, you may be wasting your time and theirs. Here’s some food for thought on lunches and other planned client interactions. Lawyers who “do lunch” do so because it seems like part of a healthy marketing strategy. And it is. But just showing up [...]
Lawyers are intelligent, capable human beings who sometimes find it almost impossible to manage their time well. The reason could be that too much is expected of them; that they like to do things very well before moving on and that takes time; that they under-estimated how long an activity will take; that when activities [...]
Ideally, a law firm’s marketing plan and budget would have been set last quarter. Got those who are late in starting this process, or who don’t know how to do it, here’s a guide. In a perfect world, you would start assessing your current year’s productivity against the year’s plan in August or September of [...]
While law firms are generally comprised of intelligent, multi-talented individuals, there will always be the need for law firms to hire some outside service providers. Yet law firms are not known for being particularly good managers of these providers. It might be a good New Year’s resolution to improve your ability to manage these services. [...]
I’m ending my posts of the year with a difficult subject…individuals within a Partnership who consistently seem to be in opposition with the rest of the Partnership. It's one of those areas of challenge that Partnerships are very good at ignoring, but ultimately to their peril. That vast majority of Partnerships function quite well. This [...]
Most clients already have an established relationship with a lawyer or law firm. That means that if you want to expand your business, you have to steal it from someone else. The best way to do this is with a full-court press. It’s much easier to get more work from an existing client so that [...]
A growing portion of my coaching business has been to help lawyers and law firm senior support staff to plan for their retirement. Traditionally, we’ve gone to accountants to help us plan for retirement because we’ve primarily been concerned about ensuring that once we stop collecting a regular pay cheque, we have enough money to [...]
Precedent figures heavily in most law practices, so it’s understandable that lawyers would rely on past experiences and belief systems in the running of their lives as well. Life experience can create wisdom. It can also lead to our greatest weak spots. In over twenty years of coaching lawyers, my primary goal has been to [...]