Speaker 1: Welcome to The Effective Lawyer, a podcast for ambitious attorneys who want to improve their practice. My name is Jack Zinda and I'll be your host.

Speaker 2: Hi and welcome to another episode of The Effective Lawyer podcast. My name is Kevin Tulley. I'm the Chief Marketing Officer here at Zinda Law Group. And with me, as always, is our founder, Jack Zinda. Jack, how are you doing today? Good, Kevin. Good to see you, man. How are you? Likewise. Doing great. So today we're going to be talking about management tips for a personal injury firm. Where do you want to start?

Speaker 1: Well, I want to start off by kind of laying the table a little bit and saying for the most part, most attorneys that I run into are really bad managers. And I'll admit at the beginning of my career, I did not consider myself a good manager either. And I think that is one of the biggest obstacles that holds both lawyers and law firms back from meeting their full potential. You know, one of the things that I think that people don't pay enough attention to is that management, like trying a case, like learning how to draft a great brief or argue before a court or take a great deposition, is a skill that can be developed and that you can learn how to be a good manager. Management is taking a series of steps consistently that helps your team to be successful. And even if you're not going to be managing a lot of people at a law firm, your ability to manage your trial team or your paralegal or your legal assistant or a couple of associates will pay off in spades in your ability to get better results and do better work for your clients.

Speaker 2: Do you find that a lot of attorneys don't think of it as part of their job and maybe that's why they're more focused on other areas?

Speaker 1: Yeah, I think I do. I think a lot of times attorneys think, OK, I went to law school. My job is to, quote, practice law. But within the practice of law, there's a lot of things you have to do. And in my head, if you put management down to its core function, it is how do you get results through the work of other people? So you're not the only one having to do all of the work. And really, unless you are strictly, you know, an appellate lawyer that works by themselves or a sole practitioner or an associate that just reports to somebody, at some point in your career, you're going to have to work through others if you want to get better results and actually get more done than you can get done in a 40 hour work week or 50 or 60 hour work week.

Speaker 2: Makes sense. So what are the ways that you are most efficient as manager of a legal team?

Speaker 1: Well, I think, you know, if we zoom out, you want to first look at defining what everybody's responsibilities are on a team. And let me start by saying by no stretch do I consider myself the, you know, a guru on this topic. A lot of these are hard earned results after doing this. You know, I've had my firm since 2008 and there's been a lot of bumps along the way. I mean, I think I've made just about every mistake that you can imagine. But one thing I dedicated myself to early in my practice was reading one business book per quarter on top of one legal book or attending one, you know, CLE or seminar or course on a certain topic and including that as part of my repertoire of what I wanted to get great at. And when I opened my practice, I said, OK, I need to be a great trial lawyer. I need to really understand what the law says and I need to be a great business person. And in my experience to become great at something, you have to put work in to get good at it. You know, if you're going to be a great swimmer or a great basketball player or a great trial lawyer, you have to first study and then work at it to improve. So I think one of the first things is you have to dedicate yourself to becoming at least adequate as a manager. I think you can get by not being world class, but you have to at least be adequate. And that's an intentional decision. One of the things that people do a lot is they'll get themselves in this mindset and they'll say, I'm not a good manager. And I'm a big mindset person. If you believe you're not good at something, you're not going to be good at it. If I go into court and say I'm a terrible trial lawyer, I'm not going to be impressive in front of the jury. I'm going to be really poor. And so you have to make that intentional decision. This is something I can be good at and something I choose to be good at. And third, you have to be willing to put time into achieving those two things. It's interesting that people might think of it like something you're either born with or without. Exactly. Or they think that you have to go to business school or that you have to be a manager or an executive to be a good manager or to put time into that. OK, so let's just use a few examples. Let's say you're an attorney and you're managing a team of, say, a paralegal, a legal assistant and an associate, and you're managing a docket of cases. The first thing you need to figure out is what is everyone's responsibility? And literally writing out what do I expect out of each of my team members? What are the roles that I expect them to do? And we call this an area of focus is the term we use in our firm. And so you might say, OK, my paralegal's area of focus is to ensure that all litigation items are set with the court, that all depositions are scheduled and go off smoothly, that all written discovery is returned from clients in a timely fashion and drafted in a way I can send back to opposing counsel. And what I would advise you to do is to sit down with a piece of paper on your laptop and for each of your team members, write out what you expect them to do. And if you have nowhere to start, just think about, OK, what do they actually do every day? Like what is it they sit down and do? And each person should have a different type of responsibility on your team. So you might say the paralegal's job is litigation items. The legal assistant's job is to keep the files organized, client communication, keeping the digital files clean, managing the attorney's calendar. You might say the associate's job is to do research, complex drafting, drafting demand letters, being a second in command at hearings, depositions, trials, trial prep. And then you might say my job is to be the strategist, to take key depositions, to try cases, to negotiate with adjusters, defense attorneys, to be the manager of the team. So step one, I've laid out what is everybody's responsibility within the team. The next thing is I like to put a KPI or key performance indicator that is tied to that individual person as well. Now, it doesn't have to be money and it doesn't have to be resolved cases. For example, our litigation paralegals, they have a certain number of litigation metrics that they have to schedule each month. So we have a scoreboard so we can track, OK, you have to get six depositions set, you know, a trial set, three lawsuits filed. Now, that's going to be different based on the number of teams, the number of cases they have. But, and we also don't want them to do this for cases where it doesn't make sense. The attorney is driving the decision making on it but gives them a target to shoot for. For our associates, it might be number of demands sent, research memos drafted, cases resolved because they play a big role in that. And for the lead trial lawyer, it's probably going to be something tied to revenue, client satisfaction, how long it takes to get a case resolved, what's the average result per case. And so now everybody has an area of responsibility. They have a key performance indicator. And the next step is you want to make sure they understand what their responsibilities are. Someone needs to sit down with them and coach them, OK, here's what's expected of you. Do you have any questions? Do you understand how to accomplish this? Do you have the skill set to do this? And then making sure that they have the tools to achieve it. The three words that I've heard a lot are LMA, lead, manage, hold people accountable. So you lead them, make sure they understand what they're supposed to do, how they're going to achieve it. You manage them by helping to coach them, understanding what their workflow is, teaching them how to do those things. And accountability means you hold them accountable for results. In my head, I always think of great managers as great coaches. You know, their job is to help the team achieve the best results possible. Doesn't mean you have to be a dictator or be a jerk. It means everyone needs to understand what's expected. And if they're not living up to it, you hold them accountable. And if they are, you reward them, you promote them, you give them more responsibilities, you make sure they're recognized in front of the team. So you encourage that behavior amongst other people.

Speaker 2: This podcast is presented by Zynda Law Group, a nationwide personal injury firm. For over 10 years, the experienced lawyers at ZLG have been partnering with outside counsel across the United States on all types of personal injury and wrongful death cases. With over 30 attorneys, Zynda Law Group has paid out millions in referral and joint venture fees since 2015. To learn more about partnering with Zynda Law Group, please email us at referrals at ZyndaLaw.com. We'll schedule a time for you to meet with Jack Zynda or one of our

Speaker 3: trial lawyers to discuss your case.

Speaker 2: One thing I wanted to jump back to for a quick second on the KPI scorecard. I know in our firm a lot of times those are not just for the employee and the manager, but they're actually shared across the firm. And so there's some built-in accountability just by kind of knowing that everybody's seeing those numbers. Talk about that a little bit.

Speaker 1: I'm a big fan of scoreboards. I think the more you can get both a team effort behind something and then also group accountability, the better your results are going to be. We had a competition recently in quarter one to see which team could get the most demands out in lawsuits filed. And we did that because quarter one typically is a little slower than other quarters because we're coming back from the holidays and quarter four is usually really big. And we saw really great results by adding a financial bonus to it that we don't normally give for those types of KPIs. Then we put it on a scoreboard that everyone saw in our practice management software. And then we talked about it at all hands, all the different meetings we had to promote those things. And we saw a 30% increase in our typical KPIs than we ordinarily get in the first quarter. So it was amazing to see those results. And there's a few simple ways you can do it. One is you need some sort of scorecard and that can be as simple as a spreadsheet that you circulate in an email or it could be in some sort of software. The next thing that I like to do is some sort of scoreboard. And if you can include the person's face on the scoreboard so the people at the top can see, wow, look how great I'm doing. Now, you want to be careful with leaderboards and scoreboards because they can also be demoralizing. If you have, let's say, a couple of people that are just killing everybody else and everyone else is doing terrible, that can actually lead to worse results because they kind of give up. There's no way I can catch this person. So the timeframe you pick the leaderboard to show is really important. Also, I typically think a quarter is a good timeframe because, you know, one month can be too narrow. One year is probably too long where a leader can just get further and further ahead. So a quarter is a nice amount of time that you can have a good scoreboard and a leaderboard for people to look at. But it can be the opposite if they don't have enough work to do. And you have to be really careful, especially if you're like us and we have a hybrid remote setup. It's very easy for people to get lost in the shuffle and not actually have very much work to do and nobody notices because you're not laying visual eyes on them. And I don't think that's necessarily meaning people are lazy. Of course, there are lazy people out there. But if you get a job and nobody tells you to do more than what you're given, you're going to assume this is a full workload and you're not sitting next to each other. So you don't know. So it's on you as the manager to have a good way of measuring those things.

Speaker 2: Makes total sense, especially in this day and age, I think that's really important.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, we've seen and Kevin, I don't know if you've seen this in your experience the last couple of years. There's really been a shift with the hybrid remote employees that we've brought on. During at the beginning of COVID, we were having just amazing success with our people that have been here a long time working remote. But then as we started hiring new people who had never worked at the firm, we saw a real drop off in productivity. And I think some of it was culture. I think some of it was expectations not being set. Some of it was the managers just assumed this person would know what to do. But it was really strange. We saw a huge drop off in that.

Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. I mean, it makes total sense. You've got the people that are already ingrained in the culture, know the workload that's expected of them. And then they go home and they get some good quiet heads down time and they're able to produce a lot of work. And of course, during COVID, none of us were doing much else. So there was plenty of time to put in. But yeah, as a new person, I think I've not been in that situation myself, but I could see that being something where it's very tough to get caught up to speed and be pulled along by the momentum of everyone else because you're not in the room, you're not seeing the pace that others are working at. And, you know, of course, there's a lot of folks, too, that just, I think, got burnt out on hopping on those Zoom calls all the time. And so it was it was an extra lift to manage, whereas if somebody's sitting in the same room, it can be quite easier.

Speaker 1: 100 percent, man. You know, and another thing that I think is really important, especially with the hybrid remote, is communication. And this, to me, has been one of the most difficult things to teach young managers and young attorneys is how to communicate. Now, you would think as trial lawyers we would be overly aggressive and, you know, too blunt and over the top. But what I found a lot of times we're willing to be aggressive and clear outside of the walls, like against defense counsel and in court. But internally, people have a very difficult time with balancing between being honest and direct and not telling people the truth. And so to me, what's important is imagine you have to develop a communication style that is empathetic. So you listen to people, you understand where they're coming from, you're not mean to them, but you're also clear on what's expected. And if they're not living up to standards, why they're not and how to hold them accountable and what you expect from them.

Speaker 2: Yeah, the one on one is is crucial for that because it creates a space for that conversation to take place. And kind of if you're consistent in your approach to those one on ones, people know, OK, this is a time where I'm ready to accept feedback, positive and maybe not so positive in some cases. But. I think that as maybe one of the mechanisms in this list of tips is really helpful for for making sure that that's happening.

Speaker 1: Oh, I agree, and I think you've got to be willing to make yourself vulnerable and be open to negative feedback about yourself as a manager. Yeah, it's two ways for sure. You know, and I find as we've grown a lot, my time has gotten more and more constrained and that's that unfortunately a lot of times is the first thing I tend to want to jettison and I really have to force myself know this time is really important. And I notice when I'm having a rough relationship with maybe someone's reporting to me, it's like, OK, how many one on ones have I had recently and how many times am I just talking at them versus talking with them and having a conversation? Yeah. Yeah. So some tips that you can do on communication in order to help make it more clear is remember, you know, when it comes to communication and this is helpful when you're trying cases as well, there is what you meant to say, what you actually said, what the person heard and how they understood it. So when we're communicating on management topics or performance topics or anything, really, I think of like, OK, I want to tell them what the issue is, why it matters, what I want to see changed and how that result will help them and help the organization. Then I want to follow up with that in writing and then have a mechanism that I'm going to see if the performance improved. And it could be maybe they're not doing something bad. You won't see them get better. But you have to be careful if you just say it verbally, people are going to be on the defensive and they may not hear everything that you said. And also, I found that a lot of junior managers and junior attorneys and even senior are really bad at this. Like I've listened to management coaching conversations and I have no idea what the manager is trying to say. They'll say, you know, Steve, you're really amazing and we love the work you're doing here and you come in early and you stay late. And, you know, there's just a few areas we want to talk about and they're going on and on. I'm like, what what is the point? Like, what is the issue here? Give me the headline. Yeah. And they finally get to it. And in a weird way, that creates more stress, I think, for the person being managed because they're like, are you firing me? Like, where are we going with this?

Speaker 2: Right, right. Yeah, that makes sense. Radical candor, right? There's been books written about it. And I think there's certainly ways to build that into the workflow and to the day to day, but also having that safe space for it where everybody knows, OK, this is the time where we have that discussion, I think is really helpful.

Speaker 1: You know, and I'm a big believer in outlines and scripts, like a lot of things that people assume that I do is, you know, from memory or from just knowing how to do it. But people would be shocked by how many scripts I have written out of like, all right, here's how I do a coaching conversation. Like, especially in the beginning of my career, you know, I had in my management tactics and tips that I kept for myself was always use an example of myself of something I did wrong. Like I always try to throw myself like I remember this time I made this big mistake. Yeah. And especially with dealing junior attorneys, because they're scared of screwing up. And if you show I made a mistake like this one time, it opens them up to be more candid with you.

Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. Been going back to Ray Dalio's principles book recently, and he had a similar thing where if you made a mistake and you put it on the issues list, you were fine. If you made a mistake and you didn't put it on the issues list, you were in trouble for it. But it created that same path to communication about it and a safe space to have that conversation versus people being afraid and then hiding things as a result.

Speaker 1: A hundred percent. And I love that book. That's one of my favorite business books. It's also a good audio book, too. It's just a lot of great, useful, tactical tips that you can take away as a manager. Yeah, absolutely. I guess that's why it's worth one hundred billion dollars. Did some right. Yeah, exactly. You know, and I think just be patient with yourself and be patient with your team is another important thing to remember. And, you know, you have to figure out ways to give yourself space not to overreact to situations that occur. And that can be difficult if you're in a stressful practice like trial where maybe you have a trial date, maybe you have something important going on and then something comes out of the blue that was a screw up. And I find it's helpful to have outlets of people I can talk to that aren't related to either the firm or the issue. So I can kind of get that negativity out and then have a reasonable conversation because you're going to be there's going to be moments where it's really tough. I mean, if you have a trial on Monday and on Thursday, someone screwed up something so you don't have copies of your deposition or you don't have your trial notebook ready or maybe, you know, your laptop busted because the IT guys did something wrong. You know, you got to be careful because if you blow up and they're going to quit or then we demoralized and then it's just going to be a downhill spiral.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, it's a pressure cooker situation ripe for conflict.

Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. You know, I could talk about this for hours and hours, but I think the last thing that I would leave everybody with is if you do nothing else, be intentional and intentional about leadership and management. And if you improve five percent at that per quarter in a few years times, you're going to be really strong. And even if you manage no one else other than your cases and your paralegal, it is going to have massive impacts on your results and your ability to be a

Speaker 2: great lawyer. Well, thanks, Jack. Appreciate you sharing all that information. And if anybody wants to follow up with you for more, where can they reach you?

Speaker 1: Yeah, as always, you can reach me at Jack at ZendaLaw.com or give me a call here in Austin, Texas at 512-246-2224. Thanks, Jack.

Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to today's episode of The Effective Lawyer. You can learn more about our team and find other episodes of our podcast at ZendaLaw.com. As always, we'd appreciate that you subscribe, rate and review the pod. Thanks.