Consulting

Firm Leader draws on 50 years of combined experience – much of it inside law firms – to address the problems and opportunities facing practice and industry groups, client teams, and individual partners in a competitive and unstable world. We help them to meet the challenges they face and, often, to recognize them as transformative opportunities.

Our approach is pragmatic and efficient, and we do not typically engage in open-ended, lengthy consulting engagements. We focus on fully understanding the problem or opportunity your firm wants to address, collaborating on the best approach for your firm, and then working with you to produce results quickly.

We provide consulting services primarily in the following areas:

Strategic Planning and Execution

Groups and client teams often struggle to create plans that all partners “own” and execute on. We help them to design planning processes that engage their members – and then to produce results.

Effective Leadership

We consult with firms and individual leaders to enable partners to lead effectively even when they devote only part of their time to leading and when the group they lead is large and complex.

Talent Management

As clients press for efficiency as well as quality, firms must draw the best possible performance from all their lawyers and persuade the good ones to stay. We help firms and practice groups create processes that lead lawyers at all levels to do their best work and remain committed to the firm. Among other areas of focus, we:

• Advise about steps firms can take to support the changes in behavior they would like to result from their training programs.
• Design and conduct upward and 360-degree reviews.
• Advise on improvements to evaluation processes and competency frameworks.

Group and Team Performance

We design interventions to create and sustain a high-performance culture, including by improving leadership, designing systems to enhance a team’s effectiveness, addressing tensions among a group’s members, and creating a sense of common purpose. We suit our approach to the group and its situation, drawing on an array of resources and methods that include interviews, facilitated discussions among the group’s members, surveys and assessments, the creation of group communication and planning processes, and leadership training.