Innovations in Leadership: Why You Need to Rely on Others

COLUMN > Innovation in Law

BY JORDAN L. COUCH

Lawyers are not general experts. I know this may come as a surprise to some readers, but having a J.D. doesn’t qualify you to do anything other than practice law. What’s more, there are many who think that having a J.D. by itself doesn’t even qualify you to practice law without passing additional tests. Why is this important? Every law firm is, at its core, a business like any other (if you disagree, take a look at the business license you have on file in your office). In order to be successful, you need to employ knowledge on a wide variety of topics, from the obvious accounting and sales to the more abstract client experience and growth modeling. Even in larger firms it’s common to see all of the leadership roles held by attorneys, and as a result firm operations are often run poorly and inefficiently. Clio’s latest Legal Trends Report demonstrated that lawyers are spending less than three hours in an eight-hour day on billable work and yet 48 percent of those same lawyers are failing to respond when potential clients are calling. It’s time we bring law firm leadership into the 21st century by recognizing our own limitations and learning to identify and trust the experts we need to build the most successful law firms.

Why You Need Experts

Leadership isn’t about doing it all yourself. It’s about building the right team of people, setting goals, and empowering your team members to achieve those goals. The leader doesn’t have to be the best at each role that has to be performed. A baseball coach doesn’t become a great team leader by being better at every position than the players. And even if you are the best, is it the best use of your time to be telling every employee how to do their job? Lawyers need experts because (1) we don’t know everything, and (2) we have things to do that are better suited to our skills. Sometimes that will mean hiring outside consultants. At other times that will mean hiring expert employees. It all depends on the specific need and the circumstances of your firms. Examples of both will be discussed below.

To some extent every law firm already understands this principle. Partners at firms give work every day to associates and paralegals that perhaps they could do themselves but are better in the hands of another. Yet in many other realms (management, IT, marketing) I see lawyers often try to do it themselves or worse, hire an expert and then try to dictate to the expert how best to complete a task. Does your firm have an IT expert to help you set up your computer systems? If not, do you know what “packet sniffing” and “sim swapping” are? If your answer to either question was “no,” you’re probably in the danger zone. Understanding both those terms has engendered enough fear in me that I won’t be getting rid of my firm’s IT team any time soon.

An expert: A basic example

My firm, like most injury firms, does a lot of marketing: SEO, radio ads, over-the-top videos, pay-per-click, social media, banner ads, geotagging, good old-fashioned networking, and the list goes on (including the ads you may see in this magazine). Over the years we’ve gotten pretty great at all of these, but to pretend that we have the capacity as lawyers to also be experts in each of these categories would be silly. So we outsource it. We trust our radio marketing team to advise us on the type of ads we should run and where we should run them. We trust our web marketers to manage our SEO and buy ads on the right search terms. It’s not that we don’t check in to make sure it’s working, but we don’t tell them what to do. We tell them the result we want and trust them to know how best to achieve that result.

This is not to say that we aren’t aware of and signing off on what’s happening. Our marketing consultants are expected to be able to explain plans to us in a way we understand so that we can hold them accountable to expected results. Just because you aren’t second-guessing your experts doesn’t mean you don’t need to be able to assess their results.

An expert: A more innovative example

When Palace Law began a process of firm-wide technology and systems improvement, we knew we needed help. Not only did we consult with friends who had expertise in project management, but we also decided to hire someone to lead the change in our office. The project manager we hired had training in agile project management and technology. With her help our firm increased profitability by 76 percent in one year. The practice of law is an old profession and thereby one with a lot of room for improvement. As lawyers, our training often does not include any of the skills necessary to make these types of improvements. If you don’t have the ability to hire someone to be your full-time operations manager (the title our project manager has moved into), there are outside consultants with expertise in law practice (e.g., Lawyerist or John Grant of Agile Attorney Consulting) to help you improve on your business systems.

Leading with data is a key tool for any forward-thinking law firm and it’s especially important when working with outside experts.

How to find & assess experts

Finding experts willing to sell their services to lawyers is easy (just open your LinkedIn account). But deciding who you should work with is a challenge. First, you need to decide what you want. Less time stuck in tech problems? A better tax return? Or just more free time to actually practice law? Whatever it is, step two is laying out metrics for how you will decide whether those experts have met your expectations.

Any expert you choose to work with should treat you not like a customer they are selling services to, but rather like a partner who wants to work with you to make your firm succeed. When you’re a customer, the vendor expert will talk to you about their services but won’t ask about your firm. A partner expert wants to know every detail of your firm before offering guidance on how they can help. A vendor will tell you what metrics you should measure them by. A partner will ask what metrics matter to you. A vendor will always have a way to spend more of your money. A partner will be open about the limitations of what they can offer and help you vet other opportunities to fill additional needs.

Lead with data

“If I’m supposed to trust my experts and not second-guess them, how can I also hold them accountable and fire them if they are not performing up to the standards I need?” Leading with data is a key tool for any forward-thinking law firm and it’s especially important when working with outside experts. If you aren’t measuring data, you have no way of knowing what’s working and what isn’t. With outside experts it’s important to set objective goals tied to your firm’s business plan. Work with experts to determine what are reasonable, measurable goals with definite timelines. Avoid a mismatch between your goals and the expert’s deliverables. For instance, a lot of marketing companies want to brag about how they can increase the number of calls you’re getting. But calls aren’t what you want—you want new clients, and new clients only come from a particular subset of calls.

Trust your experts (or fire them)

I’ve sat in too many meetings with lawyers who are questioning and arguing in response to everything being told to them by an expert they asked for advice. Please don’t do that. Admittedly it’s a tendency I understand. I am a litigator and I regularly have to cross-examine doctors about their medical opinions. But that energy isn’t helpful in running your business. Assess your experts, hold them accountable, but if you feel the need to cross-examine their recommendations, they probably aren’t the right expert for you. Trust them or find someone new.

Limitations in our profession

At this point you might be asking, is hiring experts really innovation? Until the leadership of most firms evolves beyond attorneys filling every role, the unfortunate answer is yes. Our CEO at Palace Law, for instance, is a talented lawyer who also has a business degree. These days the latter is at least as important as his J.D. in his day-to-day work. “This is all interesting, Jordan, but using outside experts all the time is really expensive and hiring them even more so. Plus, I can’t have a partner in my company who isn’t a lawyer.” You’re right. An unfortunate aspect of the legal profession is that long ago we installed structural barriers that make it substantially harder for us to access broad expertise in the way other industries do. Firm ownership rules make it nearly impossible to bring on a skilled C-suite that can invest in and profit along with the success of your firm. Thankfully there are experiments in other states and across the Atlantic that have had promising results allowing nonlawyers (for lack of a better word) to partner with lawyers in delivering legal services. The results out of Utah and Arizona’s experiments have been small so far, but promising.¹1 See, e.g., https://utahinnovationoffice.org/;
www.lawnext.com/2020/08/arizona-is-first-state-to-eliminate-ban-on-nonlawyer-ownership-of-law-firms.html. Lawyers have been able to partner with tech talent, marketing talent, and just simple capital to offer better services to more people. Opportunities like that may be coming to Washington with the Supreme Court’s authorization for the pilot project to examine legal regulation²2 Read the Washington Supreme Court’s order at www.courts.wa.gov/content/publicUpload/Supreme%20Court%20Orders/Order%2025700-B-721.pdf. and lawyers are the ones who stand to benefit the most. Find the experts who can add value to your firm and start talking about what a partnership might look like.

NOTES    

1. See, e.g., https://utahinnovationoffice.org/;
www.lawnext.com/2020/08/arizona-is-first-state-to-eliminate-ban-on-nonlawyer-ownership-of-law-firms.html.

2. Read the Washington Supreme Court’s order at www.courts.wa.gov/content/publicUpload/Supreme%20Court%20Orders/Order%2025700-B-721.pdf.