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The value of embracing roles outside our comfort zone

I recently became the Educational Co-Chair of ILTA‘s (International Legal Technology Association) EVOLVE Conference. I ended up in this role because my ambition for myself and my organization required me to wander outside my comfort zone. Yet, along the way, I’ve enjoyed building a community of fellow travelers—professionals in the legal industry who are climbing into the trenches to help build the first iteration of our cross-functional future. By helping each other, we all benefit.

In the spirit of community building, this post announces the (First Annual) ILTA EVOLVE. Relatedly, I will also share some of the details of my own cross-functional journey, which provide answers to three questions: Continue Reading Cross-functional is our future (351)

Strong leaders voluntarily initiate their own performance feedback. The benefits of doing so are enormous.

[Editor’s note: Given the time of year and the topic of Patrick’s essay, this monthly leadership column is being published two weeks early. Enjoy! wdh]

There is an old adage in managing a client’s expectations that states, “whether we like it or not, we are going to be measured by our clients.”  If we take a very passive approach, the measuring stick against which we will be measured will be exclusively a creation of our client.  Alternatively, we can be proactive and help identify and shape the scorecard.

The same principle is equally true for law firm leaders (FL), especially in dealing with your elected board or executive committee (EC), as the partners and the EC become your expanded client constituency.  Working with your colleagues, especially early in your tenure, to formulate a proper feedback or evaluation process presents a terrific opportunity for you to manage everyone’s expectations.

This issue is especially timely in light of predicted declines in law firm profits.
Continue Reading Should firm leaders take the lead on their own performance review? (343)

Legal technology is slowly becoming core to the legal business. It’s time to commit to a cross-functional team approach.

In the legal profession, attorneys with specialized subject matter expertise (e.g., discovery, trial work, corporate transactions, appellate, regulatory, and many others) provide tremendous value to their clients.  Similarly, technologists supporting the legal profession typically include accomplished programmers, skilled engineers, application experts, integration specialists, security ninjas, and the like. In both disciplines, specialized expertise is incredibly valuable.   

The premise of this post is that individual capabilities and excellence (either legal or technical) standing alone are not enough to ensure long-term, sustainable success.  No superstar technologist or lawyer is equipped to do it all, as there are too many specialties and functional roles which need to be filled.  Rather, a better approach is to construct team-based, cross-functional units that offer greater operational efficiency while building in layers of redundancy that reduce the potential for surprises, errors, or disruption.  Cf Post 323 (Patrick McKenna’s “rules of engagement” for high-performing legal teams).
Continue Reading The expanding role of technology in the law firm business model (338)

A. By embracing Adaptive Leadership principles.

[Editor’s note: Scott Westfahl and Anusia Gillespie worked together at HLS Executive Education and have been collaborating ever since.  Drawing upon Scott’s expertise in Adaptive Leadership and Lawyers Driving Change and Anusia’s perspective across organizations, their most recent effort was an online panel titled “The Resilient GC: Rolling with Disruption.”  Today’s NewLaw Fundamentals column summarizes the top five takeaways from this session, which strongly reinforce the message that NewLaw methodologies and frameworks are becoming core to legal department strategy. wdh]

Shannon Thyme Klinger, Terry Theologides, and Dev Stahlkopf

In The Economist’s recent General Counsel US Insight Hour, “The Resilient GC: Rolling with Disruption,” we heard from Shannon Thyme Klinger, Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel of Moderna, a biotechnology company that went from $800 million US in sales in 2020 to more than $18 billion US in sales in 2021; Terry Theologides, General Counsel of Fannie Mae, a government-sponsored mortgage financing enterprise with $22 billion US in annual revenue; and Dev Stahlkopf, Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel of Cisco, a digital communications technology conglomerate corporation with $52 billion US in annual revenue.

What did these three leading General Counsels from three disparate industries have to say about thriving as the clock speed of change accelerates around them and their companies?
Continue Reading Q. How do GCs thrive amid disruption? (337)

“Firms outside the Premier and Championship leagues are playing a different sport.” Thus, the winning strategies are different.

Jae Um, in her bracketing exercise for The American Lawyer magazine, arrays the 2022 AmLaw 100 based on the structure of the English football league system. At the top are 22 firms in the Premier League. Next is the Championship League, with 23 firms focused intently on getting promoted to Premier.  The third group is “Everybody Else,” which includes all the corporate law firms playing in lower-tier leagues.

Yet, as Jae Um pointed out during her visit to my Law Firms class, “it’s a mistake to extend the soccer metaphor to all 300 US/UK law firms that are doing significant amounts of corporate legal work.”  Jae explains that Premier and Championship League firms have some combination of practice areas (type, quality, depth), sector focus, and geographic footprint that enable them to attract price-insensitive work from the world’s largest and wealthiest clients. See Part II (332) (discussing market power of these firms).

Jae continues, “The 250+ firms outside the Premier and Championship leagues are playing a different sport.”
Continue Reading Learning about law firms, Part III: Innovation at “Everybody Else” firms (335)

The jobs of being a leader within any law firm should come labeled with a clear warning: This job could seriously change you and how you behave within your firm!

Over the past two decades, I have had the privilege, through my research, interviews, and hands-on consulting to peek behind the veil surrounding the challenges of becoming a NEW Firm Chair (or whatever title best signifies your firm’s leader).

From candid discussions about the stress involved in looking like you know what you are doing and the huge time demands imposed by your partner’s requests to feeling disorientated by the scale and scope of the mandate, many professionals quietly struggle with the various pressures that accompany their term in office.  In fact, I’ve discovered that the great majority of leaders, in any position of responsibility, are at their most vulnerable early in their tenure.
Continue Reading Agile leadership: navigating the double bind (334)

Source: “Legal Innovation After Reform: Evidence from Regulatory Change,” Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession (Sept 2022) at 18, Figure 1.

In the long run, however, it’s all about the data.  Initial findings from Utah and Arizona reform efforts.

[Editor’s note:  For today’s feature post, we are pleased to welcome Lucy Ricca and Graham Ambrose, two of the authors of the recently published Stanford Law report on the legal regulatory changes taking place in Utah and Arizona. Prior to becoming Director of Policy and Programs at the Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession, Lucy Ricca was the founding Executive Director of the Office of Legal Services Innovation (the regulatory office overseeing the Utah sandbox). In addition, she remains a member of the Office’s Executive Committee.  Graham Ambrose is currently a 2L at Stanford Law and a 2022-23 Civil Justice Fellow at the Rhode Center. wdh]

The year 2020, known to most for global pandemic shutdowns, also heralded leaps and bounds in legal regulatory reforms.  Utah and Arizona approved extraordinary changes to the regulation of legal practice. Both states loosened the bans on nonlawyer ownership of legal practices and the practice of law by nonlawyers.  Further, the Conference of Chief Justices issued a resolution urging states to consider regulatory innovations regarding the delivery of legal services, and the ABA approved a limited resolution encouraging consideration of regulatory innovation.  Even Justice Neil Gorsuch weighed in with his support for regulatory innovation.

This year, on the other hand, has been more challenging. 
Continue Reading The high highs and low lows of legal regulatory reform (333)

A checklist that, if done in order, actually works.

How do you ensure task completion when important projects need to get implemented, when partners seem to have agreed to participate and do their bit, but when you are not really certain that you are going to get committed follow through?

It’s been an old joke within law firms that if a partner has a deadline for producing some task by this coming Friday, when are they most likely to start on it?  And you know the punchline.

Whether it’s in a practice or industry group setting, around the table with the members of your Strategic Planning Committee, or wherever you happened to be working with your fellow colleagues, this seems to be one of the most common challenges and greatest frustrations that I hear about from leaders at every level within firms.  And perhaps worse, the most common excuse seems to be, “I had a client emergency arise.”  And of course, a client excuse trumps everything!
Continue Reading Ensuring follow-through on partner promises (329)

Examples of ‘Rules of Engagement’ that produce results.

[Editor’s note:  Legal Evolution is pleased to announce that Patrick McKenna has agreed to join Legal Evolution as a regular contributor.  Patrick fills a large gap in our coverage—the daunting challenges of leading and managing in a law firm.  As illustrated by Patrick’s earlier posts, see Post 305 (the perils of shared leadership) and Post 318 (most common pitfalls of law firm leadership training), there is no good substitute for experience and observation. Thus, we are very grateful that Patrick has agreed to share his 40+ years of wisdom. For an introduction to Patrick’s career and writing, see Post 304. wdh]

Whether working with a practice/industry team, an executive committee/elected board, or the members of some firm’s strategic planning working group, I continue to be struck by the dysfunctional behavior that is often present.  For example, how does one deal with the situation where all of your fellow Executive Committee members engage in a lengthy meeting to discuss a challenging, somewhat controversial situation and finally make a decision — only then to discover that following the conclusion of this meeting, a couple of your colleagues were quietly telling partners in the hallways what the group had decided to do, but that they were not in favor of that particular course of action?
Continue Reading The highest performing teams have rules (323)

One of BigLaw’s biggest pain points is fixable.

There are few people out there with bad intentions, but there are firm leaders with bad habits.  I recently spent an hour on a call with the managing partner of an AmLaw 200 firm who was seeking my advice on succession planning and specifically with their practice and industry group leaders, many of whom were very senior and had been in the role for well over a decade.  I began our discussion by asking five very basic questions:

  1. Do these group leaders have a formal, written job description?  Answer: “No.”
  2. Do these leaders have a clear understanding of precisely how many non-billable hours they are expected to spend leading and managing the people on their teams?  Answer: “No.”
  3. Have you provided these team leaders with any organized leadership training within the past three years, to help them enhance their individual performance?  Answer: “No.”
  4. Have these leaders been provided with any written expectations (e.g., you must, as a group, meet at least once per month) of what your firm’s leadership is expecting them to do with their teams?  Answer: “No.”
  5. Do you, as the firm leader, meet with all of your team leaders to have them share and discuss their particular problems and successes with each other, at least once quarterly?  Answer: “No.”

Continue Reading Where leadership training falls short (318)