124 - The broken talent journey in law

On today's episode, I have the honour of hosting two super switched-on men!

One is Dino Dullabh, the co-founder of Access Law Clinic and Law Training Centre, with over a decade of experience in advocating for choice in legal qualifications.

He has worked with over 800 law firms, so there is very little that Dino and his team have not faced when helping a firm recruit new qualified professionals in law, whether it be as a Solicitor, Notary Public, Chartered Legal Executive, Licensed Conveyancer, Probate Practitioner, or recognised paralegal.

It’s great to have you here, Dino.

And I also have with us here, Colin White, the MD of Ortus Group.

Colin is a law sector M&A expert offering solutions for mergers, acquisitions, career advisory, succession planning, and headhunting, with over 25 years of experience in this field.

Today, what we’re covering is the broken talent journey in law.

Dino’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dinodullabh/

Website: https://www.ltckent.co.uk/

Colin’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colinwhite-ortusgroup/

Website: https://ortusgroup.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

Thank you for joining us on the Law Firm Owners Podcast today. On today's episode, I have the honour of hosting two super switched on men. One is Dino Dulab, the co-founder of Access Law Clinic and Law Training Centre, with over a decade of experience in advocating for choice in legal qualifications. 

He has worked with over 800 law firms, so there's very little that Dino and his team have not faced when helping a law firm recruit new qualified professionals in law, whether it be as a solicitor, notary public, chartered legal executive, licensed conveyancer, probate practitioner or recognised paralegal. It's great to have you here Dino. Thank you, real pleasure Dan. 

And I also have with us here Colin White, the MD of Autus Group. Colin is a law sector M&A expert offering solutions in mergers, acquisitions, career advisory, succession planning and headhunting with over 25 years of experience in this field. Today, what we're covering is the broken talent journey. 

Colin, it's great to have you here. Yeah, good to be here Dan, thank you very much for organising it. I was, I remember introducing you Colin to Dino and then you guys having a conversation and then Dino emailed me and said, we've discovered that there's a broken talent journey and that between you Dan, me and Colin, we work on the three different ends of it. 

Give us an overview of that conversation and that insight that you had Dino. Well yeah, it's, you've sort of hit the nail on the head and I think we might not fix the entire thing today but we certainly got all the pieces lined up and where I see law firms is at a point of growth so they're needing to train and get their people qualified and there's various reasons for that, regulatory, insurance and so on. But one of the biggest pressures at the moment is a shortage of talent and when talking to Colin and looking at the challenges law firms face, if they want to, if the founders want to exit, because law firms aren't set up as traditional businesses, set up with a trajectory in mind, with an exit in mind, you know, generally law firms are set up by people who want to practice law and then they reach a point when they say, oh I need to exit the business. 

But if the business is totally reliant on the founders, it's not attractive for an external buyer or, you know, even a merger or acquisition to happen becomes quite complicated and that's when people realize, wow, I don't quite have the talent in and going out and recruiting somebody new to come in as part and that may work sometimes but often when you do that, you have a real culture change in the organization and buyers of firms will look and see, well, what's the longevity because, well, what are they buying, you know, firms have tech, they have all sorts of things, client bases and so on, but you need good people to operate it and being a regulated profession, it's not just any people, there have to be people who have a experience as well as the qualifications and what do we find in a lot of law firms? A lot of people with vocational experience, huge loyalty to the firm, linchpins to the business but not necessarily having those qualifications, so then they're kind of excluded from becoming the leadership and that could solve the problem for the founders when they're looking. It was really interesting discussing with Colin his view on how, you know, mergers and acquisitions look for law firms and I was like, wow, there's something to be fixed here by looking at the people really, that's the easier solution to solve. Yeah, so you could see that you're at the beginning of that talent journey, creating newly qualified talent to then give the backbone to a firm that could then really be sold, merged or acquired, is that right Colin? Yeah, I mean there's clearly a number of layers to it but I think what we tend to see, because we operate toward the latter end of this talent journey as we're calling it, where we're often dealing with owners who they want to be able to exit their business but the traditional way that law firms have gone about sort of backfilling to facilitate that is just not really working anymore. 

It was that apprenticeship treadmill where the people who you give a job when they're 21 years old will be the ones that buy you out when they're 50. Now it's long been the case that people don't stay in the same place for all their career now but even if people do or even if you hire a 45 year old to come into your business, everything else being equal, they're less interested in owning a business now. Societal norms have changed, people have a different attitude towards risk, people can earn a good income as an employee now, you don't need to become an equity partner to earn big money and we know, there's loads of firms out there that from the outside looking in, they look successful, financially solid but actually the equity partners are earning less money than some of the employees because they don't have the liquidity to pay out the capital accounts. 

So we're seeing people getting stuck toward that latter end of their career and it's no wonder that that's not quite as attractive now as perhaps it was 10, 15 years ago. Added to that, it's long been difficult to get good talent into firms so I think in terms of what Dino's supporting firms with is really important, having your own sort of academy producing talent rather than just relying on the market to provide that to you because there's such a battle for good people. There's no short term end insights on this one I don't think, you've just got to be a bit smarter about how you look at your talent.

Yeah, brilliant. So then what are you seeing in particular as the broken part of the talent journey Colin? Well, there's plenty of talent out there. I think it's perhaps not so much the journey that's broken but the vehicles that people having a journey's in are broken because, you know, let's face it, none of us these days tend to stay in the same place forever and that's fine because circumstances change and if I want to go and work for a different firm I'll have good reasons for doing that. 

It's not necessarily because the firm I'm currently with is doing something poorly, it's just that, you know, we all grow at different stages, might have different aims and ambitions that don't align with the aims and ambitions of the current firm. That's fine, that's natural but there are too many firms where their vehicle isn't really capable of getting to where they as a business want to get to so they end up shifting on too many of their talent that they'd like to keep. If you look at any of the surveys done around what are the key concerns and considerations for law firms today, almost always the key, you know, the most important problem that people identify is talent engagement, attraction and retention. 

Why can't people hold on to their good talent? You know, most of them can to an extent for some time. It's just the temporary nature of it and by temporary I don't mean like every five minutes, it's like keeping hold of somebody for five or ten years, that's the bit that people struggle with these days. Yeah, got it. 

So basically there's not enough people being qualified through the traditional avenues and then the market is starved of ideal new candidates for law firms to recruit and so what we're seeing here is that Dino offers a refreshing new approach to that which is to actually train up people who are maybe support staff to lawyers within a law firm to then become qualified so then they can become real partners and leaders or heads of department as such and Billa's right, Dino? Yes, I think in the 10 years we've been doing this, the vision was always to empower people who are already in a firm so the type of training that we do is for people who are already in the business and working as a paralegal or some other function in the organisation and in the past the journey was very much a traditional linear journey where a person would be set up on a part in a fast track type of path where a person would then go on and be earmarked for that and that worked very well as Colin said in the past when people were you know with law was a career and typically a person would be at one or two firms maybe max for their entire life which now I think employers I speak to if they can see four to five years from someone they're ahead of the curve at the moment. It can be quite choppy so not quite as much as five minutes but it's not unusual to see people changing jobs every 12 months at the moment certainly post-Covid and it's not the barrier that it used to be firms are understanding so when firms are looking and saying well if we're going to bring people in from the outside we have to pay in a lot of sign-on bonuses all of this and maybe the cultural fit isn't there and if you bring in someone senior and you're planning to exit the business in say two or three years there isn't time for that process to bed in and keep everything together but if you take people that are within the organization who've shown loyalty who love what they do and it may be because it's geographical it may be because they just love the people the connections that they have but they are looking around and saying well I'm not progressing and money is a factor with cost of living going up but most firms are looking after that aspect and most employees don't want to leave for a one-off pay bump because they know if they leave they may get a five grand bonus ten grand bonus or something like that you know and but they know that they're going to have to really be stretched to to deliver on that what they would prefer is to see routes for progression within and we see it when people are recognized for their ability and the firm says look I'm going to invest in you you've worked as a paralegal you've got all the vocational experience I can really see you getting qualified you the whole the whole mindset shifts everything shifts people they suddenly feel so how loyal I mean you know how does it compare for somebody to become qualified in law through law school and how long does that take versus what you're able to provide through your academy so that's a that's a good good question I think a key shift happened in 2007 with the Legal Services Act where up until then it was only solicitors who could be partners in law firms and that's why you saw solicitors firms called partnerships or LLPs at most now you see a lot more firms called limited companies as it should be so they also known as alternative business structures so post 2007 Legal Services Act anybody can become a owner and director of a law firm there's more enhanced checks so it's not as simple as a traditional company so there's enhanced checks around finances and things for the for the person but now what that means is you don't necessarily can have non-lawyer partners so you could have somebody who's very good at bringing in business for the firm that's a key person they're non-lawyer in the past was very hard to bring them into the senior level and give them the appropriate title and job that they deserve for what they bring for the firm now they can be a director of the firm now in the past what that meant was you'd have to send someone away go to university do a law degree do a legal practice course and that's four years full-time study and the current full-time rates you know something like 40 50 000 pounds in tuition yeah but it's impossible to send someone away for four years so they keep part of the business they might be your top paralegal looking after the entire department how you can do that so a lot of courses were just adapted and all it didn't they took is is face-to-face delivery and kind of made it online which is incredibly challenging studying law at the best of times is a lot of work so you would see people really struggling getting demoralized taking maybe a decade or more to to get qualified with what we do is routes that are designed specifically for people who are in work these are all the credited routes by chartered institute legal executives the license conveyances and obviously the sra with the sqe and in the 10 years we've been doing this and pushing for change things have really shifted to recognize that the education model needs to suit people that are going straight out of university of school that's fine but we also need to cater for by by any estimates there's something like half a million paralegals if we've got 200 000 authorized people on the role so that's the sra role with clc role and silence lawyers estimates of paralegals in a firm are anywhere around half a million or potentially more they need routes to then be able to qualify and still remain in their job and people can now for example license conveyance and qualify whilst working within two years within two years yes yeah within two years i mean that's for someone without a law degree yeah if if someone has a law degree they they get a range of exemptions and if you take them a year or less so the quickest we've had we don't want to push people to do it as quickly as possible but the quickest we've had it is is well under a year actually um if the person was able to a lot of this happened during um furlough when um we're at the furlough period a lot of people just knuckled down and studied and people were getting qualified in months bearing in mind that's the academic piece the work experience is two years 1200 hours over two years so there's no shortcut okay sounds quick but but there's no shortcut in their competency you know so the looking at the work experience so whilst you can academically do it quickly you know what's your work experience but even that that's that's a two-year period so most people already have that but surely as it as it was before at university you'd have to study law for four years and then do two years of experience as well of course i forgot about that it's a six-year journey if you get a six-year journey you're offering it in four four-year journey yeah and i mean and and the new solicitor route is two years potentially but they also get to stay in that position exactly so the the big benefit here is they're earning while they're learning yeah so they're not they're not going backwards in terms of finance because if you look at this is what this is what grated me about law when i when we came to qualify i was like hang on i'm being asked as a 20-something year old to go into a hundred thousand pound of debt with no guarantees like what other industry in the world makes you do this you know because at least with a doctor you were more likely guaranteed to to qualify whereas with this you were at the mercy of a firm to give you a training contract so this is why we had this absurd situation where at at its peak by 12 000 law firms in the uk with consolidation and that we have around 9 000 now but the numbers of lawyers in the role have increased at at the peak of it when we're 12 000 firms there was only 6 000 training contracts offered so that means half a trainee per law firm in england and wales per year now i think we all know that that is far too few people to cater for the level of retirement and all the you know the drop off in people leaving the profession yeah that's what was going on so this bottleneck there's an interesting overlay with in terms of why that happened though um because if you think about the the makeup of those 12 000 now 9 000 firms um you know law is still a cottage industry by any measure there's a small number of big firms and i don't just mean magic circle i mean the top 100 firms um you know they're all over sort of 30 35 million turnover now the next 100 probably goes down to about 8 million um so if you're outside the top 500 firms so that leaves eight and a half thousand they're turning over less than one and a half million usually um they can't afford to give adequate training and supervision to uh junior lawyers because um the the big firms um they're they're the bullies in the playground they come and steal your best people they'll say you know this this firm that's turning over 700 000 pounds doing convincing wills and probate they can't afford to give a newly qualified solicitor 30 000 pounds let alone 80 000 pounds that you hear about how it's just impossible for them to compete um and it's an expensive business running a training contract uh to to then think that you're probably not going to see any real returns on that investment and and that's the main reason that so many firms just gave up doing it yeah got it and and so we can see here dino's at the beginning of that journey you're more at the tail end of it colin what was it that made you see that i'm sort of assisting or you know that journey in the middle part well i mean fundamentally it's probably more about the headhunting work we do than the um than the mna i mean we do obviously we see it in the mna as well but when we sort of first recognize it um i mean if you think about the circumstance when we get instructed to to do work it's most often it's a law firm that um they're that they need to recruit a partner usually somebody that can develop or run an existing department and that can be anything from you know private client tax work through to corporate or employment law you know anything at all um but why do they need that person um sometimes it's succession planning because you know they have had someone who's been around for ages and they're retiring great that's always happened except uh 20 years ago it was much more likely to be an internal succession but fair enough that doesn't there's never always been possible so we go and look for people um or has somebody left you know they've resigned they're going to join a competitor um has somebody decided to leave the profession somebody's decided to go in-house um you know that the the reasons have always been there it's just that they're more common now but the problem is of course that um you know herein lies the um you know the irony of what i'm doing is that if you know we get instructed by a client you know nine times out of ten we're successful in producing what our client wants that's just creating a problem for somebody else you know where um we can attract somebody from another firm that doesn't even think that they're unhappy because we can engage with them to actually ask questions about well where are you in your career what about your life are you currently on the best vehicle to get you to the next destination on your journey often people aren't most of us are too busy to think about it we're always just sort of freewheeling because we're busy everybody's busy um but if we can help somebody just reflect on where they currently are and where they want to be just take a breath you know actually a lot of people are just doing what they're doing through inertia yeah it's not because people have to do where they currently you know what they're doing um and and you know that again that's part of the problem once firms have these people on board you know they'll they'll do a nice to see you and make them feel special for a while but then they just become part of the furniture often and then when they get not that they get forgotten about but they don't get treated particularly well and and they you know not everybody's special and that and they don't get that career progression they yearn for so you know or even those that have already got into equity partnership you know they can be you know if they're one of 20 or 30 equity partners the chances of all of those those partners agreeing with each other all the time are virtually nil it's just a matter of how important are the things that they disagree on um so you know every firm yeah if you if you were running a firm now that had 20 partners done and I said to you are all 20 of those partners delighted to be there you'd be kidding yourself if you answered yes yeah of course you know so everybody has this going on it's just the matter of the extent to which it goes on and the importance of you know person a making the decision to do something versus person b yeah when that comes into you know the later stages of life where um you know a partnership is thinking about well you know maybe we need to merge or sell to go to the next level because we don't have that layer um you know that that can reveal differences and this is again one of the reasons why you see post merger or acquisition um there's often well there's often casualties from a business perspective but there's often unwanted casualties because some people just aren't happy with the direction it's gone in so so with the work that I do which is primarily showing law firm owners and partners how to delegate away their heavy workloads down to their team members and then empowering their team members to operate at high levels of performance which then enables them to make more money whilst working less hours thus freeing them up are you seeing that that's the solution to law firm owners and partners being available to be able to support the career progression that their team members want I've I think in principle um that can be a good thing um but it's not just about supporting career progression it's it's about everything that there is to do in running a law firm yeah it just comes back to something Dino said earlier um you know why is it that I'm you know it used to be the only lawyers could run law firms I mean I I'm at risk of alienating my market here but most of the time the worst people to run law firms are lawyers you know professionals entering them yeah we we all go to law school to practice law we don't go to law school to run a business yeah I know people who've done that I know people who've done I did a bachelor of commerce and then I went into law so but that's that's because I just needed I needed the security of having a commercial background right yeah but I know people who've gone on to do an MBA then do law or do something business-wise and going into set up a law firm as a business but they are by far the minority the majority of us go into law to practice law and where the disenchantment happens is we then hit by regulation I mean if I say a legal swear word right now and say anti anti-money anti-money laundering regulations right now it's it's so much pressure on lawyers to run the business that the time you get to practice law leaves a disenchanted and this is where we see probably the biggest outflow of senior lawyers is to the consultancy model where you've got equity partners leaving you know regional large firms even big city firms going off to become self-employed consultants and you're like is that a step backwards not in their book they're going to do what the thing that they want to do and then the cycle will begin because they'll gain more clients and then suddenly they'll have to hire so we've already got I've got paralegals and things we're now working on self-employed consultancy basis under another consultant because that's starting to build because the business just comes there there's so much work out there but Dan the thing is when when I saw the title of your book delegate I said that's brilliant but who they're going to delegate to yeah this is the issue that that they have because a there's this real fear because we're not a normal business we have a regulator be it the SRA the CLC or Silas regulation they are serious there are many things that can go wrong and you're personally liable for when you're a an authorized person so unlike a limited company you have a separation between you and and what the company does you don't have that in law so you you guys will have exceeded this when when a lawyer has to sign it has their name on it not the firm's name they really read it they spend a lot of time looking at it because they're personally liable something that is easy to forget when you're around regular businesses so that's where if they're looking at and start thinking early on because it can't happen overnight but they can say well I've got people who are loyal to my firm here yeah but I need to get them to a qualification level that's going to satisfy the regulator satisfy the unspoken regulator as well which is your professional indemnity insurance provider because bearing in mind that can be as high as six percent of revenue yeah and the rest you know yeah and you'd have seen um you'd have seen plenty of firms that have had to make a claim on their PI and then unable to afford a premium and have to do a prepack administration right and it comes down to having and usually the issue happens because of not enough qualified people and the supervision to to to unqualified people ratio of supervisor to staff is too is too many interesting problem in fact in front of me here I've got the LexisNexis bellwether survey of 2025 and here I've got obstacles holding firms back from achieving goals and and the highest percentage is tough economic climate 37 percent and then the second one at 34 percent is lack of time for business development then 23 percent fear of change 22 percent not investing in technology tools 20 percent poor staff retention so that's that's there and then none of the above growing competition and poor client retention but of this what really stands out for me is the second one lack of time for business development and it's not just lack of time for business development as you said Colin like it's not just lack of time for recruiting it's a lack of time for anything a lack of time for having a conversation with you Dino a lack of time for having a conversation with you Colin and that's why I focused my life's work on that is how do I free up these law firm owners partners time by delegating their workload away so then they are available for business development recruiting looking at training solutions and so I can see why in this conversation between you Dino and Colin you saw that Dino's at the beginning I'm in the middle and Colin you're at the back end and it's interesting to see where our relationship takes us now and how possibly we can collaborate to really have a positive impact on that talent journey within the legal space you know what one observation I would make Dino is that when we're talking to those owners that have decided it's time to sell up the the most common thing that we're told is I'm exhausted I just can't do it anymore and it's not about practicing the law if your firm is below a certain size you can't economically create the infrastructure required to run this regulated business so therefore you have to do it yourself so you're dealing with all of your regulation compliance your finance your stuff you know everything falls on just two or three sets of shoulders who are usually the people that the firm is reliant on as being the biggest sources of fee income as well so if there's a way to relieve some of the pressure from those shoulders before they get to the point of exhaustion either they might be happier to work for longer or they might have more options when it comes to sale including internal or their business will be worth more when it comes to sale so they'll get a better financial outcome so the trick is to get people to recognize this five years or more before they're thinking of exiting the business yeah yeah I typically only get told about it when it's already too late so how do you catch them in the meantime yeah yeah yeah and then those stats you mentioned are really interesting and I think it's a bit of a red herring that people retention is only down at I think it was fourth or fifth instead of 20 percent yeah because the way I look at it you've got economic climate which is number one and then you've got time for business development number two and then investment in tech right number three if you solve your people retention problems and you get your team engaged what happens the economic climate doesn't matter as much why because you've got more engaged staff who deliver better service and you're less likely to lose business yeah you can compete for business because in a market like this you want to be retaining business getting new business is really really expensive and hard now but what about those clients if you've got people who qualified cost qualified so for example every conveyancing transaction requires a will and every conveyancing client will become a probate client in the lifetime of a law firm yet most law firms miss out on this ready-made client base for their private client department there's not this joined up thinking that's going on you know if you solve that you've got a regular steady stream of probate business coming through which when I've seen lawyers move I've seen lawyers move from litigation into into probate and turn the whole division around and say wow we've been doing this all wrong this turns out to be the most profitable sector and least not the least well arguably the least stressful because things are managed they're not run into court and sometimes there's an injunction or something like but generally they can keep regular office hours so they're making more profit and they're having a better quality of life so you're not solving your retention and then if you've got if you're not worried about your staff leaving all the time and you've got them involved you can then trust them more to get involved with business development you know we look at the world today we've got linkedin we've got networking events all over the place you can't if a partner is out there he'll be out she he or she will be out 300 days a year when do they get anything done it's great you're saying this the challenge I've found is that a lot of law firm operatives associates are not creatively minded and open to business development and so it takes the law firm owners or partners to be available to support them in that to give them that training you know to give them that commercial insight and so it's like I can only solve so much of it Dino you can only solve so much of it Colin you can only solve so much of it and so I can really see the team and teamwork between us here to really crack this together. One of the other interesting things that we see is usually you're talking about you know the partners being able to train and support their sort of junior and mid-level lawyers in becoming you know good at business development one of the other side effects of the business sort of polarizing to big firms little firms is that you know when when it was much more of a uneven spread and you know if you think about it on a graph you know it's it's kind of that now where it used to be more that in terms of size from from the small to the to the to the sorry small to the large. 

How can you explain those two graphs in words? That's an interesting question I mean that if you look at the spread today it's like I was saying earlier your top 100 firms are now 40 million pounds turnover upwards and your bottom 8000 are below a million probably right whereas it used to be your top 100 well it was maybe like your top 20 were 40 million and upwards so there was there was much shallower curve on the graph from the small to the large it's a very flat curve that becomes incredibly steep quite quickly yeah and what that means the knock-on effect is particularly in the very large firms I mean let's take Magic Circle for example how many associates become great at winning clients in those firms it's actually very very few but they've got hundreds and hundreds of associates we take on headhunt projects from most of our work is in that sort of mid-tier sort of 20 to 50 million turnover firms most of them say we do not want a partner from a Magic Circle firm and that's because they assume that they will be crap at business development they won't have a client base to call their own because they've never had the opportunity it's the people that grow up in those small and mid-tier firms that get close to clients that actually learn how to do that but that small and mid-tier is getting smaller and smaller so there's a lack of opportunity now by comparison now don't get me wrong there are some fantastic business developers in all firms but it's it's just a matter of it's a trend that's been growing over the last sort of 10-15 years and I imagine the same is true of other skill sets within those businesses because the associates in the very largest firms they've got crazy hours targets they can't do anything other than just churn the client work can they yeah yeah absolutely which which is why I choose to work with firms no larger than 100 team members and and usually they have you know up to about eight ten partners and I usually find that there's one or two in there that are ambitious want to take the firm places see that the traditional model isn't working anymore and can see that if they have team members that can be relied upon to turn up be engaged do the work well it then frees them up to be able to focus on business development recruiting you know and solving all the other challenges that law firm owners face well I I know go on Dino so I think what you're saying Colin we really highlighted something about the lack of opportunity but what what I've seen when I'm talking to I don't want to use the word young because our spread of of learner is is really broad I would say perceived as junior they perceived as junior but they are in fact very senior and I say that because for example someone who's called a paralegal has been with the firm say 15 years he or she will know every single client by name you know and every single client will know that person by name they are actually very good at business development but we don't use the word business development and we never use the word sales in law what are they actually good at they're good at client relationship they're good at looking after clients and with law firms especially with the overflow of information and you could look at reviews look at this I've always been a fan of I will ring up somebody I know to say do you know someone who can solve an employment law issue a leasehold issue or whatever issue I need solving and be referred a lawyer that way and whilst google searching all of that is there I think clients with higher value problems look for if they will ask people it's that referral network and that client service that happens these people will do more of it if they know the problem is they see a meant they see a glass ceiling because they call the paralegal but and there's this ingrained belief that they can't rise to senior ranks and become a director or a partner of the firm because of that barrier that barrier is no longer there but most people in this position don't know it and most law firm leaders don't know it because they're so busy doing the daily business but when we see people starting to get qualified and realize this glass ceiling is gone the loyalty that they have to the firm the seniority of position that they have to the firm suddenly we see this renewed desire to go out and do business development but doing it in a way that's very effective because they're not selling they're going out and representing especially the local community I can absolutely back that up with my experience the clients I've worked with that when a team member feels valued and taken seriously and has time invested in them to gain the career progression they yearn for their loyalty to the firm and targets and an engagement just greatly increase so yeah I really get that Dino yeah great. Sorry just just one more point in that Dan I appreciate we could go on forever here but that's what Dino was saying there is that you know that glass ceiling that you know some of your your best people will perceive it's also to do with how people are often measured and rewarded in law firms because one thing that has remained quite traditional is measuring people by their post-qualified experience and you know someone says well I've I've got 15 years experience therefore I'm worth an awful lot more money than that person that's got three years experience you know by the same logic I mean I've been playing football longer than Inger Harland does that make me a better footballer than him you know it's arguable but probably not. I write people up all the time I tell my kids when they tell me oh so and so's been doing it for a long time I said but have they been doing it well I you know have they been doing it well just because you've been able to hold down a job for a long time doesn't mean necessarily you may be okay at the job but there could be someone who's done the job for half the time but it's absolutely a rock star. 

Yeah and they're just repeating year one year after year rather than progressing. And in an industry where new talent is very difficult to come by law firms are settling for that subpar performance and yeah I know absolutely we could talk forever us three I've really enjoyed hosting you both on this show in the show notes I'll include a link to both of your LinkedIn and to both of your websites thanks so much for joining me here today Dino and Colin. Thank you. 

Thank you Dan good to see you again Colin and Dan really real pleasure. Cheers.