Leading Law Firm Operations: Building Systems That Reduce the Daily Firefighting, with Debbie Foster & Stephanie Everett

Episode Notes

Transcript

Stephanie Everett:

Hi, I’m Stephanie.

Zack Glaser:

And I’m Zack. Welcome to The Lawyerist Podcast, just one of the many ways that we help lawyers build healthy firms, better businesses, and hopefully more sustainable lives. Today, we continue our series with Stephanie talking to Debbie about Next Level Leaders, and I guess the book Be A Next Level Leader, which you can get on our website, beanextlevelleader.com, on Amazon. You can call us, I’m sure we’ll figure out a way to get it to you. But this one is about leading operations, which is the third of the four cornerstones.

Stephanie Everett:

So Zack, you and I have some fun travel coming up that we want to tell everybody about and invite you to join us and come hang out with us because we love seeing people in real life.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, yeah. In IRL, as the kids probably don’t even say anymore at this point, but still, Las Vegas coming up September 22nd to 24th is 8:00 AM, which is the parent company of the 8:00 AM MyCase and all of those that suite of legal and beyond legal products. They’re having their conference Kaleidoscope September 22nd to 24th. And if you use the Lawyerist26 promo code, so in the promo when you’re signing up, Lawyerist26, you get a $99 pass. Wow. I

Stephanie Everett:

Think

Zack Glaser:

That’s

Stephanie Everett:

Pretty fantastic.

Zack Glaser:

That’s a significant discount.That’s phenomenal.

Stephanie Everett:

I was like, “Are you sure? Is that a typo?”

Zack Glaser:

Hang on.

Stephanie Everett:

I think it is. I think that’s what they told us, but I really hope so.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah. Go do it. If you can get into this thing, because it’s online at $995. So if that’s doing it, do it.

Stephanie Everett:

Lawyers has some pool, man. Look at that. We’re getting you a big time discount.

Zack Glaser:

Come to Vegas. Let’s go. It’ll be interesting. They’ve got the Savannah Bananas. Okay, I say Bananas weird, I think is what people tell me, but they’ve got the Savannah Bananas guy coming as the main speaker.

Stephanie Everett:

I am so excited about this because guys know I live in Atlanta, so Savannah, I mean, it’s kind of far. It’s still a three and a half hour drive.

Zack Glaser:

That’s

Stephanie Everett:

Not bad. But we have known about this team for a long time. I get a lot of their reels on my social. I mean, when they came to Atlanta, you could not get a ticket. They sold out. They had multiple games and it was super. The ticket prices went up because we were trying to go and I was like,

Zack Glaser:

“This

Stephanie Everett:

Is crazy.”

Zack Glaser:

If you haven’t heard of the Savannah Bananas, once again, get out from under your rock. You think of the glory days of the Harlem Globetrotters where they were packing. And they still do, I’m sure. But the glory days of the Harlem Globetrotters, when people were like, “Ooh, this is a really, really fascinating way to watch basketball.” That’s what the Savannah Bananas have done for, I guess you’d call it minor league baseball. I don’t know that they’re technically in any one of the leagues anymore, but –

Stephanie Everett:

I don’t know. And they got wacky rules.

Yeah, check it out. But I think, and I’m sure why 8:00 AM has invited Jesse to be the keynote speaker is the marketing machine behind this thing is working because the fact that anyone, the fact that people across the country are now talking about this team is the story. And so how do you take some principles from that to your law firm? I’m always fascinated to hear about these brands and I know lawyers are always like, “Oh, but we’re professionals. We can’t do that.” And I’m like, “Stop being a stick in the mud.” There’s some principle from that that you can take it and apply to your. You don’t have to sing and dance.

Zack Glaser:

You don’t have to be on

Stephanie Everett:

Stilts.

Zack Glaser:

But maybe. But they’ve got some guys that pitch on stilts. They’ve got some people that they do some very, very interesting things. But the point is, to me, the point is that Jesse Cole looked at this and said, “How do we get butts in seats for baseball? It’s not about the baseball. It’s about the entertainment.” And that’s what baseball is about in the first place.That’s what soccer is about. All of these things are about putting people in seats and entertaining them. And I think that’s fascinating to have shifted that paradigm and said, “Not how do we make baseball better? How do we entertain people?”

Stephanie Everett:

I’m sure he’ll draw some parallel for us at the conference in Las Vegas in September, but how do you educate people? How do you get them excited about the Law? I think people

Zack Glaser:

May

Stephanie Everett:

Hear that and say, “Okay, Stephanie, whatever. No one’s excited about criminal defense.” And I’m like, “But maybe.” Sometimes this is what I love about our LabCon conference. I get to stretch and challenge people and say, “But what if? And what if we went there?” And again, you don’t have to be ridiculous with it, but sometimes doing the ridiculous exercise, it’s what lands you on the realistic thing. I think I’ve probably told this story before if everyone’s like, “Where is Stephanie going?” But in problem solving, sometimes asking for the bad ideas gets you to the right one. So they were trying to figure out how to solve for ice on power lines because it would make the power lines break and then power’s out and it’s a huge problem in the winter when power goes out, people get cold.

Zack Glaser:

I don’t like it. Yeah.

Stephanie Everett:

Exactly. So somebody was like, “Well, what we need is a bear to climb up on top of the pole and shake the wires because that would shake the water off the power lines and therefore they wouldn’t freeze.” So someone’s like, “Maybe we put honey pots on top of the poles to attract the bears up there.”

Zack Glaser:

I like this. Let’s take it to the extreme. Let’s go nuts. Exactly.

Stephanie Everett:

Where they landed of was what if we fly helicopters near the power lines and the wind from the helicopters whips the water off of the power lines to prevent the ice from forming?

Zack Glaser:

And that’s a thing that can be done.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah. So who knows? Maybe our ridiculousness, it pushes you, right?

Zack Glaser:

Yeah.

Stephanie Everett:

But beyond Jesse, they’ve got a great lineup of speakers. I’m on the website now. A heck of a lineup. And this is going to be amazing. You and I are going to be there recording this podcast. So if you’re there, who knows? Maybe you’ll be on the show. We’re still figuring it out. We’re excited to hang out, be a part of the event and see everybody in Las Vegas. Hopefully, I’ll have a budget.

Zack Glaser:

I love that. I love that. Well, if we’ve piqued your interest, if you’re part of MyCase, the 80 AM family there, definitely look into this. It’s 8am.com. That’s the number 8am.com/events/kaleidoscope. We will have a link to this in the show notes. Absolutely.

Stephanie Everett:

Well, now let’s check out my conversation with Debbie about the third cornerstone in our four cornerstones of Law Firm leadership.

Zack Glaser:

Oh yeah, three of four. Let’s go.

Stephanie Everett:

Hey everybody, it’s Stephanie and I’m back with Debbie. And this is part three in our four part series on the four cornerstones of Law Firm Leadership, which is the framework that we discuss in our new book. But really it’s so much more than that because it’s the training we’re doing and it’s all the things. But today we’re here to tackle the third cornerstone, leading operations. So Debbie, we often think about leading. We started with leading self and then leading people, which is probably where most people think about when they think about managing and managing a team, but set up for us leading operations and why this is so important.

Debbie Foster:

So as a people leader, and we say that that’s what Next Level Leader is all about, right? If you lead people, this is the right program for you. This is the right system for you. This is the right book for you to read. And leading people is one of four cornerstones. So we talked about why leading self was so important to start there. Leading people, a lot of times when you think about leadership, what does it mean to you? People think about my people, my team, how I coach, how I develop. And then the third cornerstone is leading operations we’re going to talk about today, and the fourth one is leading forward. Those are often the two that don’t get enough love and attention, right? So honing in on leading operations, it’s how are you building the system? How are you taking all the ideas that you have and turning them into how can we make this work?

It’s about how we bring together, how we follow up on the things that need to be done, how we prioritize things, and how we build systems that our teams can lean into. So the work that we do is getting done the same way to the extent that that’s possible every time.

Stephanie Everett:

One of the things we talk about in the book is this identity of the architect and building those systems versus being the glue and being maybe the personal. We talk about heroics, the person who jumps in and what does that look like in a law firm?

Debbie Foster:

When I say from a stage like, “Y’all play whack-a-mole every day, all day long,” or, “You got to go open up that closet and put your superhero cape on, or you got to grab the fire hose and start putting out fires.” I see the whole room of people just nodding their heads and saying, “Yes, I totally feel that.” And so the idea that leadership in a law firm, some percentage of the time is always going to be firefighting and jumping in and being the hero, but how do we start to flip the script on that and make it so we are protecting the time, that architect time, protecting the time when we can think about operations and we can think about systems? And unfortunately, the busy word, when we talk about this with law firm leaders, they often look at us and say, “But when?

When?” And it’s almost like if you give me a dollar and I give you $10 back, is that a good deal? I think that’s how we have to think about systems and leading forward is it is investing a dollar to get $10 back. So we have to figure out how to protect that time and make time for building these systems.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah. I often say that we do a disservice to ourselves in law firm world because we say it’s something’s billable or not billable, and in our minds we have translated not billable into not valuable, and that is just wrong. Some of the most valuable work we could do to build our business is technically not billable to a client, but if you can solve that problem and then it helps your work in a hundred clients, that’s really valuable. But to your point, we have to stop, protect that time and actually put real focus and attention there.

Debbie Foster:

Yeah. If you can spend an hour of protected time saving someone five minutes, 27 times a week, that math, it just tells the story itself. And even if you could save them two minutes, we joke about the heroics thing. The other thing that we always hear about is the death by 10,000 paper cuts, right? It’s not one system that needs to be built. It’s a hundred systems that needs to be built, but it starts with just building one, right? It’s overwhelming when we look at the 100, but if we just think about how can we have better meetings, how do we have better touch bases so we understand what people’s blockers are? How do we take intake and just really get it right? Because bad intake creates a hundred problems down the road, and if we could just invest in getting it right at the beginning, it solves so many of those other issues.

So how do we think about it in bite-sized chunks?

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah. In the book, one of the things we do in this section is talk about urgent and important and how to triage that, which you have to do for yourself, but I think sometimes we forget we really have to do that for our team because our team doesn’t have the whole side of the field. I know this happens, I can say this with our team sometimes, and I can think of a recent example that you brought to us that you were working with a team member on that they were like, “I just want to focus on this.” And you were like, “That’s actually the last thing I need you to focus on. I need

Zack Glaser:

You to

Stephanie Everett:

Solve over here.” We forget that as a leader, that’s part of our job is helping our team figure out what’s on their plate, how to prioritize it, and how to move it around so the work gets done.

Debbie Foster:

Yeah. So the urgent and important thing, let’s start there because urgent often interrupts the time that we need to spend on important things. And the important things, when that category of tasks or things that you need to build suffers, you end up having more urgent things. So actually protecting that time to be able to build something saves you time on the fact that you’ll just have less emergencies and less urgency. The issue with the people and helping people prioritize, one of the things I learned from that lesson specifically is you’re right, I called out that’s the last thing I need you working on, but also what our team members said back to me, but that’s actually something that’s pretty easy for me to fix.

The other things feel harder to fix. And so part of us helping our teams prioritize and really understand the difference between urgent and important is having them understand that the investment of time to do something that’s hard often has a better payoff than that one small thing that they can fix very quickly. And we need them to be able to do both. Use my judgment. We want everyone to use judgment, but the reality is I want people to use my judgment. I want them to look at a situation and do what I would do. Part of what we do as leaders, as we’re working with our teams and having them think about systems is having them listen to how we come to those decisions about prioritization and where they should be spending their time. So the next time they’re faced with the same thing, they have their own judgment, but they also remember back to that time when we helped walk them through why this should take precedent over that.

Stephanie Everett:

Yes. So in the last section in leading people, we teach people how to coach instead of rescue, how you ask questions and lead someone through a process so that they can kind of come to that answer on their own. Now you’re mirroring that concept that we just talked about in the last section with this cornerstone, which is. They’re all intertwined, but it’s like, okay, not only do I have to help my team prioritize, but I don’t want to just rescue and tell them every time. I actually want to coach them and ask them the questions that they need so they can start figuring this out and they don’t have to come to me every time to say, “What should my priorities be this week?” That they’ve learned your judgment through that process of coaching them so they can then make those decisions.

Debbie Foster:

For sure. And the one other thing I would add to that is the concept of trade-offs, right? Every day we are deciding that we’re going to work on this and there’s a trade off always to working on this, like what are we not working on? I think that as we mentor and coach our team members on the urgent and important, we should also be thinking about the trade-offs because that’s a factor. Not doing this work over here might have an impact on other people, which means there’s messaging and cascading messages and going and letting someone know, “I know you brought that thing to my attention and I have these other projects that I’m working on and I’m not going to be able to get to that right away because oftentimes my version of urgent and important don’t match up to someone else’s version of urgent and important, and we’re all making that balance and we’re all thinking about those trade-offs all the time.

Stephanie Everett:

The other thing this kind of leads us to that we talk about in the book is role in decision mapping. I think it’s important for teams to understand decision-making authority, which is a little bit different than expectations. It’s like when do I get to just own the decision? When do I need to do some work and maybe come back to you and we decide together? Or when do I do the research and then I have to come back to you and it’s actually your decision? In law firms, this is super hard.

Debbie Foster:

It is. I think it’s hard because it’s kind of the premise of our book, right? There’s not always clear lanes and roles and responsibilities and really understanding who does have that authority to make decisions and also it isn’t always the same. So if you have a leader who’s very busy and wrapped up in a bunch of things, you might have a lot more leeway to make decisions today, but then tomorrow if that person frees up, they’re all of a sudden going,” Why did you do that? What happened with that? “So I think we owe it to our team members to think very clearly about roles and responsibilities. We’ve tried to do this with our leader expectation documents where we say,” These are the decisions that belong to you. “And to be very clear, we do not expect them to be perfect in the making of those decisions, right?

They still belong to them. And if something goes wrong, we as their leaders simply say,” How can I help if they’ve made a wrong decision? “And we hope that we all learn from it and we talk about consequences and coaching and how do we think about this differently the next time? But having that clarity around you get to decide these things, here’s a place where me as your leader will support you in other decisions. So you bring them to me, we’ll kind of brainstorm and talk about them. And then I think one other piece of this that we’ve talked a lot about is who are your big strategy thinkers? How do we empower our leaders to say, you’re going to do something big, create your plan first. Who do you want to bring into the room to really do that high level strategic thinking, thinking about how the thing you’re working on affects other processes and make sure you do that work at the beginning so before you set out in kind of mapping out what you’re going to do, the things that are clearly under your roles and responsibilities, that you have input from other people who are thinking about maybe other areas of the firm that aren’t front of mind for you.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah. I want to unpack one of the things you kind of said in there that’s so important, which is this idea of being wrong. I think one of the reasons decisions are so hard in law firms when it comes to, and I’m going to go client specific decisions. So obviously there’s lots of types of decisions being made about how we run our business and how we do things, but when it gets to the work and the actual work product we’re creating, wrong decisions can be costly, right? They can impact a client in lots of ways, right? I used to lay in bed at night and think, “Did I make a million dollar mistake today?” That’s a reality that we all live with, and I think it’s why a lot of decisions do get kind of upgraded to the partner level because it’s like, “I don’t want to make the wrong decision.” So I think that just one, I wanted to name that because some decisions can be so crucial and important.

Although I did have a partner when I was very earlier in my career, he was like 70, except for missing an appeal deadline, there’s not much we can’t fix. And at that point I had missed an answer deadline, which I thought the whole world had just fallen apart. It turns out you can still open it as a matter of right in Georgia, but you had to pay some fees and I was just like, “Can you just take it out of my paycheck? I’ll pay for. The firm should not have to pay for my mistake.” And they were all laughing at me like, “It’s okay. We got you. We all made those mistakes too. What did you learn from this?” So those dynamics definitely exist, but it also brings up a different point that we do talk about in the book, which is surfacing problems because

You actually want to know as the leader, you want to know when those problems are happening or when we’re traveling toward a problem like, “Hey, this deadline’s coming up and this brief is not where it needs to be.” You want to know that five days out, not one day out. And so how do we as leaders create an atmosphere where problems get surfaced, where people are willing to be vulnerable and say, “Hey, I actually need some help or this isn’t going the right way,” or whatever it is, because I think that’s a real challenge for most people.

Debbie Foster:

Yeah, I think that that is mostly a culture thing and a leader behavior thing because I don’t know that anyone would disagree with me saying, “I would like to see the problem when it is small, at the smallest spot.” The moment you discovered it and you took 11 minutes to decide if this was bigger than a bread box, if you wondered, “I want to know about it.” And so some of it is how do we create that space where it is welcome when people bring us mistakes, bring us, “I think I’ve screwed something up.” And that is a lot easier to say than it is to do. And I think to your point from a lawyer perspective, so if you are leading in a law firm, you have some responsibility for how that work moves around the firm and you think about new associates and how do we set them up for success?

One of the things is part of your job is to surface issues. That is actually part of your job. And if you don’t do that, it’s you not doing your job, so your job is to escalate. But you could say the same thing about financial mistakes that happen in the finance department or things that aren’t client related. As soon as you know that problem exists, you should be willing to raise your hand and say, “How do we fix this? How do we make it better?” So I think you’ve got to build a culture of people, number one, being willing to step up and say, “I think something is wrong.” And then number two, making sure that the reactions are reasonable to that. “Thank you for bringing that up. We would always rather see a problem here than here. Now let’s figure out how to fix it and how to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah, which goes right back to the beginning, being that architect, not just firefighting, but how do you take that step back and say,” Is there a bigger problem here? If the same problems and the same things keep happening, how do we solve this bigger?

Debbie Foster:

“And I think that’s a really good point about leading operations is we spend a lot of time solving symptoms of problems and not really saying,” Why did that happen? Where was the point? “And I’ll give you a really simple example from something that just came up. We were working with a firm who does business to consumer work. So referral sources are wildly important and they want to measure collections by referral source and there’s all these gaps and they’re like,” We need to hire someone to come in and go figure out where all these came from. “Okay, maybe, but that actually only fixes one thing. Can we go all the way back to intake and figure out why isn’t it. Well, and what we found out was the reason why it wasn’t happening at intake is because they still use a paper form. That was fine.

Okay, whatever. They use a paper form or a Word document, basically. They don’t enter it right into the system, but also the field in their system was a dropdown field and there was no place to type any text in. So if the answer that was on the form wasn’t in the dropdown, they just skipped it. And so yes, we could hire someone to come in and fill out all the referral information, but we’re just going to have this problem again. So how do we go back and really think about how do we build the system to get the output that we want instead of being so focused on the output and how we make it better?

Stephanie Everett:

Love that. So then the last thing, kind of shifting gears again, that we cover, I say last, there’s probably lots of nuances, things that we actually cover in this part, but the last kind of big topic that I think resonates with a lot of people are meetings. And we start with this meeting audit where we actually have people map out all their recurring meetings that happen in a week. How long are they? How many people are in the room? And then we really push on, is this a meeting? Should it be a meeting? And how do you actually facilitate healthy meetings so that we’re not wasting people’s time?

Debbie Foster:

Yeah. So I think we start off with understanding how much a meeting costs at the very most basic thing. You gave me an example of a meeting you were in where a bunch of equity partners were talking about something that materially didn’t really matter, right? The location of batteries. Well, that was like a $7,000 an hour meeting. And so how do we make sure that we’re only talking about things that are worth $7,000 an hour in meetings like that?

Stephanie Everett:

And talk about a symptom versus the problem. The problem there is decision authority, right? No one at that firm had the authority to just own a decision that was a $5 decision. So instead, because. And this is problematic for many, many law firms, and we probably do a whole nother show about this because no one’s willing to say this is actually you own this decision or these types of decisions and we all get along and we all agree, so we’re all partners, so shouldn’t we just all make decisions together? And that’s where we end up with these equity partner meetings with lots of people in the room making decisions about really low value things.

Debbie Foster:

We’re talking about the same problems over and over and over and over without ever landing on a result, right? How many times have I heard about the associates that aren’t hitting their billable hour targets in $7,000 an hour meetings over and over and over again? Right. Now, two things, the meeting audit, valuable, everyone should do that. And I think that firms fall into maybe a few different categories. The first one is we don’t have very many meetings at all, so we struggle with communication, we struggle with decision authority, we struggle with who do we go to for what and when, because we aren’t having some regular cadence of valuable meetings. Then you have firms on the opposite spectrum, which is death by meeting. There’s all kinds of meetings and nothing is happening from those. And then you have people who are in the middle. They have a reasonable number of meetings, but they don’t really get the traction that they want.

So our messaging is not just about how many meetings should you have. It’s how do you make sure that the meetings that you choose to have are effective meetings with the right people, the right number of people, the right decisions coming to that meeting.

Stephanie Everett:

Right. And then how do you actually set up and facilitate a meeting? Again, things nobody taught us in law school, right? So is there pre-work? Is there an agenda? Are there time limits? How do you make decisions in the meeting? What’s the purpose of the meeting? Because a meeting to discuss things, like you just said, that should not be it. But you could have a meeting to, “Hey, we want to brainstorm ideas of solving this problem. I want to get other people’s…” Brainstorming type work does happen well when we’re chatting it out, or we want to build this thing or make a decision. There’s reasons to meet that aren’t just give updates and discuss things ad nauseum. And then what do you do at the close of the meeting? How do you track who is doing what by when? I know you always do a really good job of pushing for this.

Have we made the decision? Okay, who’s doing what? What are they doing? By when?

Debbie Foster:

And can we do it by Friday? Right. Marking it down. Can we just get it done by Friday? Why does it take so long? Why do we need a month or six weeks or 10 weeks to do something that total time elapsed takes two hours? Can we just get it done?

Stephanie Everett:

And I think another missing piece, and you just alluded to this too, what are the cascading messages coming out of this meeting? Who needs to know what? Because what we both see way too often in law firms is not clear communication channels, and it sort of creates this. I mean, it really is like rumor mill. Well, this partner went and told their assistant and their associate something, but this one said something different and this one doesn’t even know. And then other people find out from the water cooler chat and then people. And if they don’t Or no messaging comes out. And so then people fill in. We always say if they haven’t heard anything, they usually fill in their own story and it’s usually not the story you’d want them to hear. It’s a very negative story.

Debbie Foster:

For sure. I mean, there’s so much work that could be done and there’s some really great tools in the workbook and in the book to really help you think about what your meeting structure looks like and how to make it better.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah. All right. Well, as we wrap up, what homework assignment do we want to give everybody this week?

Debbie Foster:

I think the homework for this week should be around meetings. Really take a look at a few different people’s calendars and just inventory your meetings. And do we have a really cool tool that we can talk about?

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah. If they want to head to our website, beanextlevelleader.com/resources, they can find a meeting audit calculator there and you can check it out.

Debbie Foster:

Pretty cool. That’s the

Stephanie Everett:

Homework. There you go. And stay tuned. Join us for next week. We’re going to wrap it up with our fourth cornerstone on leading forward.

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