Build Better Law Firm Operations, Not More Heroics (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Stephanie and I'm Zach. Welcome to the lawyers podcast. Just one of the many ways that we help lawyers build healthy firms, better businesses, and hopefully more sustainable lives. Today, we continue our series with Stephanie talking to Debbie about next level leaders, and I guess the book be a next level leader, which you can get on our website, be a next level leader.com on Amazon. Um, you can call us. I'm sure we'll figure out a way to get it to you. Uh, but this one is about leading operations, which is the third of the four cornerstones.

[00:00:36] Speaker 2: So Zach, you and I have some fun travel coming up that we want to tell everybody about and invite you to join us and come hang out with us. Cause we love, we love seeing people in real life.

[00:00:47] Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in IRL, as the kids probably don't even say anymore at this point, but still Las Vegas, uh, coming up September 20th. 22nd to 24th is 8am, which is the parent company of the 8am my case and all of those that suite of legal and beyond legal products. Uh, they're having their, their, uh, conference kaleidoscope September 22nd to 24th. And if you use the lawyerist 26 promo code, so in the promo, when you're signing up lawyerist 26, uh, you get a $99 pass.

[00:01:27] Speaker 2: Oh, I think that's pretty fantastic.

[00:01:31] Speaker 1: That's a significant discount. Like that's phenomenal.

[00:01:34] Speaker 2: I was like, are you sure? Is that a typo?

[00:01:36] Speaker 1: Hang on.

[00:01:37] Speaker 2: I think it is. I think that's what they told us, but I really hope so.

[00:01:41] Speaker 1: Um, I, yeah, go, go do it. If you can get into this thing, cause it's, it's online at, uh, $995. So if you, if that's, if that's doing it, do it.

[00:01:56] Speaker 2: Lawyerist has some pool. Oh man, look at that. Like we're getting you a big time discount.

[00:02:01] Speaker 1: Come to Vegas. Let's go. Um, it'll be interesting. They've got, uh, they've got the Savannah bananas. Uh, okay. I say bananas weird, I think is what people tell me, but they've got the Savannah bananas guy. Um, come in as the, the main speaker.

[00:02:17] Speaker 2: I am so excited about this because, you know, guys know I live in Atlanta. So Savannah, I mean, it's kind of far. It's still like a three and a half hour drive, but. That's not bad. We have known about. This team for a long time. I get a lot of their reels on my social. Uh, I mean, when they came to Atlanta, you could not get a ticket. It was, they sold out. They had multiple games and it was super like the ticket prices went up. Cause we were trying to go. And I was like, yeah, it's crazy.

[00:02:45] Speaker 1: If you haven't heard of the Savannah bananas, once again, get out from under your rock. Um, they, you know, you think of the, like the glory days of the Harlem globetrotters. You know, where like they were packing and I'm, they still do. I'm sure. But the glory days of the Harlem globetrotters, when people were like, Ooh, this is a really, really fascinating way to watch basketball. That's what the Savannah bananas have done for, I guess you'd call it minor league baseball. Um, I don't know that they're technically in any one of the leagues anymore, but, um,

[00:03:19] Speaker 2: I don't know. And they're like, and they got wacky rules. Like, yeah, like check it out. But I think, and I'm sure why they, why. Um, Jesse to be the keynote speaker is the marketing machine behind this thing is working, right? Because the fact that you, the fact that anyone, the fact that people across the country are now talking about this team is the story. And so how do you take some principles from that to your law firm? I, I, I'm always fascinated to hear about these brands and I know lawyers are always like, Oh, but we're professionals. Like, we can't do that. And I'm like, stop being a stick in the mud. There's some principle from that, that you can take it and apply to your, you don't have to, you know, sing and dance.

[00:04:06] Speaker 1: You don't have to be on, but you know, it, it like, they've got some guys that, that pitch on stilts. They've got some, some people that they do some very, very interesting things. But the point is to me, the point is that Jesse Cole looked at this and said, how do we make people, how do we get butts in seats? For baseball, it's not about the baseball, it's about the entertainment. And that's what baseball is about in the first place. You know, that's what soccer is about. That's what all of these things are about putting people in seats and entertaining them. And I think that's fascinating to have shifted that paradigm and said, not, how do we make baseball better? How do we entertain people?

[00:04:46] Speaker 2: Yeah. And maybe the, I mean, we'll, I'm sure he'll draw some parallel for us at the conference in Las Vegas in September, but you know, how do you educate people? How do you get them? How do you get them excited about their, about the law? I think people may hear that and say, okay, Stephanie, whatever. No one's excited about criminal defense. And I'm like, but maybe sometimes this is what I love about our LabCon conference, right? I get to stretch and challenge people and say, but what if, and what if we went there? And again, you don't have to be ridiculous with it, but sometimes doing the ridiculous exercise, it's what lands you on the realistic thing. I think I've told, probably told this story before. If everyone's like, where is Stephanie going? But in problem solving, sometimes asking for the bad ideas gets you to the right one. So they were trying to figure out how to solve for ice on power lines because it would make the power lines break and then powers out. And it's a huge problem in the winter when power goes out, you know, people get cold.

[00:05:43] Speaker 1: I don't like it. Yeah.

[00:05:44] Speaker 2: Exactly. So somebody was like, well, what we need is a bear to climb up on top of the pole and shake the wires because that would shake the water off the power line. And then for they wouldn't freeze. So someone's like, maybe we put honey pots on top of the poles to attract the bears up there.

[00:06:04] Speaker 1: I like this. Like, like, let's take it to the extreme. Let's, let's go nuts.

[00:06:08] Speaker 2: Exactly. Where they landed of was what if we fly helicopters near the power lines and the wind from the helicopters whips the water off of the power lines to prevent the ice from forming.

[00:06:21] Speaker 1: And that's a thing that can be done.

[00:06:23] Speaker 2: Yeah. So, huh. So who knows? Maybe our ridiculousness, like it pushes you, right?

[00:06:29] Speaker 1: Yeah.

[00:06:29] Speaker 2: But beyond Jesse, they've got a great lineup of speakers. I'm on the website now, and this is going to be amazing. You and I are going to be there recording this podcast. So if you're there, who knows? Maybe you'll be on the show. We're still figuring it out. Like, we're excited to hang out, be a part of the event and see everybody in Las Vegas. Hopefully, you know, I'll have a budget.

[00:06:56] Speaker 1: I love that. I love that. Well, if you're, if we've piqued your interest, if you're part of the, the, my case, the 8am, you know, family there, like definitely look into this. It's 8am.com. That's the number 8am.com slash events slash kaleidoscope. We will have a link to this in the show notes. Absolutely.

[00:07:20] Speaker 2: Well, now let's check out my, my conversation with Debbie about the third cornerstone. And our four cornerstones of, of law firm leadership.

[00:07:29] Speaker 1: Oh yeah. Three of four. Let's go.

[00:07:44] Speaker 2: Hey everybody. It's Stephanie and I'm back with Debbie and this is part three in our four part series on the four cornerstones of law firm leadership, which is the framework that we discuss in our new book. But really it's. It's so much more than that because it's the training we're doing and it's, it's all the things, but today we're here to tackle the third cornerstone leading operations. So Debbie, we often think about leading because we started with leading self and then leading people, which is probably where most people think about when they think about managing and managing a team, but set up for us leading operations and why this is so important.

[00:08:20] Speaker 3: So, you know, as a people leader, and we say that that's what next level leader is all about, right? Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. This is the right program for you. This is the right system for you. This is the right book for you to read. And leading people is one of four cornerstones. So we talked about why leading self was so important to start there. Leading people, a lot of times when you think about leadership, what does it mean to you? People think about my people, my team, how I coach, how I develop. And then the third cornerstone is leading operations we're going to talk about today. And the fourth one is leading forward. Those are often the two that don't get enough love and attention, right? Right. So honing in on leading operations, it's how are you building the system? How are you taking all the ideas that you have and turning them into how can we make this work? It's about how we bring together, how we follow up on the things that need to be done, how we prioritize things, and how we build systems that our teams can lean into. So the work that we do is getting done the same way to the extent that that's possible every time.

[00:09:30] Speaker 2: One of the things we talk about in the book is this identity of the architect and building those systems versus being the glue and being maybe the personal, you know, we talk about heroics, right? The person who jumps in and, you know, what does that look like in a law firm?

[00:09:48] Speaker 3: When I say from a stage, like, y'all play whack-a-mole every day, all day long, or you got to do this, you got to do that. You got to go, like, open up that closet and put your superhero cape on, or you got to grab the fire hose and start putting out fires. I see the whole room of people just nodding their heads and saying, yes, I totally feel that. And so the idea that leadership in a law firm, some percentage of the time, is always going to be firefighting and, you know, jumping in and being the hero. But how do we start to flip the script on that and make it so we are pretty good at it? Protecting the time, that architect time, protecting the time when we can think about operations and we can think about systems. And unfortunately, the busy word, when we talk about this with law firm leaders, they often look at us and say, but when, when? And it's almost like if I give you a, if you give me a dollar and I give you $10 back, is that a good deal? And I think that's how we have to think about systems and leading forward is, it is investing a dollar to get $10 back. So we have to figure out how to protect that time and make time for building these systems.

[00:11:00] Speaker 2: Yeah. I often say that we do a disservice to ourselves in law firm world because we say it's something's billable or not billable. And in our minds, we have translated not billable into not valuable. And that is just wrong, right? Some of the most valuable work we could do to build our business is technically not billable to a client. But if you can solve that problem, and then it helps your work in a hundred clients, that's really valuable. But to your point, we have to stop, protect that time and actually put real focus and attention there.

[00:11:35] Speaker 3: Yeah. If you can spend an hour of protected time saving someone five minutes, 27 times a week, that math, it just tells the story itself. And even if you could save them two minutes, we, you know, we joke about the heroics thing. The other thing that we always, hear about is the death by 10,000 paper cuts, right? It's not one system that needs to be built. It's a hundred systems that need to be, needs to be built, but it starts with just building one, right? It's overwhelming when we look at the 100, but if we just think about how can we have better meetings? How do we have better touch bases? So we understand what people's blockers are. How do we take intake and just really get it right? Because intake, bad intake creates a hundred problems. Down the road. And if we could just invest in getting it right at the beginning, it solves so many of those other issues. So how do we think about it in bite-sized chunks?

[00:12:32] Speaker 2: Yeah. In the book, one of the things we do in this section is talk about urgent and important and how to triage that in what you have to do for yourself. But I think sometimes we forget, we really have to do that for our team because our team doesn't have the whole side of the field. And, and I know this happens, I can say this with our team sometimes, and I can say this with our team sometimes, and I can say this with our team sometimes, and I can think of a recent example that you brought to us that you were working with a team member on that they were like, I just want to focus on this. And you were like, that's actually the last thing I need you to focus on. I need you to solve over here. And we forget that as a leader, that's part of our job is helping our team figure out what's on their plate, how to prioritize it, and how to move it around. So the work gets done. Yeah. So the urgent and important thing,

[00:13:15] Speaker 3: let's start there because, um, urgent often interrupts the time that we need to spend on important things. And the important things, when the, when that category of tasks or things that you need to build suffers, you end up having more urgent things. So actually protecting that time to be able to build something saves you time on the, on the fact that you'll just have less emergencies and less urgency. The issue with the, with the people and helping people prioritize. Um, one of the things I learned from that lesson specifically, is you're right. I called out like, uh, that's the last thing I need you working on, but also what our team members said back to me, but that's actually something that's pretty easy for me to fix. The other things feel harder to fix. And so part of us helping our teams prioritize and really understand the difference between urgent and important is having them understand that the investment of time to do something that's hard often has a better payoff than that one small thing that they can fix very quickly. And we need them to be able to do both, you know, um, use my judgment. We want, we want everyone to use judgment, but the reality is I want people to use my judgment. I want them to look at a situation and do what I would do. And so part of what we do as leaders, as we're working with our teams and having them think about systems is having them listen to how we come to those decisions about prioritization and where they should be spending their time. So the next time they're faced with the same thing, they have their own judgment, but they also remember back to that time when we helped walk them through why this should take precedent over that. Yes. So in the last section

[00:15:09] Speaker 2: in leading people, we teach people how to coach instead of rescue, how you ask questions and lead someone through a process so that they can kind of come to that answer on their own. And now you're mirroring that and you're saying, well, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to do that. I'm that concept that we just talked about in the last section with this cornerstone, which is, you know, so they're, they're all intertwined, but it's like, okay, not only do I have to help my team prioritize, but I don't want to just rescue and tell them every time I actually want to coach them and ask them the questions that they need so they can start figuring this out. And they don't have to come to me every time to say, what should my priorities be this week that they've learned your judgment through that process of coaching them.

[00:15:52] Speaker 3: So they can then make those decisions. For sure. And, uh, the one other thing I would add to that is the concept of trade-offs, right? Every day we are deciding that we're going to work on this and there's a trade-off always to working on this. Like what are we not working on? And I think that, that as we mentor and coach our team members on the urgent and important, we should also be thinking about the trade-offs because that's a factor, not doing this work over here might have an impact on other people, which means there's messaging and cascading messages and going and letting someone know, I know you brought that thing to my attention and I have these other projects that I'm working on and I'm not going to be able to get to that right away because oftentimes my version of urgent and important don't match up to someone else's version of urgent and important. And we're all making that balance and we're all thinking about those trade-offs all the time.

[00:16:45] Speaker 2: The other thing this kind of leads us to that we talk about in the book is role and decision mapping. Yeah. So I think it's important for teams to understand decision-making authority, which is a little bit different than expectations. It's like, when, when do I get to just own the decision? When do I need to do some work and maybe come back to you and we decide together? Or when do I do the research and then I have to come back to you and it's actually your decision? And be in law firms, this is super hard.

[00:17:17] Speaker 3: It is. And, and I think it's hard because there, it's kind of hard to be a law firm. It's kind of the premise of our, our book, right? There's not always clear lanes and roles and responsibilities and really understanding who does have that authority to make decisions. And also it isn't always the same. So if you have a leader who's very busy and wrapped up in a bunch of things, you might have a lot more leeway to make decisions today, but then tomorrow, if that person frees up, they're all of a sudden going, what, why did you do that? What happened with that? Right? So I think we owe it to our team to be able to make decisions. And I think it's very important for our team members to think very clearly about roles and responsibilities. We've tried to do this with our leader expectation documents, where we say, these are the decisions that belong to you. And to be very clear, we do not expect them to be perfect in the making of those decisions, right? They still belong to them. And if something goes wrong, we, as their leaders simply say, how can I help if they've made a wrong decision? And we hope that we all learn from it. And we talk about, you know, like consequences and coaching and how do we, you know, how do we think about this differently the next time? But having that clarity around, you get to decide these things. Here's a place where me as your leader will support you in other decisions. So you bring them to me, we'll kind of brainstorm and talk about them. And then I think one other piece of this that we've talked a lot about is who are your big strategy thinkers, right? How do we empower our leaders to say, you're going to do something, big, create your plan first. Who do you want to bring into the room to really do that high level strategic thinking, thinking about how the thing you're working on affects other processes and make sure you do that work at the beginning. So before you set out in kind of mapping out what you're going to do, the things that are clearly under your roles and responsibilities that you have input from other people who are thinking about maybe other areas of the firm that aren't front

[00:19:17] Speaker 2: of mind for you. Yeah. I want to impact one of the things you kind of said in there, that's so important, which is this idea of, of being wrong. And I think one of the reasons decisions are so hard in law firms when it comes to, and I'm going to go client specific decisions. So obviously there's lots of types of decisions being made about how we run our business and how we, you know, do things, but when it gets to the work and the actual work product we're creating wrong decisions can be costly, right? They can impact a client in lots of ways, right? I used to lay, lay in bed at night and think like, is this a million? Did I make a million dollar mistake today? Cause things that I write, like that's, that's a reality that we all live with. And I think it's why a lot of decisions do get kind of upgraded to the, to the partner level, because it's like, I don't want to make the wrong decision. So I think that just one, I wanted to name that because it, the, some decisions can be so crucial and important. Although I did have a partner when I was very early in my career, he was like 70. Except for missing an appeal deadline. There's not much we can't fix because, and, and at that point I had missed an answer deadline, which is in my, I thought like the whole world had just fallen apart. It turns out you can still open it as a matter of right in Georgia, but you had to pay some fees. And I was just like, can you just take it out of my paycheck? Like I'll pay for like the client shouldn't have to, the firm should not have to pay for my mistake. And they were all, yeah, they were all laughing at me. Like, it's okay. We got you. We all made those mistakes too. What did you learn from this? Um, so, so those, those dynamics definitely exist, but I, but it also brings up a different point that we do talk about in the book, which is surfacing problems because you actually want to know as the leader, you want to know when those problems are happening or when we're traveling toward a problem, like, Hey, this deadline's coming up and this brief is not where it needs to be. You want to know that five days out, not one day out. And so how do we as leaders create an atmosphere? Where problems get surfaced, where people are willing to be vulnerable and say, Hey, I actually need some help, or this isn't going the right way or whatever it is, because I think that's a real challenge for most people.

[00:21:35] Speaker 3: Yeah. I think that that is mostly a, you know, a culture thing and a leader behavior thing, because I don't know that anyone would disagree with me saying, I would like to see the problem when it is, when it is small. The smallest, like at the smallest spot, the moment you discovered it and you took 11 minutes to decide if this was bigger than a bread box, if you wondered, I want to know about it. And so some of it is how do we create that space where it is welcome when people bring us mistakes, bring us, I think I, I think I've screwed something up. And that is a lot easier to say than it is to do. And I think to your point, from a lawyer perspective, so if you are leading in a law firm, you have some responsibility for how that work moves around the firm. And you think about new associates and how do we set them up for success? One of the things is part of your job is to surface issues. That is actually part of your job. And if you don't do that, it's you not doing your job. So your, your, your job is to escalate, but you could say the same thing about financial mistakes that happen in the finance department or things that aren't client related. As soon as you know that, problem exists, you should be willing to raise your hand and say, how do, how do we, how do we fix this? How do we make it better? So I think it's like, you, you've got to build a culture of people. Number one, being willing to step up and say, I think something is wrong. And then number two, making sure that the reactions are reasonable to that. Thank you for bringing that up. We would always rather see a problem here than here. Now let's figure out how to fix it and how to make sure that it doesn't happen again.

[00:23:25] Speaker 2: Yeah. Which goes right back to the beginning, being that architect, right? Not just firefighting, but how do you take that step back and say, is there a bigger problem here? If the same problems and the same things keep happening, how do we solve this bigger?

[00:23:39] Speaker 3: And I think that's, that's a really good point about leading operations is we spend a lot of time solving symptoms. Of problems and not really saying, why did that happen? Where was the point? And I'll give you a really simple example from something that just came up. We were working with a firm who does business to consumer work. So referral sources are wildly important and they want to like measure collections by referral source. And there's all these gaps and they're like, we need to like, we need to hire someone to come in and go figure out where all these came from. Okay. Maybe, but that actually only fixes one thing. Can we go all the way back to intake and figure out why isn't it? Well, and what we found out was the reason why it wasn't happening at intake is because they still use a paper form. That was fine. Okay. Whatever. They use a paper form or a word document. Basically they don't put right, enter it right into the system. But also the field in their system was a dropdown field and there was no place to type any text in. So if the answer, that was on the form wasn't in the dropdown, they just skipped it. And so, yes, we could hire someone to come in and fill out all the referral information, but we're just going to have this problem again. So how do we go back and really think about how do we build the system to get the output that we want instead of being so focused on the output and how we make it better?

[00:25:10] Speaker 2: Love that. So then the last thing kind of shifting gears again, that we cover, I say last, we've probably, there's probably lots of nuances, things that we've covered. We actually cover this part, but the last kind of big topic is that I think resonates with a lot of people are meetings. And we start with this meeting audit where we actually have people map out all their recurring meetings that happen in a week. How long are they? How many people are in the room? And then we really push on, is this, is this a meeting? Should it be a meeting? And, and how do you actually facilitate healthy meetings so that we're not wasting, people's time?

[00:25:51] Speaker 3: Yeah. So I think we start off with understanding how much a meeting costs at the very most, most basic thing. You know, you gave me an example of a meeting you were in where a bunch of equity partners were talking about something that materially didn't really matter, right? The location of batteries. Well, that was like a $7,000 an hour meeting. And so how do we make sure that we're only talking about things that are worth $7,000 an hour in, in meetings like that?

[00:26:20] Speaker 2: And talk about a symptom versus the problem. The problem there is decision authority, right? No one at that firm had the authority to just own a decision that was a $5 decision. So instead, because, and this is, this is problematic for many, many law firms. And we probably do a whole another show about this because no one's willing to say like, this is actually you own this decision or these types of decisions. And everyone ever, we all get along and we all agree. So shouldn't we just all, we're all partners. So shouldn't we just all make decisions together? And that's where we end up with these equity partner meetings with lots of people in the room making decisions about really

[00:27:00] Speaker 3: low value things. We're talking about the same problems over and over and over and over without ever landing on a result, right? How many times have I heard about the associates that aren't hitting their billable hour targets in $7,000 an hour meetings over and over and over again? Right. Now, two things, the meeting audit, valuable, like everyone should do that. And I think that firms fall into maybe a few different categories. The first one is we don't have very many meetings at all. So we struggle with communication. We struggle with decision authority. We struggle with who do we go to for what and when, because we aren't having some regular cadence of valuable meetings. Then you have firms on the opposite spectrum, which is death by the end of the day. And that's where we're at. And that's where we're at. And that's where we're at. And that's where we're at. And that's where we're at. And that's where we're at. There's all kinds of meetings and nothing is happening from those. And then you have people who are in the middle. They have a reasonable number of meetings, but they don't really get the traction that they want. So our messaging is not just about how many meetings should you have. It's how do you make sure that the meetings that you choose to have are effective meetings with the right people, the right number of people, the right decisions coming to that meeting.

[00:28:17] Speaker 2: Right. And then how do you actually set up the meetings that you choose to have? Again, things nobody taught us in law school, right? So is there pre-work? Is there an agenda? Are there time limits? How do you make decisions in the meeting? What's the purpose of the meeting? Because a meeting to discuss things like you just said, that should not be it. But you could have a meeting to, hey, we want to brainstorm ideas of solving this problem. I want to get other people's and brainstorming type work does happen well when we're chatting it out. Or we want to build this thing or make a decision, right? There's reasons to meet that aren't just give updates and discuss things ad nauseum. And then what do you do at the close of the meeting? How do you track who is doing what by when? I know you always do a really good job of pushing for this. Like, have we made the decision? Okay. Who's doing what? What are they doing by when? And can we do it by Friday? Right. Can we just get it done by Friday? Like,

[00:29:18] Speaker 3: why does it take so long? Why do we need? A month or six weeks or 10 weeks to do something that total time elapsed takes two hours. Can we

[00:29:26] Speaker 2: just get it done? And I think another missing piece, and you just alluded to this too, what are the cascading messages coming out of this meeting? Who needs to know what? Because what we both see way too often in law firms is not clear communication channels. And it sort of creates this, I mean, it really is like rumor mill. Well, this partner went and told their assistant and their associate something, but this one said something different and this one doesn't even know. And then other people find out from the water cooler chat and then people, and if they don't know, or no messaging comes out, right? And so then people fill in, we always say, if they haven't heard anything, they usually fill in their own story. And it's usually not the story you'd

[00:30:09] Speaker 3: want them to hear. It's a very negative story. For sure. I mean, there's so much work that could be done. And there's some really great tools in the work that we're doing. And I think it's workbook and in the book to really help you think about what your meeting structure looks like and

[00:30:24] Speaker 2: how to make it better. Yeah. All right. Well, as we wrap up, what homework assignment do we want

[00:30:29] Speaker 3: to give everybody this week? I think the homework for this week should be around meetings. Really take a look at a few different people's calendars and just inventory your meetings. And do we have a really cool tool that we can talk about? Yeah. If they want to head to our website,

[00:30:48] Speaker 2: nextlevelleader.com slash resources, they can find a meeting audit calculator there and you can check it out. Pretty cool. That's the homework. There you go. And stay tuned. Join us for next week. We're going to wrap it up with our fourth cornerstone on leading forward.