How to be the leader your law firm needs

Law firms require good managers to keep things organized, effective and on track. But visionary, inspiring leaders are essential to firms' present durability and future prosperity. And you can be one.

“So You Want To Be In Management?” was the question posed by the title of the conference session at which I spoke this past weekend. I joked to my fellow panellists that I’d be leading off my remarks with: “No, you don’t.” Well, I was mostly joking.

I didn’t, though. The audience, more than a hundred mid-career litigators, were serious about the opportunity, or maybe the obligation, to take on a management role in their firms. They occupy the no-man’s land between older partners who’ve made great sacrifices and expect others to do the same, and younger lawyers for whom the costs of those sacrifices wildly exceed the benefits. These “in-betweeners” have to bridge this gap every day while preparing to inherit leadership roles at the firm, sooner or (if the older ones have their way) later.

Our panel aimed to help with that process, but it was relatively brief and there was a lot more to be said than we had time for. So I thought I’d devote a brief entry to pass along whatever advice I can for lawyers who do, remarkably enough, want to “be in management.”

Off the top, though, I want to point out that management is not the same as leadership. In the broadest sense, management is about organizing and directing resources (above all, people) to achieve the firm’s goals, while leadership is about developing and articulating the vision and purpose behind the goals and inspiring people to pursue them. Law firms often conflate the two, grouping the overseers and organizers with the influencers and galvanizers. Certainly these folks need to work together, but the roles are separate and call for different skillsets and mindsets.

I think this distinction matters because as a general rule, lawyers don’t like to be managed — but they do like to be led.

On the first point, lawyers tend to resist management and oversight. They chafe against frameworks and push back on procedures, because they prize their autonomy and want to work in ways that feel most comfortable and productive for them. I think this is a consequence of poor early-career training — if you learned to swim by being thrown into the water, you’ll never fully abandon the haphazard dog-paddling by which you first managed to stay afloat. The longer a lawyer practises in a self-made fashion, the harder they will resist operational discipline down the line.

Accordingly, if you have to manage a lawyer, you probably should focus less on the precise means by which they do their work, and more on the firm’s goals, the outcomes towards which the lawyer’s efforts are directed. A manager highlights and foregrounds those goals, offering (or where necessary, mandating) guidelines and guardrails for lawyers to accelerate their progress and amplify their effectiveness. To manage a lawyer, point out the destination and give them a freshly paved highway, but let them customize and drive their own car there.

Maybe the hardest part of managing lawyers is reminding them that by virtue of their membership in the firm, their personal goals are intermixed with the firm’s goals. In many cases, these goals overlap: Both the firm and the lawyer want the lawyer to make boatloads of money. But the firm also wants (and needs) the lawyer to supervise juniors, cross-promote partners to clients, and demonstrate sterling personal behaviour. How often and how effectively you issue those reminders will probably determine your success as a manager.

I’ll stop there, on the subject of managing lawyers — I’m not an expert and there’s plenty of insight out there from people who are — and move to the subject of leadership in a legal organization and of lawyers in particular, which I actually consider more important. A well-managed lawyer may sit in a high-powered car on a gleaming highway pointed towards a golden horizon. But good leadership is the ignition button, without which nothing combusts.

Lawyers are intensely task-focused people who love checking boxes and accomplishing things — but I believe most lawyers want those things to be worth accomplishing. Almost all of us entered law school with some measure of idealism about making the world better through the law, and while everything that came afterwards beat most of that idealism out of us, some still remains. Most lawyers want a destination worth striving towards. Good leaders help provide it.

I’ve been fortunate to see a number of great lawyer leaders up close, and in my experience, they share most of these characteristics.

• They’re committed to the vision. You can hear in their voice and see in their manner that they really believe in what the firm is trying to accomplish, that there’s more to practising law at this firm than counting profits. It’s a modern misconception that you can’t project strength when talking about intangibles and values; after all, those were precisely the subjects that history’s legendary leaders became renowned for.

• They’re honest and forthright. Speaking with a strong law firm leader is refreshing, sometimes like a slap of cold water. There’s no platitudes or bullshit: They are plain-spoken, direct, and completely unapologetic about caring for the firm as much as they do. And I find they’re very good at making people feel appreciated; maybe that’s because they manage to connect the person’s own values and aspirations with those of the firm.

• They fight with facts. The best law firm leaders are also the most well-informed. They hoover up data, both quantitative and qualitative, about the firm and the industry, to ensure their vision is realistic and aligned with where the (legal) world is heading. They visit lawyers in their offices to converse, listening more than talking, and they take the bad feedback in stride with the good. (The very best do the same with staff.)

• They lead by example. I recently heard about a midsize law firm here in Canada that fell apart shortly after the managing partner moved to a rival firm. I’m sure that wasn’t the only cause, but it illustrates the degree to which a leader can personally embody the firm’s vision and symbolize its credibility. A law firm leader should be, literally, exemplary. “Do as I do, not just as I say” is powerful medicine.

• They can be anybody. This is the point I really wanted to make to those litigators. There’s nothing magical about law firm leaders; they’re just people who saw something meaningful in the firm, recognized that some important things needed to be done, and decided not to wait for someone else to step up. A leader cares about the firm. It matters to them that the firm thrives, because the firm itself matters to them. That’s all.

Management is very much about how, and law firms need to pay a lot more attention to their systems, processes, frameworks, and everyday habits, because that’s where the “how” of the law firm is embedded and because the “how” is going to change radically in the next five to ten years.

But leadership is about who, and to where, and most of all, why. A strong law firm can survive the removal of old systems and habits and the installation of new ones, so long as the firm’s people believe there’s something about the firm worth preserving, protecting, and seeing through. Good leaders make that possible. And I am 100 percent certain that that leader can be you.