Create & Sustain Strategic Visions

Build Extraordinary Teams

Inspire Others Beyond What They Thought Possible

Persuade Others, Despite Fundamental Disagreements

Create New Leaders

Increase Profitability

Leadership is about having the skills, confidence and wherewithal to make your life and your career follow the trajectory and achieve the goals that you desire.  Without the capacity to manage yourself, your partners, staff, and clients, you will always be at the effect of external circumstances.  

I work with:

• Managing partners

• Office managing partners

• Practice group leaders

• General counsel and other in-house counsel

• Individual lawyers trying to navigate, and make the most of, a new leadership or management role

• Lawyers starting their own firms

• Individual lawyers aiming to move into leadership roles in the future

• Partners who recognize that leadership skills are critical to their ability to grow their individual practices

Why is Coaching Valuable for Law Firm Partners? 

All world-class athletes have coaches, as do a high proportion of top business leaders. In a rapidly changing business environment, a coach is particularly valuable because a coach provides a sounding board and structures for approaching challenges from new perspectives.  In a busy legal practice, it can be hard to prioritize activities that are important but that don’t have the urgency of client deadlines. A coaching relationship provides a dedicated time period devoted to addressing important topics such as managing associates, enhancing client relationships or creating strategic plans. Since coaches are separate from clients’ professional and personal life, they have no agenda other than to support the client in being happier and more effective in the areas that are important to him or her.  Following are three of the most common reasons that lawyers seek out leadership coaching: (1) to Maximize Profits, (2) Increase their level of Satisfaction and Motivation, and (3) to Enhance their Sense of Control, Power and Autonomy in their Careers.

Use Leadership Coaching to Maximize Profit

Improve Associates’ Work Product and Efficiency
Until you are able to leverage your associates effectively, your income is inherently limited. Coaching helps partners ensure that the time spent managing associates leads to higher quality work product and greater financial returns.

Business Development Support
Coaching can be used to make business development plans and address any obstacles that interfere with those plans. Time management, networking, aversion to sales and many other topics can be addressed through coaching.

Alignment of Effort and Focus
Momentum and opportunities are lost when partners pursue divergent agendas. Coaching helps partners clarify what they want as individuals and engage in meaningful dialogue with their peers, leading to more opportunities for collaboration and profit.

Use Leadership Coaching to Increase Satisfaction and Motivation

Focus on Values
Lawyers generally feel most satisfied with their work when it is aligned with their personal strengths and values. Coaching facilitates this by helping lawyers to clarify what is most important to them and craft a practice that best reflects those priorities.

Work-Life Balance
Exhaustion and burnout inevitably diminish satisfaction with one’s career. Working with a coach can help lawyers identify previously unseen methods for addressing time management issues and carve out more time for whatever they deem most important.

Resilience
Even the luckiest and most hardworking partners will eventually encounter unexpected challenges, such as economic upheaval, industry obsolescence, family health issues, etc.  Coaching uses scientifically validated approaches to assist partners to build necessary skills to cope with, and bounce back from, personal and professional setbacks.

Use Leadership Coaching to Enhance Your Sense of Control, Power and Autonomy in Your Career

Persuade Others
Real power comes from the ability to influence, inspire and motivate others. Coaching helps partners communicate their ideas, plans and proposals in a way that engages others and elicits their support. 

Develop or Fine-Tune Creative Solutions
When partners have exhausted their usual approaches to problem-solving, they often believe they have tried everything. Coaching is highly effective because it provides new frameworks for thinking about and addressing longstanding or tough problems. 

Increase Leadership Skills
No one is born with all the skills necessary to be an effective leader; and the more extensive the leadership responsibilities the more challenges emerge.  Coaching helps partners identify and address these growth areas in a way that is suited to their personalities. 

Leadership Programs and Facilitation