Next Level Leader: A Practical Framework for Law Firms (Full Transcript)

[00:00:01] Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Bernadette.

[00:00:02] Speaker 2: And I'm Zach, and this is episode 615 of The Lawyer's Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. Today, I interview Debbie and Stephanie about their Next Level Leaders program, the book that goes along with it, and the workbook that goes along with it, and all that is the Next Level Leaders stuff that's in their brains.

[00:00:24] Speaker 1: That's awesome. I'm really excited about this Next Level Leader. I just think it's going to be so amazing.

[00:00:30] Speaker 2: Every time I see or hear them talk about the concepts, about the things that are inside the Next Level Leader programs, every time I work with the assets that we're creating, I get more excited. It really is a very – I like when things are very practical, but also kind of blow your mind.

[00:00:51] Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. And it's so necessary, right? So, yeah.

[00:00:56] Speaker 2: Oh, man. Oh, man. Yeah. I think one of the questions that I ask them in here is like, can you really train leaders? Is leadership an innate quality, or is it something that you can train? It is. It's something you can train. Somebody could be better at it than others, but it is something you could train. And so, yeah, in that realm, it is absolutely necessary. Yeah.

[00:01:17] Speaker 1: Yeah.

[00:01:18] Speaker 2: Well, speaking of absolutely necessary, I, in my day-to-day, and I know in your day-to-day, use artificial intelligence in very, very different, varied ways. And I know you and I get to use it and approach it very differently from each other, even. I was curious about what you've been doing kind of to help our Labsters, to help the people that you're the business strategist of, in their practice using artificial intelligence.

[00:01:51] Speaker 1: Yeah. So, I've been doing some really great stuff in Lab with AI, and it's so cool, and it is so exciting. One of the primary ways that we're using AI in Lab is in our foundations. So you know, foundations is the course that, or the part of Lab that helps businesses or law firm owners build a solid foundation, right? And so, we're using AI prompts to help them through a lot of that coursework. And I've found that the AI prompts are really challenging them on their answers, really stretching them, and pulling out things that they didn't really know was there, but when they read it, they're like, oh my gosh, you know, so.

[00:02:46] Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's kind of my question when it comes to prompts and it comes to like using these prompts in a thought partner sort of way is like, is it doing more than just me sitting down and kind of pondering, me just kind of thinking about my business, you know?

[00:03:03] Speaker 1: And a lot of, I had some pushback, like I have some Labsters who aren't ready to do that. And I even have one who said, you know, I really want to do the thinking myself. And I told her like, listen, the AI is not doing the thinking for you, it is, the prompt is set up to interview you and ask you the really deep questions and challenge you when you give a sub level answer, you know?

[00:03:34] Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I love that. That's one of the interesting things I think of as like using AI as your thought partner is like, it doesn't, yes, AI most of the time is really polite to me, and it's like great questions.

[00:03:48] Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, you're the smartest person in the room.

[00:03:54] Speaker 2: But it will push back, it will, you know, it'll give me that flowery nicety. And then it'll be like, but the thing you're missing is this, this and this. And I find that immensely helpful a lot of times.

[00:04:07] Speaker 1: Yeah, I have one labster that I'm working with. And she's literally building her firm from the ground up. And these AI prompts are spot on, like they're really helping her get clarity on her vision, helping her get clarity. She's been setting boundaries and just doing some really amazing stuff as a result of the things that she's getting from these AI prompts. So yeah.

[00:04:37] Speaker 2: Oh, that's fantastic. I love that because a lot of times when I interact with attorneys or our labsters, people are saying, how can I use AI in my practice? How can I use AI to, you know, what should I be using AI for? And this is a really, really nice use case of just kind of like having the prompts help you query, help you discover. I love that. Yeah.

[00:05:02] Speaker 1: Me too. It's making my job even more fun. So. Ah, nice, nice, nice.

[00:05:11] Speaker 2: Well speaking of fun jobs, I get to interview Debbie and Stephanie here coming up. So stick around.

[00:05:32] Speaker 3: Hi, I'm Debbie Foster. And I'm Stephanie Everett. And Debbie and I are the coauthors of a new book, The Next Level Leader, The Four Cornerstones of Law Firm Leadership, and a new online course and program and all the things helping law firm leaders be really great.

[00:05:51] Speaker 2: Stephanie, Debbie, thank you for being with me today. I'm Zach, one of the hosts of The Lawyer's Podcast. It might be a little odd for people to hear Stephanie's voice on here and my voice at the same time. So I kind of wanted to quickly say that. But Debbie and Stephanie have written a book called Next Level Leaders and have started a program called Next Level Leaders, which we're going to kind of dig into a little bit. But before we dig into it, we'll tell people where they can find it. I'm just going to go ahead and because we're going to have multiple cohorts of the Next Level Leader program. It is an online program that you can do to, well, to be a Next Level Leader. You can find it at beanextlevelleader.com. Now that I've gotten that part done with, Debbie and Stephanie, what is it? What is Next Level Leader program? I guess, where did this idea come from?

[00:06:47] Speaker 4: Obviously, Stephanie and I have spent a lot of time working inside of law firms. And for me specifically, my whole career has been spent with larger small firms and mid-sized firms and dealing with the constant and very predictable challenges around who's actually leading and making decisions in a law firm. And from my experience, I have seen that the answer to that question or the non-answer to that question, because a lot of times there actually isn't really an answer. It's just whoever happens to be in the room at the time, leads to a lot of friction and a lot of frustration and a lot of job satisfaction issues. For a while now, we've been talking about what it means to be a great leader in a law firm. And we've done some different programs. We've brought DISC to a lot of firms as an example. And a couple of years ago, we started this emerging leader work and we started working with leaders specifically, kind of testing out some of our frameworks and our thoughts on what leadership should really look like in a law firm. And then one day, mid-year last year, we really started getting serious about how we have to take this show on the road. We had done some in-person leadership events in 2025 that landed so well and people were saying more of this, please. And we were talking to individual law firms about how to build leadership programs inside of their firms. And Stephanie and I talked about it and just said, we need a structure and a framework for how we do this. And so I built something and said, what do you think about this? And she said, I love this and this, but these few things need to be tweaked. And we did what we like to do together. And we brainstormed and collaborated and said, this is what next level leadership looks like. So what did I leave out of the story, Steph?

[00:08:51] Speaker 3: No, I think you covered it really well. And we know too, that a lot of times people are really good at their job, right? Like they're great lawyers or they're great paralegals, they're great office administrators. And suddenly we say, hey, you're really good at what you do. Let's make you the leader and put you in charge of other people who do what you do. And we know the skillset for doing that, that leadership, managing people is sometimes very different than maybe what made you a great expert at your job. And so we really did see, and I guess I should say it, we know this too, a lot of law firms don't have this training. We just stick people in this job and say, okay, figure it out or learn from the person who taught you. You kind of learn by osmosis and watching it, and we don't get a lot of the training and framework. And so it's harder than it needs to be, because we really wanted to create this like a plug and play process to make it really easy for people to show up and be great leaders for their team.

[00:09:56] Speaker 2: Yeah, you hit on something there. I was going to ask, what is the existing training framework that we're trying to shift away from? And you at least hinted at, it's kind of nothing, right? There isn't a leadership framework in most offices that this is sort of replacing. But what is, I guess, what is it that firms are doing right now that we want to kind of change, that we want to adjust with this program?

[00:10:28] Speaker 4: So I think this is a great place to talk about what we just did at ALA last week. At the ALA conference, we had a business matters session where we asked that question. We said, how does your firm develop its next generation of leaders? And in that room, we had 66 people, 67 people that participated in answering our questions. And this is how it broke down. 69% said intentional mentoring and coaching. And one of the things that I connected the dots on from the stage there is many of the people in that room know how they learned it, which was baptism by fire, trial and error, making mistakes and saying, well, I'm never going to do that again. And I think there's a lot of people in that room who thought, I have to do better for them than someone did for me. So I think that is a lot of the reason why we saw that percentage of people say mentoring and coaching. But 32% said people learn as they go with informal support. And 14% said leadership development isn't really on the radar yet. And only one person in the whole group said we have a formal structured leadership development program. And this room was a very small handful of people with less than five lawyers and a few more that had up to 10. The bulk of the people were, I think, 11 to 25 lawyers, maybe half of them were that. So this was a really great cross section of live information coming from that audience around we just kind of shook our heads and said, yes, this is what people need.

[00:12:15] Speaker 3: I think the other thing that I'm excited about with what we're doing with this book and this program is really helping people see just how broad leadership really is. Because I think probably when Debbie asked that question of the room, I suspect that we didn't ask this, but if we said, how do you define leadership or what does this mean for you? What are those mentoring programs even covering? I suspect a lot of it was around maybe giving feedback, managing people, maybe setting expectations for people. And that's important and we cover that too. In fact, I was just telling Zach that we call it the four cornerstones of leadership. And cornerstone number two is all about leading people. But I think what people sometimes leave out of the definition or the initial thought when they think what is leadership in a law firm is cornerstones one, three, and four. So cornerstone one is leading self, right? It's all about how do we show up with intention as a leader? Leaders bring the weather. Well, what weather are we bringing? Are we being intentional for our team? Are we being a good example? Are we honoring our commitments? Does our team rely on us? So it sort of starts with that. Obviously cornerstone two is about leading people. But then cornerstone three, leading operations. How do you prioritize the work of your team and manage that work to make sure that everyone on the team does the things they say they're going to do and that meetings are effective and that we're moving work and moving the organization forward and how we manage our operations. And then finally, cornerstone four, just to kind of complete out the summary here is leading forward. So what are we doing to be strategic in our leadership? How are we thinking about what's coming next in innovation and improvements and leaving it better than the way we found it? So I agree, Debbie, people don't have good training programs, but even if they do have training programs, I suspect if we had dug in another level, we would find that it was probably pretty incomplete. And what we're excited about is really bringing all this to our law firm leaders.

[00:14:31] Speaker 4: I'm sure you're right about that. I'm sure that it's all about what you're comparing it to, right? And if I got nothing and I'm having a weekly one-on-one with someone, suddenly that's everything because I had nothing. So I'm sure you're 100% right. And again, what we've talked about is the structure and the framework and the shared language. Why this program can be really impactful is not just because it's another book. It's because we are giving people tools and frameworks and shared language that will help them take this not just as something that goes into their brain and changes how they think, but it's going to change how they speak to their other leaders. It's going to change how they give feedback. It's going to change how they show up for meetings. It's going to change how they think about strategy and how they think about operations. And that's really the impact that we're going for is not just a nugget of information from another great book, because there's a million great books out there. We read them all. We love them. We read as many of them as we can, but we need it to go a level up from there. And we've already had multiple firms who have reached out and said, instead of sending a person or two to our cohort, can you just do this for all of our leaders, for our firm? Because that is a multiplier. That is an amplifier, right? It's not just one person coming back with this. It is a group of leaders who lead in the exact same environment, learning this together and saying, this will be a force for us. And so we're excited to do more of that in addition to running these cohorts where we still think an individual person can make a big impact in a firm. They can come back. It's like drop the rock in the still pond. They can come back and it can have a ripple effect across all of their teams and all of their leaders. So we're excited about both parts of this, about bringing someone in and teaching it and thinking about how we take that to an individual firm.

[00:16:42] Speaker 2: I was thinking about the idea of can you teach leaders? And yes, you can. But I think I want to kind of like go on the shared language because I think the shared language here is a really good way to even get beyond teaching a leader individually. But I want to highlight one specifically, the heroic, like going from heroics to architects. I want to give people a little bit of a taste here of like what we're talking about when we're talking about shared language. Can you all talk to me about the moving from, you know, acting through heroics to becoming an architect as a leader?

[00:17:18] Speaker 3: I think, you know, that's a great question. And we talk about it obviously in the book and in the program, a lot of leaders are great at the work they do. I said this, this is how they get tapped to be leaders. And we call that energy, you know, your expert mode, right? You do the work. And then a lot of times from there, you become the problem solver because you're really great at doing this work. You know the things. So your whole team is coming to you, asking questions, getting help. And sadly, it can be, it can be a real problem because you become the bottleneck. And we hear this all the time. We're leaders, especially, you know, we hear it all the time in lab. People come to us and say, I'm the bottleneck because everything flows through me. Or in your example of being the heroic, like the system works because I jump in and I put my arms around everything and I fix it and I keep it on path. And I do this over here and I do that over here and I just make it happen. And that is exhausting. I mean, it works, right? It is, it for sure can move the process from A to B and the clients, we serve our clients, their problems get solved. And they probably think, I mean, they may not have even realized what was happening in the background and all the heroic efforts we were making to keep it all on the rails. But over time, that is really hard and that's a hard way to be as a leader. And I think that's one of the reasons we see the burnout that we see is because again, you're the bottleneck. Everything, all the people are coming to you, all the system, everything's coming to you. And so what we talk about is you're still going to have those roles. You're still going to do that work. But if you can step back and put more energy into being a multiplier, which means develop your team and your people so that they do more without coming to you. And architect, how do you design the whole workflow so that maybe you're involved or maybe you have a small little piece of involvement, or maybe you're not involved at all because now the team is trained, they have the parameters, they know what decisions they can make, they know what's expected of them and the work can flow from here to here and it doesn't touch you or you have some oversight role. And that's where things get easier. I mean, it's harder in the moment. It takes longer. You have to be more intentional about it. But if you can step away and carve out that time to be an architect, then I think the work can scale beyond you. And then you can, to me, it's enjoyable. It sounds hard in the moment, but that's where you kind of get to step back and be like, okay, I see this whole process through and now I get to just be more, have more oversight. And then that's what allows you to be that strategic thinker because now you can say, where can we make this even better? Where's there still some friction? I've designed this system, but now I want to even make it run that much smoother or get the client experience that much better. So I think that's the shift that we talk about.

[00:20:19] Speaker 4: One other thing that I would say to that is we talk to a lot of leaders about what's next after them, right? Or what if you can't come to work on Monday? And we know that these leader roles are really essential in law firms because they are the people who put the superhero capes on and go do the heavy lifting things to make everything work. And that feeling, whatever you want to call it, heroics, whack-a-mole, firefighting, whatever it is, that is their version of normal. And what we also hope is an intended consequence of being able to think about this differently is to think about how to make these roles not so dependent on one person. And that does play into contingency planning and succession planning, which we think is really important for all leadership positions and not just for a leadership position. But as we think about how tenures are shrinking in law firms, we don't hire lifers anymore. This idea of formalizing leadership and really thinking about how you're building a sustainable practice, the foundation of that really is our leaders.

[00:21:35] Speaker 2: So I've got both of you here, Debbie being the CEO of Affinity and Stephanie being the chief growth officer, but I think being a lot of times the face of lawyerists. And so you two generally at times, at least publicly speak, to kind of a different size of law firm. And so that brings up the question to me, who is this for? Who can benefit from this in general as lawyers?

[00:22:05] Speaker 4: I've actually made that answer really, really short. I have said, if you lead people, this is for you. And the undertone of that is you do lead people because you at least have to lead yourself, even if you're a party of one, like checking in. But if you lead people, if you are responsible for people getting work done, that could include you. This is for you.

[00:22:31] Speaker 3: Everyone benefits. This book wasn't written about firm size. There's lots of stories and examples, and some of them may feel like they're from a mid-sized firm because we talk about, but there's, so there's examples of some firms with larger departments, but the stories don't matter because they, you know, the point of it is these type of problems show up in firms of all sizes. So I think anybody can really benefit. And, you know, the other thing that we haven't really mentioned yet too, is it was so big, to Debbie's point, that we really wanted to make it a hands-on tool, like super practical, you know, we're very specific about that. Like, how do you actually use this? And how do we give you the scripts and the plug and play so that you can just go and use it from day one? So it actually turned into a book and a workbook and this virtual program where people can come and learn these concepts together and practice them together, because it's to sit here and say, hey, you need to have a difficult conversation. And here's this framework, and here's the script, and we're going to help you prepare for the conversation, and we're going to help you, you know, understand how to get into it. But we wanted to take it even a step further and say, or what if you showed up with a group of people, like-minded people, and you got to practice it in a place where, you know, it's not your team member where the stakes are high, you can, you know, come in and practice with somebody else having the conversation. And so really that's the whole spectrum of what we're providing here. So people can read the book, but we hope that they'll read the book and get the workbook where there's all the frameworks and exercises and tools, and then join us online too for this cohort, because that's where we get to make it all make sense.

[00:24:16] Speaker 2: Love that. And there will be multiple cohorts on an ongoing basis. So certainly don't want to say, you know, Cohort X is coming up, but if you go to beanextlevelleader.com, you will be able to get all of the information related to this, related to the next cohort and the book and all of that. Is there anything else that you'll want to kind of leave people with on this? Selfishly, I know that every time y'all talk about leadership, a lot of times people get excited about that and they tend to listen. So yeah, is there anything else you want to kind of leave us with?

[00:24:55] Speaker 4: I would just say that, you know, we, while we did and have always said we want to write a book about leadership, the fact that we took the time to write a book about law firm leadership and acknowledge the places that it's different, because there are some things politically and culturally about a law firm that make it a little different. I'm not going to say harder or easier, but it just makes it a little bit different. And because that is all we do, and that is what we focus on, we wanted to make sure that the stories that we used and the tools and the frameworks that we were using weren't going to be, that they weren't going to be, that they weren't going to feel like you could never bring something like that into a law firm. That we really thought about who are these law firm leaders? We know their names. We thought, like, could this person bring that to their firm, right? And we wanted to really make sure it was genuine and that we were staying true to the things that we know about the common challenges in a law firm.

[00:26:01] Speaker 3: And I think the other last thing that I would say is leadership is a journey. So it's not just something, you know, we talk a lot about like, yes, you may have the title or you may not have the title, but you're not done. It's not like you figure this out and you perfect it. I mean, Debbie and I are the first to acknowledge. We struggle with these concepts sometimes. And I know even writing it, you know, I'd be like, oof, I need to practice this one or I need to be more intentional about this piece of my leadership this week. And so this is making, I think it's making me a better leader and making me a more thoughtful leader for sure. So I would just say, even if you've been a leader for a really long time, I think this is one of those things that you could read and you'll get new information or new insight or you might discover something different about yourself or it might challenge you in a new way. So it really doesn't matter where you are in your leadership journey. I think we've written something that will help you.

[00:26:58] Speaker 2: I'll second that. I've gotten some, as you can imagine, gotten early additions of all of these things. And that is something that I definitely noticed is that there are a lot of thought provoking questions, concepts, and ways of rethinking things. Even if you've gone through, you know, a leadership book after leadership book. So well, y'all, I really appreciate y'all being with me and expanding upon this. I look forward to seeing all of the cohorts going through this and getting the physical book in my hands when it comes back from print. But again, if people want to learn more about this, they can go to be a next level leader.com. Debbie, Stephanie, thank you so much for being with me.

[00:27:51] Speaker 4: Thanks, Zach.