120 - The three secrets to law firm success

My next guest is Jonathan Watmough. He was an M&A partner in the City at 30 and managing partner at 38.

Over the next ten years, the firm won Law Firm of the Year three times, The Managing Partners' Forum's strategic leadership award and he was personally named twice in the Top 100 lawyers in the UK.

He is now an adviser, coach, speaker and author who helps law firm partners and partnerships drive performance.

Check out his extraordinary work here:  https://www.helpinglawyersthrive.com/

About Dan:
Dan provides law firm owners and partners with leadership and management skills that have been proven to dramatically increase their profits while reducing their workload. Over the last five years, Dan’s clients have grown their revenues from 15% to 392% in one year while more than halving their workload.

To find out about Dan's availability and programs, click here: https://www.danwarburton.com/

Proudly edited with finesse by Mike at Making Digital Real ✨

Transcript

Welcome to the Law Firm Owners Podcast. I am your host, Dan Warburton. If you are a law firm equity member, partner, CEO or MD who wants to increase your profits while reducing your workload, then you are in the right place.

It's the skills that I needed to become a leader. Yeah. I'm so happy that I've met you in my life.

You've spoken about the revenue increase. It went from like 70,000 to nearly half a million. What percentage increase is that? It's over 400% in that range.

Our monetary returns have been insane. And what we have made in extra profit as compared to what we spent on you is incomparable. You've just trebled the firm's profits in one year.

Yeah. Are you getting what I'm saying? After working with Dan for a few months, my income is up. My happiness is up.

This has changed my whole life. Welcome to the Law Firm Owners Podcast. I'm here with the great Jonathan Watmuth.

He was an M&A partner in the city at 30 and managing partner at 38. Over the next 10 years, the law firm won Law Firm of the Year three times and the Managing Partners Forum Strategic Leadership Award. And he was personally named twice in the top 100 lawyers in the UK.

He is now an advisor, coach, speaker, and author who helps law firm partners and partnerships drive performance. And what we're covering today are the three secrets to law firm success. Jonathan, it's brilliant to have you here.

Yeah, thank you very much for having me. It's good to be here. You've achieved some rather impressive feats in your life.

And I'm interested to hear from you what these three secrets are. And before we've gone live, we gave a snapshot of our experience of not your average, but just our experience of law firm owners and partners in general in that they're very much skilled and focused on doing the legal work. However, they often don't raise their heads or look at the whole business view and the business picture and where it's going.

And so they're generally not business people. However, I can only imagine what it's like to not be a business person, to hear somebody say they're not business people, and for me to think, yeah, but I am that. I own a business.

And so I'm interested to hear these three secrets of what it takes for law firm owners and partners to succeed as business owners as such. Yeah. Well, I say I talk about three secrets, but I'm not sure they're secrets for a start.

But just going back to what you were saying, Dan, I think most lawyers or most law firm partners at least are accidental business people. I can't really think of very many partners that I've known who've gone into the law in order to go into business on their own account, which is what they end up doing. So they're accidental.

And you go into law for all sorts of reasons. I was sort of pushed into law by others without really knowing what it was about. And I think most people end up doing that.

And then you end up in a certain situation. You end up pretty good functionally at what you do. And then you end up in a situation where someone turns around and says, how about becoming a partner? And you think, well, yeah, okay, well, that's the next logical step.

But what else am I going to do? Am I going to stay here as a senior associate, or am I going to go in-house, or am I going to do something completely different? So it's this logical hierarchical step. So people end up as partners for sort of the wrong reasons, if you like. And that functional ability to be really good with clients doesn't necessarily translate into a functional ability to be really good at business.

But I think it is. It's a conscious step to become a business in your own right. And that in itself means that you've got a lot of accidental business people.

And obviously, if you're trying to run a firm, if you're trying to lead a firm, or you're trying to lead a group of lawyers, then you're leading people whose focus is on the law, and it's on the clients. And that's brilliant in many ways because you can leave them alone to do a fantastic job with the clients. You never have to second guess how good they are at client service or how good they are at the law.

You know they're going to do a brilliant job, and that's fantastic. But on the other hand, as a leader of them, you're saying, look, we've got to do other things, a whole load of other things to coalesce ourselves as a business group and to change. And that's where it starts becoming stickier.

So yeah, even a rudimentary understanding of who we really are in terms of self-awareness, there's a very common type of person who goes into what we do. And there are very common behaviors that people exhibit as lawyers and as partners. And it's absolutely common.

There's a common system. So even a rudimentary understanding of what it really works like can take you a long way. Yeah, yeah.

So break it down for us. What are these three secrets or insights that a law firm owner or partner needs to get their head around to really start making some good money whilst perhaps not working such crazy hours? Yeah, well, I think if you're... I mean, this is on the assumption that you're trying to build something bigger than yourself. You can build a reasonable following with three or four associates or something like that on your own account, but that will only get you to a certain level.

So if you want to do something much bigger than yourself, then the only way you can do that is through other people or with other people. And that's when you get into leadership. So, I mean, I've said to you, I think there are three key things.

There's leadership, there's strategy, and there's winning the war for talent. Now, I'd actually reverse that and say, because I think you'd have to start with the war for talent because ultimately the whole purpose of what we do is it's all about people. And it's become more about people over my career.

So I've been doing it for, I don't know, 30-odd years now. And it's become more and more focused on people and individuals who control relationships. So the whole market has moved towards lawyers, but it's also driven individualism.

So it's all about people. And if it's all about people, then it has to be all about winning the war for talent because the people own the relationships, if you like. And those people are quite singular, reasonably independent, need to be coalesced together if you're going to run a business.

And that requires leadership because if you don't have leadership, then you just get what I call strategic autopilot. So you get drift, in other words. It's what you call business as usual.

There's a strong sense of the system preserving itself. And so you get business as usual. So you get me too.

You get following the herd, which is fine. On a certain level, it's fine. And you could argue that up until fairly recently, in a growing market, all you had to do was follow the herd.

But if you want to do something different and you want to stand out and you want to do better than the herd, then the absolute key in winning the war for talent is leadership. And because fundamentally, nothing really happens in law firms without leadership. Literally, nothing changes.

Business as usual, the system will assert business as usual. So what would you make a great leader, somebody that's leading effectively? What are they able to cause to happen across a law firm? Yeah, it's primarily about, there's two simple things. One is inspiring people and the other is influencing people.

So let me start with the second one, because they are, we, I'm one of these people, so I can't use this in the third person really. Lawyers are classic, insecure, overachievers. And that's probably, that phrase has been bandied around for a long time.

But there is a classic psychological makeup of the typical lawyer. And that tends to drive quite singular in, well, they're not necessarily hugely independent. This phrase, herding cats, has been around for a long time.

But it's not, and I don't believe in it actually, because I don't think lawyers are actually fundamentally uncontrollable. I think they're very steerable, provided that you behave in a particular way. But you can only influence these people.

You have to influence them. You can't tell them what to do. These are, ultimately, these are owners, or part owners usually of the business.

So they won't be told what to do. And typically lawyers, and I've done this many times, typically lawyers will always turn around and go, yeah, okay, yeah, fine, I'll do that. And then they'll go and just carry on doing what they're doing.

Consent and evade happens really strongly. And one of the excuses that we come up with for maintaining consent and evade is, well, that's not in the best interest of my clients, so I'm going to do something different. So the only way you can, they have to willingly do things that they don't necessarily want to do.

And that requires influence. So you can't, I've never succeeded in telling any lawyer what to do. Even junior lawyers, actually, you can't tell them what to do.

And why should they? So it's about influence, and that's about, that really is about then buying in to what you're talking about doing. On any sort of level, whether it's compliance or admin or marketing or some sort of leadership task or some sort of client service task, they have to buy in and want to do it themselves. It has to be their idea.

So their influencing is about making it their idea. Whereas inspiring is trying to galvanize them to do something much bigger. And inspiration is about creating a narrative, creating a direction of travel, and some excitement.

And not many law firms are very exciting places, I'm afraid, because people get weighed down with the immediacy of the current task and looking after clients. And it's really hard work. It's stressful.

It's hard work. It's pressurized. And there's people like me going, harder, harder, you know, I need more hours.

So it's really hard work. And therefore, if you can inspire people on top and really give them a sense of we're going somewhere, this place is going somewhere, and we're doing something different, which I can buy into. And when you get that inspiration, you get all the discretionary efforts over and above what they're actually contracted to do, if you like.

That's when people really start going above and beyond and start doing exceptional things, really. Yeah, so I think it's, I said inspiring and influence. It's actually influencing first and inspiring second.

Yeah, as I've found, we can only influence somebody effectively when they feel like there's something in it for themselves. Absolutely, yeah. And where a lot of law firm owners and partners fail is they just don't listen and get into the world of their team members.

And if they just really listen and found out what do you want to succeed at, what career progression do you want, where do you want to go, you know? For some, it might be a month off in summer to go traveling across India, whatever it is. And then you can, instead of looking at them as an employee, you look at them as somebody that you mentor to achieve everything that matters to them. And then when they get that there's that genuine care from you towards them and their success, then that's when you get reciprocation of loyalty.

That's what I've found. Absolutely, I couldn't agree more. No one, someone once said to me, this is a great phrase, no one will be led where they don't want to go.

And so it has to be, you have to be on converging paths, you know? Yeah, yeah. They have to be on converging paths with their team. Their team has to be on converging paths with the business.

The business has to be on converging paths with the firm. You know, there's a lot of planets, I'm mixing metaphors here, but there's a lot of planets that have to align in order for people to all want the same things. Oh, and by the way, then you've got to want it in the same way, which is a cultural thing, which comes back to, you know, strategy.

You've got, yeah. So anyway, long-winded way of saying an individual has to fit with, they have to fit, I talk about the biology, the physics and the chemistry of fit with people. And this is whether they're a partner or whether they're an associate or whether they're part of the support systems in the firm.

And if you think about the biology, the biology has to be really well fitted with the role. You really want to do that particular role. Yeah, what's also known as the right people on the bus.

Yeah, absolutely. Because your leadership management can be wonderful, but if it's the wrong people on the bus, they're just not interested to collaborate and cooperate, right? Yeah, no, absolutely. And if you don't have, if you're not a good fit with your role, then it's not going to last.

If you're not a good fit with, what you want to do in business terms is not a good fit with the team you're in or your team is not a good fit with the business longer term, then it's not going to last. Or if you want it in a different way, which is the sort of chemistry of who you work with and how you work together. If those three, if all of those three planets don't align, then it's not really going to work.

And that's about, so getting the right people on the bus is metaphorically about getting people who fit with all those three things. They're a good fit with the role at the right time in their life. They're a good fit with the business or the business is a good fit with them.

And they are a good fit with the culture. Then you stand a pretty good chance of going somewhere. And then as you say, there's that convergence of both you and them feel aligned in where you're all headed together.

Yeah, no. Absolutely. And alignment is, well, especially a partnership level, alignment is absolutely fundamental.

We have to want the same things for, not necessarily for all the same reasons, but we have to want the same things in broadly the same way. And then we, which comes back to strategy, are we all in this together for the same, for the heading in the right direction in the same way? But yeah, I mean, getting the right group of people on the bus is absolutely fundamental, unless you've got that fit. And the trouble, part of the trouble with running a, well, part of the trouble with commercial law firms is by nature, you have quite a lot of turnover of staff.

Yeah. And so you are constantly refreshing and trying to re-coordinate and re-coalesce groups of people. And when you have that high attrition, which is part of the challenge of winning the war for talent, is to bring the attrition rate down to get it steadier and more stable.

Yeah. It definitely destabilizes things when there's a 20, 25% attrition rate. Yeah, absolutely.

So this first secret insight is leadership and that leadership only works when you've got the right people to lead to begin with. Yeah. Or, you know, in parts, part of leadership is, I mean, you can't, if you become a leader of a law firm or you become a leader of a team of lawyers, you have to, job number one is to make the best of what you've got.

You can't just say, well, I wish it was otherwise. You just have to make the best of what you've got. So there, you know, you have a real exercise in inspiring and influencing people who are probably looking at you and saying, who are you? And why should I listen to you? So, yeah.

And a lot of, a huge amount, I spend a lot of time talking about leadership to firms and to boards in particular. And the idea that you as a leader are actually a servant and your job as a leader is to make the partners more successful, to help them be the best lawyer they can be, be the best partner they can be to achieve their career dreams. When you turn around and say, well, my job is not to manage these people.

It's the opposite of managing. I don't think any law firm leader or leader of lawyers manages anyone. Which is why the phrase managing partner is the biggest misnomer in the world of law, actually.

But the truth is, is nobody likes to be managed or feel managed, right? Like when skillful management is in place, you don't feel managed. You feel uplifted, inspired, empowered, right? Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I think management, I heard a very good thing on Radio 4 Donkeys years ago, and someone came up with this phrase.

I don't know where it came from. The difference between leadership and management is leadership is doing the right things and management is doing things right. And there's a fundamental distinction between the two because I don't think I've ever managed anyone.

I don't think you manage people. I think you manage processes and you manage two outcomes, but you lead people. You don't manage people.

You lead people. And when this peculiar type of person that you have to lead has a very common set of characteristics of lawyers, then you have to lead them in a certain way. And yeah, a lot of that is very disarmingly becoming effectively a servant and saying, look, I am here to make you look good.

I'm here to help you get better and achieve your aims. And part of the problem with that is you obviously you have to create an environment in which a peculiar type of person can thrive, notwithstanding the fact that they're their own worst enemy a lot of the times. Yeah, brilliant.

Brilliantly said. And in my language, it's the art of accountability. Holding a team member to account isn't cracking the whip or asking to do something that you know they can't do so then you can catch them out on it and prove them wrong.

It's actually agreeing what they're going to achieve together and then supporting them to achieve those targets that you both agreed. And taking responsibility first for their ineffectiveness. What's missing in your leadership and management that's causing them to not operate as well as they could do, which is the opposite of a blame culture, right? Absolutely.

Yeah, I mean, the idea that you're going to turn around to a lawyer and you are going to, especially a senior lawyer, and you're going to start second guessing their decisions. You're nowhere near their decision making on the ground. What they do on the ground with clients, you're nowhere near.

You're completely devolved all responsibility to them. I mean, you quickly realize, I think if you run a law firm and particularly quickly realize that you have hardly any, you're responsible, but you have hardly any levers of power. Yeah.

That sounds really weird, doesn't it? But it's true. You can't just pull this lever and people work harder. You can't just pull this lever and quality improves.

It just doesn't work like that. And after a while, you realize, you think, hang on, have I got any levers at all here to pull? And nothing's happening. And then you realize, well, actually, it's because all you can do is inspire and influence these people to do better things and to get better.

Yeah. As I say to my clients, the truth is, is you don't have control over anything. Nothing.

Apart from one thing and that's how you respond. How you show up in front of people, which as you say, is your ability to inspire and influence. Yeah.

I think that's right. Actually, I think there is one lever that you have as a law firm leader. One.

Only one. Well, in my world, I thought it was only one. And therefore, I think you have to use this lever really well, which is you pick the team.

Yeah. Okay. Yes.

That is a really big point because you do have a lot of influence as to who's going to be on the bus ultimately. Yeah. And if you are trying to, metaphorically, improve, upgrade the DNA of the organization in whatever way, whether it's in terms of quality or difference of sector focus or expertise, it doesn't really matter.

You can influence who is hired and the type of person that is hired. And therefore, you can engineer what the future looks like. But that's an incredibly long-term prospect.

You can influence, okay, what type of trainees are we looking for? What type of trainees are we going to need in 10 years' time or five years' time? And you can start to influence this stuff. And you can change the DNA of the organization by shifting a recruitment strategy. But that's the, as far as I was concerned, that was the only real lever I had apart from, sort of, you know, just literally, metaphorically, trying to be a role model for this is what leadership looks like.

Yeah. Because actually, being leadership in law firms is not at all top-down. It's top-down in the sense of you need strong leadership from the top and you need to set the tone.

But strategy in law firms is very, very local. Things go wrong or don't happen at a local level, not at a top level. And so you need, you need to replicate systems of leadership at this level, at this level, at this level.

So you have this, what I call a transmission system all the way down. Yeah. Because actually, it's what happens on the ground every day.

You know, it's what happens in the back of that cab on the way to a meeting. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, everything you're saying, it just fills me with confidence with everything that I've learned and the work that I do with my clients.

Like, this makes me think of the three levels of leadership and management that I know of, which is the first one is you lead and manage yourself. You do what you say you're going to do by when you say you're going to do it. So you're on time.

You show up well, well-dressed, you know, you present yourself well, you speak to people kindly and things like that. Then the second one is leading and managing others to do and say what they're going to do, to be on time, to be effective, be effective with clients. And then the advanced level is managing and leading others to manage and lead others.

And then that's when you get this cascade of the leadership and management skills that go all the way down to the bottom of the firm. Oh, absolutely. And that's why when you say, when I say you pick the team, one of the most important things is to pick your leadership team.

In other words, who are your, who is your, if you, I don't know, let's say you, let's say you organize yourself by practice groups. Okay. So who leads these practice groups? And, and, and actually do you have, do you, do you have enough of the right quality leaders? Are you better off pushing two practice groups together? Because you only really have one genuine leader in that practice group.

Yeah. I've done that. And then over time, as leadership evolves and people start bubbling up and systems, the leadership systems you're developing start becoming more consistent and inculcate themselves.

Then that leadership starts appearing and then you can start divvying things up a bit more intelligently. But I genuinely think you, you have as many practice groups or divisions or whatever as you have leaders. Because unless you have that transmission system, you, I used to, when I first started doing this, I spent, I spent probably 18 months, maybe a year, I spent, coming up with all sorts of brilliant ideas, absolutely amazing, world beating ideas and, and getting nodded at in partner meetings and what have you.

Yeah, that's a really good idea. And absolutely nothing changed on the ground. And, and this is a real wake up call for me.

And it was quite depressing actually. But after a while I realized just me coming up with things and saying things is not going to make any difference. Firstly, the partners on the ground have to want to do this themselves.

So they have to buy into it. And second, I then need people who can, who can, who can lead this thing on a local level and make sure that these things become habit. So yeah, it was a bit of a wake up, bit of a hard lesson wake up call that.

But yeah, without, without leadership on the ground, everything falters. Yeah. Great.

Okay. What would you say is the second secret? Yeah, well it's ultimately if we go back to the beginning, so winning the war for talent in one way, shape or form is the ultimate challenge in a law firm. If you win the war for talent, then you've only got yourself to blame if it goes wrong or if you, if you underperform.

Because if you've got, if you've got better talent than or as good a talent as anyone else, then you will win. There's no doubt. That's as simple as that.

So, but if you're not born with a silver spoon in your mouth, you know, if you're not, you're not running a magic circle firm or something like that, where, where talent just gravitates towards you, then you have to work a lot harder. Um, so, so then it comes back to, okay, what is, so I've got, I've got, let's assume I've got good leadership. Okay.

Good leadership means that you, you stand a chance of doing something. Why? Because you can get buy-in and you can get people working consistently together. But ultimately, you need a strategy to win the war for talent.

And if you're not a magic circle firm or silver circle firm with a huge brand, you're not Kirkland and Ellis and people just, you know, there's, there's the world's supply of CBs end up in your inbox every single day. People falling over themselves to work for you. And therefore, you, you have complete choice as to who you, as to who you take on.

And in many ways, the war for talent is, in the first instance, the war for talent is about developing a really wide choice of people. If you've got choice, you can make much better selection decisions. So you can go into, going back to where we were about 20 minutes ago, you can then decide, is this person a really good fit? Both with the biology of the role, the business fits, and are they a good fit in chemistry terms? If you can get fit and they're of the right quality and of the right caliber, then you're laughing.

But having choice, having that wide choice enables you to make very clever selection decisions. Which I've heard is, is the art of talent pooling. Pooling? Talent pool, yeah.

So you, you build up like a database of people that are on a waiting list to be notified of a position. And so as soon as that position comes up, you've got a database of 50, 100, or 200 ideal candidates that get sent the opportunity to apply for it. And then that way, you get many more CVs to pick and choose from.

Yeah. Well, yeah. It's a lovely position to be in to have a waiting list of people, people wanting to join you.

I mean, my, my personal experience is that once the, part of the big thing is there has to be a, there has to be a big differentiator between you and your nearest competitors in order to develop that choice. Yeah. And that's fundamentally about your, ends up as being about your recruitment brand, completely different to your client brand.

Your recruitment brand really, I mean, to my mind, the recruitment brand in many ways was more, more important than the client brand. And the recruitment brand was way ahead of the client brand. It would take the client brand three, four years to, to, to, to catch up with reality.

Whereas the recruitment brand was much more here and now. The recruitment brand was ahead of the curve, whereas the client brand was behind the curve, if you like. And so having that complete clarity out there in the recruitment market about who you are, what you stand for, why we're different, and why should it matter to you as a potential candidate, whether you're a, you know, a senior equity lateral hire, or whether you're a, you know, a paralegal, doesn't really matter.

There has to be complete clarity about why should it matter to you and why are we different? And unless you can encapsulate that, all you're going to do is see all the same candidates as everyone else. And you're going to be fighting all the same candidates as everyone else. So having, having that clarity of this is who we are and this is how we're different.

And that could be, that could be a cultural difference. It could be a business focused difference. It could be, you know, it could be, I don't know, it could be Paul Weiss and we're, we pay 185,000.

It could be with, we pay the most to trainees or to NQs, but you, so I'm not, I'm not. Or we offer career progression at a pace that suits you. Yeah.

Yeah. But you have to be very clear what your market is and what makes you stand out to that market because ultimately strategy, a lot of people talk a lot of rubbish about strategy. Strategy really is about how can you get a competitive advantage? So there's, there's a big, there's a big difference in my mind and there always has been.

There's a massive difference between natural competition where everyone broadly, there's a, it's a bit Darwinian at times, but everyone broadly gets what they deserve and sort of goes through life, you know, naturally competing with one another versus strategic competition where people are just killing each other. And, and when you have strategic competition, you get, you get people, literally, you get massive shifts in, in competitive pressure very quickly, which is what's happened in the last four or five years in London with the US firms coming in and competing with a pay wall. So hold that, hold that thought.

But if you, if you work on the basis of strategic competition, then you will identify your competitors and you will have a, you will have a strategy to develop a competitive advantage over those competitors. And the most important for attractive, for attracting the ideal candidates. Yeah.

For attracting talent. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's the knob of the exercise and therefore, you know, coming back to where we started, it's all about people.

Well, if you can play to, you've, you've got a particular competitive advantage, an unfair advantage in the talent recruitment market and you can play to that strength and that strength is a weakness of your three or four main competitors, then you are going to get, well, you get a double whammy. It's like what they call in football, a six point game because you, not only do you get better people, but you get their better people. Yeah.

So you win and they lose. That's like a win win. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Double whammy win.

Yeah. And not many lawyers, not many lawyers or law firms actually think in terms of, it's a zero, it is a zero sum game. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And if you've always stood out, it is actually a zero sum game. There are winners and losers. And I know what you mean about them not focusing on their employer brand as such because if you look at their website, they don't, they don't make a decent song and dance about their employees, so they don't showcase them like they're the heroes that they really are.

And then they know they don't speak about the career progression, where the firm is going and what's possible for the people that are employed there. And so many law firms just go and copy the website of another firm for ease. And then there's just this beige attraction marketing to employing new people.

Yeah. And absolutely. And, and, and that's being found out now, now that the wall for talent is really white hot and the wall for the top talent is really white top.

Yeah. Firms look like each other. They sound like each other.

And the reason for that Dan is simply because going back to what I was saying at the beginning, leadership is in such short supply in law firms. And it is so hard to actually lead in law firms because the system is so self-reinforcing in terms of preserving business as usual, and there's governance checks and balances and term limits and all blah, blah, blah. There's all sorts of things weighed against someone who is a good leader actually coming through and exposing themselves to the risk of becoming a law firm leader, that you end up with a lot of what I call accidental managing partners.

So you end up with people who are there to essentially preserve the status quo. They've been, in fact, they've been elected as a person. The personality has been elected specifically to preserve the status quo because that's what the firm needs.

And, and therefore that translates into me too. It translates into business as usual. It translates into just, just doing what everyone else does because that is in a, in a growth market, that is a completely sensible thing to do.

There is no need to do anything out of the ordinary, just follow the herd. It's like being in a peloton and cycling race. It's someone else's taking all the, cutting the wind for you.

You know, you say that, but me and you know that many law firm owners and partners are exhausted, burnt out, tired, fed up. They work really long hours. They've built a role in their firm where they're relied upon for the entire firm to keep moving.

In other words, everybody comes to them for advice. So they just give the advice. So they become the Google for all their team members.

All their clients keep expecting them to keep doing the work. And then their clients go and refer them onto other people. So then they end up completely overwhelmed with a team of people that they don't give any time to.

So then the team don't get the career progression, the attention they want. So then as we know, they leave as this high staff turnover. How bad do you think it needs to be for a law firm owner or partner to get.

That there's a whole nother way of doing this, that through mastering and learning the management and leadership skills that we've grown up with and studied in depth, make such a profound difference to their lives. When, what do you think that point is when they get it and they start thinking in a new way, if ever? Yeah, no, I don't, I don't think they do. I think that, no, generally, um, I, I mean, I know, I know lots of really, really, um, what I call overachieving partners who just overachieve every single year and yet the reality is they underperform, um, because the cost of the cost to them and the cost of everyone's work, who works for them and the cost of their families of the results that are being, the results are spectacular, but that it's an annual enterprise.

It starts the 1st of May. Usually the annual enterprise starts again. So, you know, 30th of April, it used to be the UN used to be 30 April, usually.

Uh, so 30 April, you'd, you know, you'd, you run as hard as possible right up to the 30th of April. And then you draw breath and then first thing in the morning on the 1st of May, you wake up and go, I'm starting at zero again, that is pretty dispiriting, but that's the nature of the annual enterprise that it is. Okay.

So hold that thought. So, but these, so many, so many great lawyers are caught in a, um, it's like a Faustian pact really, as long as the firm and as long as the leadership of the firm doesn't help them, what, what you call, what I call trade up to a better class of problem. And you have to force people to do this.

You have to force people to move on up. Um, and if they don't, then they just carry on going around in a vicious circle. And the trouble is because nowadays, you know, it's so much harder.

There's so much more what I call individualism. Um, the, so the costume business, uh, spectacularly high now, well-being issues, attitudes to work, the pressures are so much greater than they were. And yet people are still behaving in the same way.

So yeah, ultimately it comes down to the individual. The individual has to make a choice as to whether they're going to break out of this cycle of just, just it's a hamster wheel and you have to make a decision. Am I going to, am I going to get off the hamster wheel and get onto another hamster wheel that turns at a slower pace, but it involves making choices about what we do and how we do it and who we do it with.

So it's, it's not, in many ways, the law firm model has reached absolute maturity. It can't be pushed any harder. I mean, you've been, people have been saying for years, I want more chargeable hours, no one has, has succeeded in getting more chargeable hours out of people.

If anything, chargeable hours, recorded chargeable hours are dropping and they have been dropping. It's about an average of 2.75 or something like that. Around about there, three hours a day is, is, is what decent for getting out there people.

Yeah. In some firms, I mean, you'd be surprised. I mean, you talk about, there's a lot of talk about, you know, in Magic and Magic Circle firms and US firms, for example, you talk about 2000 chargeable hours.

Um, yeah, maybe if there may be a few firms like that, but there's, there's not a lot of firms in the city are getting more than about 1400 chargeable hours. And that's really high, high performance firms in the city. So if you think 1450 chargeable hours is what, it's about six and a half, seven, it's about seven hours a day.

And, oh, hang on. This is in a top city firm, but the trouble is that the individual is probably spending 12 hours in the office to do seven chargeable hours. Yeah.

With, with, with my clients, I say the magic number is five hours per day. If you can just get everybody across your team here in five hours a day, that's not killing them. It's managing, it's manageable and it can be fantastically profitable for the firm.

Yeah, I think, well, that's if you're still on a billable hour, which most people are, which they are. Yeah, I think it depends. It depends on the mix of the business you've got, but broadly speaking, it should be possible.

I mean, most, most of the firms that I'm, I'm involved in, uh, larger commercial firms are, you know, someone, someone who is, someone who's committed and who, who wants a long-term career is probably doing a 10 hour day, I would think. So they're doing like nine till seven or something like that. Most people in this, take it, take the city.

And I know that doesn't necessarily apply once you go outside into regional firms, but let's say there's a 10 hour day available, then recording six hours out of that day should be perfectly possible. Yeah. If, if you're, if you've got enough work and if you're, if you're being resourced properly.

So getting six hours a day down shouldn't be too difficult. Um, in most city firms, 1,300, 1,350 is about the norm. Yeah.

Um, pushing it to 1,450 is, is quite tough. Um, but the trouble is in most city firms now, if you're paying a, you're paying an NQ a hundred, 120,000, something like that, and Vincent and Elkins or some of the U S firms are paying what, 185,000 then to an NQ. Yeah.

Then, you know, you've got to be careful what you wish for. If you, if you're paid a spectacular salary, then you have sold your soul. Yeah.

You are gonna be asked to do spectacular hours as well. Yeah. Um, so no, but I don't, I don't think it's all about, it's not all about banging hours down.

I don't, I don't think. And I agree. I absolutely agree.

It's much better to have a team that's able to manage their workload and and have some kind of work life balance. So they enjoy their work somewhat. They're going to be able to reciprocate with much more loyalty and predictability and reliability.

Right. Yeah. It's a whole, it's a very complex blend of things that people are looking for.

And if you, if you really understand your people and you really understand the type of market of people that you can, you can reasonably act, given the type of work you do, where you do it, the size of the market available to you, then you can't just suddenly turn around and say, well, I'm going to pay, you know, I'm going to pay 150,000 pounds for an NQ and I'm going to want 2000 chargeable hours a year. But if in your location and the particular market, if, if you can't attract anyone who wants to do that because the market just doesn't exist, the market's not big enough, then well, you've wasted your time and it's never going to work. So you've got to, you've got to work on the basis of what market are you in and what is the norm for the market that you're in, but beyond that, I'd say, I think I've never, I've never seen particular problems where if you have the right people, if you have really inspiring people leading and they're doing really good work and they know where they're going and they, they're looking after their people, then you get people putting in a huge amount of discretionary effort over and above.

That's just human nature. Everyone wants to be part of something and to be part of something that's going somewhere. So, but if you're, if you're, if you're, if you're a down at heel, boring partner, who's, who's, who's just looking after themselves, not really going anywhere, never made up a partner out of their practice in 10 years.

Why should anyone follow you? Why should anyone want to be associated with you? You get, you get what you deserve. You get the people you deserve ultimately. Yeah.

Well said and, and focusing on getting skilled leadership really is the key. Yeah. I think it is ultimately.

And if, and it's not, it's not for everyone. It doesn't have to be for everyone. And not every single law firm partner has got to be an out and out leader.

That's not the point you need. Law firms require a lot of partners who are foot soldiers. And I don't mean that in a, in a derogatory way at all.

You need a lot of partners who are just brilliant at looking after clients and doing the work. But you need, you need a certain percentage of people who are capable of galvanizing the whole thing and, and keeping people on the straight and narrow and showing them the way to go. And if you've got that, it, it will absolutely make you stand out and will enable you to do things that other people can't.

Brilliant. I know me and you, Jonathan could absolutely talk to all the cows and donkeys come home. I've really enjoyed having you on the show today and I've learned so much from you.

So yeah, you know, thanks so much. You know, I look forward to staying in touch and yeah, hoping that our paths will cross again at the right time. Thanks a lot.

Thanks for having me. It's been good fun. Cheers.

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