Best Practices for Law Firm Exits with Kevin McGoff

Episode Notes

Transcript

Karin Conroy:

This is Counsel Cast, part of the Legal Talk Network, and I’m your host, Karin Conroy. When you face a complex case outside your expertise, you bring in a co-counsel for next level results. When you want to engage, expand, and elevate your firm, you bring in a marketing co-counsel. In this podcast, I bring in marketing experts who each answer one big question to help your firm achieve more. Here’s today’s guest.

Kevin McGoff:

My name’s Kevin McGoff. I’m a writer. I’m a lawyer, and a former life. I was a paper boy, flower delivery man. I did all kinds of things, done it all before I found my way to law school and worked in various jobs within the law in a small firm, a big firm. I worked for the state at one time for the disciplinary commission, and at this point in my life, I am a rider and traveler and a bicycle rider when I have the topic.

Karin Conroy:

Awesome. Kevin, thank you so much for being here. I get this topic all the time and I feel like a lot of people are very stuck. They don’t know what the answers are, and there’s a lot of different directions we can go under this topic. So the topic and the title for the show today is Best Practices for Law Firm Exits. We’re going to talk about a lot of different angles that this could go. A lot of times, I think the first thing people think of is you’re at a firm and you’re thinking about leaving to continue being a lawyer and go down that road probably under your own firm or with some friends and partners or whatever. Maybe not. Maybe that means something entirely different. Maybe that means that you’ve decided the legal industry is not for you. We can talk a lot about how difficult that it can be.

There’s ridiculous levels of addiction and issues within the legal industry that are way higher than average. And so a lot of people come to that conclusion, maybe that’s the right answer for you, but one way or the other, it’s a thought you’re having in terms of leaving. This is either you’re going in a different direction, you are rethinking your life in general, and it goes hand in hand with your book, which is finding your landing zone, which I think is a perfect topic for all of this. So where do you start when you’re thinking in one way or another, this isn’t the right place for me.

Kevin McGoff:

Right. My idea, and I did a lot of this when I, I represented a lot of lawyers who came to this crossroad, and I would always start with, you need to do a lot of self-reflection. Why do you feel that way? Is it your surroundings? Is it yourself? Is it your clients? Putting a finger on this is what’s driving this uncertainty, I think is really important. And that in my view is step one. And sometimes that’s not an easy thing. You have to talk to people too, which I think would be my number two piece of advice. I think lawyers, my experience is that they’re a little reluctant to declare that there’s uncertainty. They’re not exactly in charge and maybe not in charge of their own destiny.

Karin Conroy:

They don’t have the answer.

Kevin McGoff:

No. And you think it’s a little embarrassing that we went to law school to have answers. We didn’t go to law school to ask questions unless you had a witness in front of you. Right, right.

Karin Conroy:

Yeah.

Kevin McGoff:

So I do think that one has to be open to opening themselves up and taking advice from some trusted allies and professional people as well. I think another thing that I found in my life as a lawyer representing lawyers, that it was this idea that we can do everything. That I can be the marketing person. I can be the accountant, I can do the advertising. And a lot of times these folks ended up my office with, why is your trust account messed up? Well, my spouse was my accountant. Well, what’s his or her background? Well, they can add and subtract.

Karin Conroy:

Theres more to it. I can’t even tell you, Kevin, this is probably the most common thread through every single episode. No matter who the expert is, no matter what we’re talking about, we could be talking about social media, we could be talking about email newsletters, we could be talking about mental health issues with lawyers, anything. And the most common thread is that their ego gets in the way and they refuse to recognize ownership of finding the expert that has the right answer. And this is for me, besides kind of what you were talking about in step one and recognizing your issue, this is step one, a kind of knowing that you have an issue and then knowing that you probably can’t do this by yourself.

Kevin McGoff:

Right. Well, and I think too, the quick self conversation needs to be, I’m not the first one to go through this. You all think we are when you’re walking down the street thinking the way of the world’s on my hand. Nobody’s ever passed this gate before, but that’s

Karin Conroy:

True. Yeah. Well, and it’s like parenting too. I feel like you kind of realize at one point when it’s your first child and it’s a newborn, you kind of look at them and you think nobody’s ever known this child before and nobody else has the answers for them. And then you realize actually there’s thousands of parenting books, and there probably already is an answer for whatever this issue is I’m facing today. And as soon as you can kind of set yourself aside and recognize that, hey, there probably already is an answer out there, life becomes a whole lot easier. It’s like, oh my gosh. Yeah, that worked. It’s amazing.

Kevin McGoff:

And Karin, the one thing I think that lawyers, we have this advantage and that we’re in an industry where giving advice is what we do. And therefore when we go to our colleagues in the law and ask for advice, I’ve rarely had the experience when they said, I’m not going to help. I mean, another lawyer is going to listen to you and say, maybe I’m not the person for this conversation, but let me tell you who is

Karin Conroy:

Exactly.

Kevin McGoff:

But the idea that you’re well positioned, unlike other industries, to have people that are accustomed to answering questions and hopefully saying, I don’t know the answer to that, but I know who does.

Karin Conroy:

Yes. Okay, so let’s go through the steps. So step one, you’ve got an issue. You’re realizing that you’ve got some uncertainty around where you want to go forward. Step two, you start to ask questions, look for your resources and people who can help you out. So we’ve kind of got this part all in place, and let’s assume there’s going to be two different angles. We’re discussing. Number one, you’re leaving law or looking at some alternate thing entirely. And number two, you’re staying within the legal industry and possibly starting your own thing. So first of all, let’s say number one, you’ve decided being a lawyer is not my thing. I want to kind of figure that out. What’s the next thing that you want to start to think about there?

Kevin McGoff:

Well, I think then my suggestion would be you start, what am I good at? Where do my talents lie? And I’ve got exercises in this book that I wrote that speak to that, that you make the list. I mean, what am I good at? I’m a good writer. I’m a good singer. There’s a story in the book about a woman who left Wall Street and she ended up singing on Broadway. She had this talent that she had as a kid and set it aside to be an investment banker world. And also what are your interests, which I think sometimes may follow your talents. I had colleagues who wanted to, this one I’m thinking of, his dad was the superintendent of a big school district, and one of his desires was to one day leave being a lawyer to become a teacher.

Karin Conroy:

Oh, wow.

Kevin McGoff:

He planned this, and for him, he went another direction, but forever, that was his plan. And so I think, what are your talents? What are your interests? And I also think where have you been? I mean, what in your background speaks to you that got you to where you are today? Who helped you that those are important things. And I also think the list needs to include, okay, here’s things that I’m not interested in. It’s not a bad idea to have that list to say, I don’t want to be a gardener. I don’t want a landscaping company. I don’t want to be a lifeguard. Again, all those sort of things that

Karin Conroy:

Reminds me of when I was in grad school, we did what at the time was done through Gallup, but I think somebody else has since purchased it, but it was called the Strengths Finder. And you took this test and it literally was to try to find out what you’re good at and just as important where you’re not strengths were. And they didn’t want to call it weaknesses. I can’t remember what word they used. It was things to not focus on. So I felt like this was a really light bulb moment for myself just because it was like you’re told all through sort of elementary school and whatever, that you can do whatever, you can be anything. But as you get older and you kind of hone your skills, you can’t do everything throughout a single day. There’s only so many hours in a day. And so it’s a better use of your time to focus on your strengths.

And so that was where that whole philosophy was focus on your strengths and then those not strengths, whatever they call them, weaknesses. In my approach and style, I find great team members who have those strengths, and then I fill in with them. So for example, I am very good at systems and organizing and whatever, but the soft interaction with clients on a daily, I can do it on a certain amount, but on a daily basis it just grinds me and I can’t stand it. So I have an amazing client person who does all of that, and that’s her thing. And so you have to find a balance where you recognize those are the things that I can’t stand doing, I’m not really great at. And you have to have some self-awareness with that stuff too. So you start to kind of put together this list of strengths and whatever. And then what’s the kind of next phase? Well,

Kevin McGoff:

I think that the next phase is maybe the leap phase, right? I mean, it does take courage to change, and lawyers are notoriously risk averse, which I know that’s a fact. I never really understood why that is, that we are this way. Well,

Karin Conroy:

Exactly. But their job is to keep the client safe and away from the risk in a lot of cases. So the leap one though, I feel like this is key and this is what everybody’s like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ll do that, or whatever. But they kind of miss it. They have all these plans, but they just sort of sit collecting dust on a shelf somewhere,

Kevin McGoff:

Right? I mean, it is a risk. There’s a great story about a young lawyer who got her dream job in a law firm in Atlanta, but she liked to write, and she was doing some writing for Forbes Magazine. Somebody called up and said, Hey, would you come to New York? And talked to this guy at ESPN. She thought that it was a networking opportunity. And halfway through the conversation she realized it was a job interview. Oh, wow. And she almost didn’t go. She walked out with a two year contract as an on-air personality. She was the sports biz. Miss her expertise was in college athletics. Her comment to me was that two, often lawyers in her view walk around with blinders on, that they had the plan, but when it comes to the leap, I can’t do it. And she’s an example of a lawyer that did and has launched in. She’s not on the A BN anymore. She has other careers going, but her life changed because she took a leap. And ESPN or Singing on Broadway aren’t going to come too many of our ways.

Karin Conroy:

That’s not gonna’ happen twice. Yeah, right, exactly. So I want to switch over because I feel like this is a good segue to switch over to the other path where you have uncertainty, but you’ve decided that you’re going to continue being a lawyer and maybe start your own thing. And the reason I feel like this is a good segue is because of that leap thing, and this is where I see so many, not just the leap to actually start the firm, but the leap to take a risk with the marketing. So where we typically start is kind of branding and logo, but also the website. And what happens so often is we are given examples of what Joe down the street is doing, and what Joe down the street is doing is not the answer for you. So I can’t say this, I’ve said this so many times, I couldn’t even count it, but that is always seen as the safest option because it’s there, it’s been done, and it’s happening right now.

But what you can’t see is whether that’s working or not. You can’t see how long that’s been sitting there. So the idea that you’re going to go with that safe option with your marketing, with your messaging, with any part of setting up your own firm is a recipe for disaster. So let’s go down that road. What would the difference be if we’re talking about exiting and taking a different kind of landing zone, but starting up a new firm, what’s the first thing? I feel like there’s so many steps and pieces that go into that. Nobody knows where to start. Do I start by contacting a marketing company? Do I start by poaching my clients? And how do I do that in an ethical way? And so let’s start with one, pick any one of those questions.

Kevin McGoff:

Yeah, no, I think the starting point, having done this is to sit down with a financial person, my accountant on my situation with another and say, okay, here’s what I think will happen with these clients. Here’s my revenue stream. What do you think? Give me your view. Is this viable? Because I think in personal financial planning or in professional planning, it is what are your expenses? I mean, you have to really appreciate that as I think step A and things then flow from there. So now that I know what my expenses are, I know that I can afford a marketing person. I know that my opportunities for office space are going to be in this realm as opposed to this realm. And so I think that’s the first step.

Karin Conroy:

I think that’s important because it puts a box around all the future conversations. So I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had people who are in those early stages and they’re thinking about it, and the first part of the conversation starts with, well, it’s sometime this year and it’s like March. I’m like, okay, well that’s really broad. I need probably a more narrow timeframe than that. And then they’re like, the next question of course is how much is this going to cost? Which is also asking how much does a car cost? What kind of car? And so it’s like, first of all, you have to have some concept of where your budget is going to be. And if they don’t have any concept coming in of what their expected revenue is and what percentage of that they’re going to allocate towards marketing and what that number looks like, then basically I usually say, we got to take a step back. And until you have that number, we can’t have a conversation.

Kevin McGoff:

No, and it goes back to, we already talked about this, but I’d like to reinforce it that I can sit down and do the back of the napkin thing, but I was a history major. I get MBA, I know there’s a certain limitation there where my expectations are such that, oh yes, I forgot to plug in this expense. So yeah, I think you need to get somebody to say, this is a business plan, like a real business plan, not something you sketched out while you were watching ball game, right? Yeah,

Karin Conroy:

Right. Well, once again, I think this is the third time. Now we’re coming back to this idea of hiring the expert. I don’t do my own taxes for many reasons, but that’s only one small piece of what you’re talking about at the beginning of forming a business. So you got to get this right. This is not something that you want to look back 18 months later and say, oh, shoot, I really messed that part up. That’s just the road to disasters. Start with your numbers, get your budgeting in place and have some sense of, obviously it’s going to be a range because you’re making estimates.

Kevin McGoff:

Yes, depending on where you are in your career. When one decides to take this path, my view is you figure out your expenses first and then let’s talk about the revenue. Can I generate the revenue to meet those anticipated expenses? I think sometimes my experience as lawyers overestimate a little bit the loyalty of the client that was supposed to come with them, and then otherwise, having done the ethics work for a long time, there are a lot of possible pitfalls when one leaves an operation to do something else that you have to be careful about to do it properly and not a for ethics reasons, but certainly for business reasons. Indianapolis is where I practice law and there’s 7,000 lawyers. Something we said it’s a small city, but a big town. And so if you step on toes inadvertently or on purpose, the word gets around and a client poacher or somebody who does things nefariously, the word gets out. And that’s not a good thing. Even if you’re in New York City or Los Angeles, right?

Karin Conroy:

Yeah, anywhere. Yeah. I mean it’s such a small world with the internet now and lawyers and their review process and there’s review places all over the place where one really bad review when you’re first starting could be really damaging and you can pretty clearly put some financial damage on that. So let’s take the flip side of that. What would be some clean ethical methods of preparing for a departure with the thought in mind that obviously you want to take as many clients as you can with you ethically, but how do you do that?

Kevin McGoff:

Well, you have to be upfront with your law firm, right? I mean, there’s rules of professional conduct and while they differ from state to state, generally speaking, the client’s file is portable. It’s not a shadow that the law firm owns. There’s still law firms out there that believe that this is my property, but the fact is the client gets to go where the client wants to go, but there’s also rules about the order in which somebody approaches those clients. And there’s case law, some jurisdictions we’re approaching the client first to say, Hey, I’m getting ready to leave. Will you come with me? Is frowned upon. I’ve always thought the upfront approach is best. We had lawyers leave our law firm and all of them when they left, we patted them on the back and said, you know what? We wish you well if you want to go out on your own and do it. Some of these people we rehired in different iterations because they were good lawyers. And so don’t burn any bridges within your own colleagues. That’s

Karin Conroy:

Really important. And just because you’re a good lawyer doesn’t mean you’re going to be a good business person. These are two very different things. You guys went to law school. I went to business school, and this is where a lot of my clients decide to hire me for is because I have that expertise. And I did different stuff in business school then you guys did in law school. So if I have a legal issue, I’m not going to try to do it myself because I didn’t go to law school for the same reason. I’ve got stuff that I learn and understand and have years of experience doing from business school. The number of people who go out and try to start their own firm and actually are successful, it’s not a hundred percent. It’s been a much smaller number than a hundred. So the idea of burning bridges and going out like bulling a China shop, I’m the king of the world kind of attitude is really foolish. Just aside from the fact that maybe you’ll be successful, but you’re going to see these people in a Courtroom, you’re going to see them at networking events. This is just be a human no.

Kevin McGoff:

And where you don’t want to see them is with your name and their name on a top of a court of appeals opinion because they did a knockdown, drag out firm breakup that they spent a lot of money and in the end, everybody was upset, but I’m not sure anybody was any better off with. The day was over two years later when I’ve been involved these things, it’s very acrimonious and taxing. There’s an easier way to go about setting up the

Karin Conroy:

Offer. Well, and it kind of brings me to another question is oftentimes you’re thinking about leaving because you’re not happy. There may be some acrimony there. You may be really upset with someone, you may have been passed over or you just don’t get along with people. We’ve all had jobs like this. You still need to be professional. You still need to not burn that bridge even though it feels like they’re burning the bridge with you. And so how do you do it in a way that I just keep coming back to the ethics question. How can you take a client with in the cleanest way possible where they’re not going to have a problem with that?

Kevin McGoff:

Yeah, no. What I always counsel people was you talk to the firm, I’m leaving, here’s my date. And then you have a joint letter that both the law firm and me who’s leaving signed to say, Kevin’s going down the street. You’ll see him on Saturday morning with his desk on his back, and he’ll be at such and such a location. And if you choose to go, then you choose to go. And sometimes that’s hard to get the managing partner of the bigger operation say that’s the right way to do it, because in the end it is the client’s say, and once you sort of clear that hurdle in your mind, then it all settles as it happens. If the client that goes with is unhappy, they’ll come back. Not if you make it difficult for them to get their file out the door, they won’t. They’ll go somewhere else.

Karin Conroy:

Well, and from the firm’s perspective, the firm that’s being left, I’ve seen this countless times too where it’s not handled well, but when it is handled well, it’s something like what you’re describing. They have announcement on, especially if it’s like a partner, and especially if the firm name is changing, well, they’ll have a notice on the site for a certain amount of time and maybe even a link over to the new website for that person. From the firm’s perspective, they also add a note about how whatever that practice may be. So let’s say that person did personal injury, they talk about the strength of their firm in that practice area and how we still have the ability to, they may be leaving, but we’re still good. We still got you, we’ve got your back.

Kevin McGoff:

But isn’t it a marketing opportunity for both?

Karin Conroy:

A hundred percent, it should be for both. And your clients are looking to you to see how you handle it. This is like everything else in life, how are you going to handle this because this is how you’re going to handle me. And so if you’re going to be nasty about this, I don’t want to work with that. That’s unpleasant. So if you’re going to be professional, say the right things. I don’t want to know the drama that’s happening, I don’t care to know all of that. I’m going to assume that you guys are professionals, and then I want to see it handled in a professional way. So let’s talk more about how to get it all set up. We’re doing the version two where you’re setting up a firm and you’ve decided to go, you’re leaving. So what are some of your first pieces of advice in terms of getting that new firm going and thinking long-term about how to make that a satisfying experience for you? Right.

Kevin McGoff:

Well, presumably there’s a business plan going in. So that day one isn’t, wow, we moved the files over. I have a secretary or a legal assistant and I have clients and let’s just go that if there’s a business plan that factors in place already, and it’s going to change obviously as the years go on. But I think also it’s a function of doing good work right out of the box and being able to overcome the disruption of a move. We moved across the hall in an office building one time. It was every bit as disruptive as when we moved from the suburbs to downtown. It didn’t matter. The distance didn’t matter. It was disruptive.

Karin Conroy:

A move is a move.

Kevin McGoff:

You got to get over that quickly so that your focus gets back to the work. And I think, again, I would as a side note, delegate, you really need to hang the pictures on the wall. I mean, somebody else could help you with that,

Karin Conroy:

And maybe you won’t have a meeting for the first couple of weeks, so you can skip that part if nobody’s coming in. Yeah, yeah.

Kevin McGoff:

I mean, use your time wisely and then just you need to get out there and be seen in person, not just on the internet or on the side of a bus or however one markets that you’re active in theBar or your country club or church, whatever it is that you want to do. But that’s part of it too.

Karin Conroy:

So I wanted to step back because one thing that you said that sparked a little light bulb for me, and I feel like we talked about this earlier before we started recording, is doing good work. So let’s step back and figure out and talk about what does that mean and how do you figure that out with your own definition? Because that’s going to mean something different to every single person on the planet, not just lawyers, but first of all, how do you figure that out and then how do you translate that into your business plan?

Kevin McGoff:

Right. Well, I think doing good work, first of all, you have to have a certain level of competence. So the person that leaves a law firm is probably been brought along to some degree to be able to say, okay, I can handle this. But then if I started out doing criminal defense and family law and some personal injury, it won’t be very long in my view in a career these days to say, I need to shed some things. And I think that’s an opportunity for growth as a lawyer is in the subtraction of saying, if I get rid of, in my own experience, the criminal defense law after about 30 years to say I’m going to concentrate more on the family law and ethics work. And that I thought made me more proficient at doing what I was doing. Now, certainly there’s economic reasons, and that’s another one of those leaps of saying, I’m going to cut off an income stream. But if you’ve set up your new firm properly, you’ve got somebody in there that’s doing the criminal defense work so that when those clients come, you say, Karin’s going to take this case I’ll supervise and

Karin Conroy:

All that. Maybe you just pull someone in what I was talking about earlier with my client manager where this is my weakness, and so I pull someone in who has that strength. But I’m wondering when you decided, you took a look at the areas you were covering and you decided, I’m done with criminal defense, was there also a mental health issue there too? The reason I’m asking is I’ve seen this over and over. A lot of criminal defense attorneys, we work with burnout. They get to a point where they’re like, okay, this was great for a while and now I need something else. Or am I just kind of making assumptions?

Kevin McGoff:

No, not at all. And I think burnout’s a whole separate issue. And there’s some lawyers that I know that are really invested in that, and there is a notion that the idea of burnout is it’s less about you just working all the time and it’s more about you have reached a point in your career, in your life, perhaps age related, not necessarily so where your mind and body doesn’t want to do this anymore. And accepting that is difficult. I think recognize that it is, first of all, difficult, and then once it’s recognized, again, going back to the sort of the macho lawyer image, it’s an admission that this is a part of my life that I need to get rid of because of what you think is a deficiency, but it’s not necessarily a deficiency. We think it is. Oh, okay, I’m too old to do criminal defense work. That means I’m old. No, that’s not true.

Karin Conroy:

No, and even from my own experience, it’s not even necessarily a certain type of work for me, it was recognizing red flags for red and green flags for the right kind of client. So I would regularly get clients who felt like they were hiring just sort of a admin and they were going to micromanage not a good fit for me or whatever. I have a list of things that, and I just also know inherently in my gut when I’m talking to someone, if this is going to be a good fit, if they’re saying the right kind of things and whether it’s talking to a client or doing a certain kind of work, there was one person who was doing some coaching at one point and talked about just if you kind of tune in to the way things feel in your body, when I’m doing something I don’t enjoy, it just feels disgusting.

I don’t feel good. It impacts my whole day and it spirals in my brain. Whatever your processing methods of processing are, it’s there, and you already know this, and all of a sudden when you start thinking about it and recognizing it, you’ll see the patterns. This thing, and I’m feeling the same way again about this thing, whether it’s a certain kind of client, certain kind of work that you’re doing, maybe it’s walking into your office building, whatever it is, it’s when you have that feeling that is not aligned with this path that you want to go forward with, you need to pay attention to that. And that’s the piece where you’re like, okay, this is not going to be sustainable for my entire career. Once I figured that out and started eliminating that, it wasn’t a reduction. I made way more money. I had way better clients. Things went through the roof in all positive directions. So this isn’t like we’re going to pull back and you’re going to be eating ramen noodles for lunch for the next three years. For me, it was a positive in every direction. So just because you’re cutting out a practice area feels like maybe it’ll be a financial blow, but maybe not. Maybe you’re going to be really specialized in another area and that will more than make up for that.

Kevin McGoff:

Yeah, no, I’ve seen that happen. It happened to me. It’s exactly the same. I totally agree with that. The other thing, observation I would make along these lines is when you venture out that you make good hiring decisions,

Karin Conroy:

Oh my gosh, yes. And

Kevin McGoff:

Once you make those good hires that you treat those folks well, because for a small law firm, for a solo practitioner, one of my pitches is you have this opportunity that the big firm lawyers don’t necessarily have in picking your successor and creating a plan for you. You don’t have to leave, but you want to not work Fridays anymore. I mean, it’s a lot easier to do when you hired the right person and treated them well and trust them and made the promise perhaps that the one day this will be yours thing, but you treat ’em as if that’s going to be true. Nobody necessarily wants to think about that when they’re 35 or 40, but when they’re 60, if they did it right, they’re going to be really glad that they did to say, I took care of car and all these years and now it’s my time to go off and travel and do what I want to do.

Karin Conroy:

When I was 35 or 40, I wanted to be like, okay, next year when I retire. Exactly. That didn’t happen. That ain’t right. Well, yeah. And if you don’t have the dream and think about it and put the plan in place, it’s definitely not going to happen. I feel like this is another good segue into the book review because we’re kind of talking about big life plans, how it fits into your goals, but also your life in general. So it’s time for the thought leaders library. Remember, our website has a curated collection of top book picks from our guests. So Kevin, what’s the one book that you believe every lawyer should have on their bookshelf?

Kevin McGoff:

It is a book by a fellow by the name of Arthur Brooks. He’s a sociologist. He teaches at Harvard, but he’s a fairly prolific writer. He’s on the fighting on the internet with ease, and one of his books is called From Strength to Strength, and that is a 2022 publication that I recommend during every program that I present because he’s looked at the evolution of the career of a professional person and he looks at it from the perspective of a fellow that he was a professional musician, he played the oboe, and he realized when he was in his late twenties that he could no longer play with the proficiency that he played 10 years earlier, and he’s 28. And it’s like he’s a young guy and he realizes that fact. I think one of the great takeaways from that is his talk about intelligence that in the early stages of your career that we’re building this fluid intelligence that we work a lot, put a lot of hours in, we learn a lot our ability to manage things that take on in our world of lawyers, bigger cases and more complicated things. Your analytical abilities are great, but they do diminish. And what he says is, and I buy into this idea that’s the fluid intelligence, but the crystallize intelligence is all that we did in our twenties and thirties and forties, fifties is now crystallized, and you have this ability now to share that. And when he talks about it’s wisdom passing and knowledge passing because you do get wiser as you get older. And I thought my father was full of it when he said that, but he’s proved himself correct.

Karin Conroy:

Right. But that shows your kind of young ignorance also. That’s something you come to realize as you get older. I absolutely love Albert Brooks. I feel like he does this amazing combination of topics that he covers, and I feel like this goes hand in hand with the David Brooks book called Second Mountain, where he talks a lot about you go through life and you hit your first mountain. It’s a typical sort of career path or life path, whatever you’re doing in life, and you kind of go through and you have a career and then you hit a valley also kind of like the hero’s journey. You hit this valley and you have some sort of dark event where you either just fall out of love with it or something happens. You just realize that it’s not the right thing, and this is perfect for our topic also.

But then you have the chance to create the second mountain. And the second mountain is where you really figure out where your calling is. You figure out the true meaning of your community, your life, your career, and they both have the last name Brooks. So you could be in the same section of the library and find both books. And I think they go hand in hand. I love this idea of this moment where you’re on the second mountain, but then you take the intelligence that Albert Brooks is talking about. That’s this crystallized intelligence you’ve got over the course of your experience, and you find a way to really use that to catapult whatever this next thing is, whether you’re deciding to be a lawyer and start the next firm or not, whatever that might look like to recognize that. Because I think what I see all the time is people get really caught up in, I’m going to start this next thing. Let me see where everybody else is and what they’re doing, and then I’ll just do that. And maybe that’s the easy answer, which it’s not the right thing to do that I’ve seen work countless times is to take that expertise and to take that crystallized knowledge that you specifically have that’s different and unique about you, and use that to take you forward, not what other people are doing. So once again, I’m my soapbox there. No,

Kevin McGoff:

There’s so many snippets. His book, and he talks about satisfaction a lot, and he crystallizes that by saying that satisfaction isn’t about chasing bigger and bigger things. It’s about paying attention to smaller and smaller things. And if you think about that for a minute, it’s a little hard to get your mind around because we tend to chase the bigger things because the bigger is better, all that.

Karin Conroy:

So much energy is put on that, and so much focus is put on the big things. And you see this, the example I am thinking of is on websites that lead with all the dollar signs. We’ve won these millions of dollars for our clients and 8 million here, 10 million, it’s all the dollar signs. And it’s like there is a client who wants to see that, but is that the client you want? And if that’s not the client you want, then we’ve got a problem. And that’s not what you necessarily should be leading with is all those dollar signs you should be leading with what they really care about, what is driving them to contact you. Okay. Kevin, what is one thing that that works?

Kevin McGoff:

Well, I think what I’d say is certainly to the marketing world, you need to understand your product. And if you’re a lawyer, your product is yourself or your law firm. And my suggestion is that you not drive your career. Maybe you drive yourself home some night where you leave the office and you get back at the driveway and say, how’d I get here? I don’t know. I made it safely. And I think a career can be like that as well to wake up and say, how did I get here? And so what works, I think, and I’ve had several lawyers who’ve made this work for themselves, is to make yourself a project the same that you make your clients a project. And I’m a litigator, right? So I have a to-do list of witnesses and people I need to interview and motions that need to be filed and the timeline to do that thing. And I had a successful lawyer tell me that she had a side project, she invented a game, and the game became popular in Europe. I said, how’d you find time as a public defender to do that? And she said, I made myself a project and it went on my calendar and it worked. And it’s like anything else. It does work if you budget that time for yourself and make it sacred,

Karin Conroy:

Right? Wake up basically don’t be in that car. I love that visual because we’ve all done it where all of a sudden you look around, it’s like I was totally in some other place in my mind. I was having conversations with other people. I was in some other state, but luckily some little part of my brain was taking control of the car. But if that’s the majority of, I think the way people are driving their career too, they’re just kind of on autopilot. And so the first thing is wake up and make a decision that you’re going to make a change. If that’s where we started the episode, you’ve decided that this isn’t right anymore, and you’re going to make that change. But you need to commit to actually making that happen and not just keep thinking about it and what’s going to be that first step that you do. Awesome. Kevin McGough is the author of Finding Your Landing Zone. We also on the show notes, we will have an a discount for the book if you want to check that out. But thank you so much. This was such an awesome conversation. I feel like we covered everything, some practical stuff, some philosophical, we covered it all.

Kevin McGoff:

It was a great way to spend part of the afternoon. Thanks for having me with you, Karin.

Karin Conroy:

Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Counsel Cast podcast. Be sure to visit our website at Counsel Cast dot com for the resources mentioned on the episode and to give us your feedback. If you enjoyed this episode, I would appreciate if you could rate and review the podcast on Apple and subscribe to your favorite podcast platform. See you on the next one.

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