Debbie Foster (00:03):
Welcome back to The Powerful Leaders No apologies podcast, where we celebrate fierce, fabulous females making waves in the legal world. I’m Debbie Foster and I’m excited to introduce you to these women who are leading the charge with their bold leadership and influential journeys ready to be inspired by their powerful stories. Here’s the show, and we’re back with another episode of Powerful Leaders. No apologies, and I’m excited because today we’re doing a part two. So if you haven’t listened to my first recording, the first episode where Matt Homan was my guest, I would encourage you to go back and listen to it before this one. Although if you just decide to listen, you could just go listen to part one because we’re going to talk about some different things in this episode. But Matt is a good friend of mine. I’ve known him for a long, long time. We have gotten to do some fun work together. Matt has an interesting journey, formerly practicing law, and now has a business that has reimagined meetings that is super, super cool, but we’re not going to talk about that today, Matt, are we?
Matthew Homann (01:09):
I don’t think so, but you are in the driver’s seat. Debbie, what are we going to talk about?
Debbie Foster (01:14):
Well, today we’re going to talk about what it would look like to reimagine the practice of law. So I want to start off by reminding you, which you don’t forget anything. So the year was 2008. You were a big Twitter fan back in those days, and you tweeted that 10 Rules of Legal Innovation in 2008. Now, you might wonder, it took me 11 seconds to find this because I use it regularly. Sometimes I just pull out a particular tip from your 10 rules of legal innovation, and sometimes I actually go through all 10 of them and talk through them doing a presentation or with a client. So I’m just going to read a couple of them. One of them, if you’re the first lawyer to do something that other businesses have been doing for years, it isn’t innovative, it’s about time. Another one, when you focus on being just like your competitors, the worst thing that can happen is you might succeed.
(02:19):
Ooh, that’s a really good one. Another one to be a more innovative lawyer, look inside the profession for motivation, but outside the profession for inspiration. And the last one, remember though, your clients may tolerate your failure to innovate. They’ll never forgive your failure to care. And I’m ending with that one because I oftentimes, when I’m talking to a client about innovation and I bring some of these tips up, I bring up the fact that for a long time, law firms have been able to get away with not innovating because so many of them care so much. But we’ve reached this place where innovation really matters and caring isn’t going to get you all the way there. Maybe it once did, and I will post a link to all 10. I’ll post a link to the original tweet because it still exists in the show notes, so you can go back and read the rest. And Matt, it’ll be a nice little trip down memory lane for you, but
Matthew Homann (03:25):
I’ll have to dig out my Twitter login again. Now,
Debbie Foster (03:28):
These have really resonated me with me. I mean, since 2008, since I first saw them, I have used them from time to time, and I know you and I are totally on the same page about this, but we both are in a place where we have law firms that are asking questions about doing business differently, but they’re struggling to figure out how to turn that desire to do it into action and impactful results. What do you think?
Matthew Homann (04:01):
We were joking before we started this podcast that this would be the appropriate time to add a trigger warning both to young lawyers, frustrated with a profession that doesn’t seem to be innovating as fast as they’d like, but to also to those who are managing lawyers who have gotten fat and happy on an existing business model that has worked just fine for a long time. And so if either of those trigger you now might be the time to tune out, come back in 25 minutes or so,
Debbie Foster (04:27):
Or 25 years
Matthew Homann (04:28):
Or 25 years. So it’s been like it’s almost 20 since I wrote those. They’re easy to find. Just Google legal innovation. It’s one of only three results on Google a little bit.
Debbie Foster (04:41):
I thought you were serious there for a section for a second. But yeah, funny.
Matthew Homann (04:46):
So I think that the fundamental challenge is that lawyers have been raised inside a business model that has worked for many most of the time. And it’s worked because there has been a path from lawyers who are inside firms to lawyers, who are hiring people who are inside firms, the path of general counsel and so on and so forth. And as fundamentally, the billable hour is an unbelievably easy business model to master, right? It is the number of time, the amount of time I spend times the rate I can convince my clients to pay minus all the time I’m going to write off because I feel guilty about it because they’re not going to pay it because I didn’t actually write it down, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that this is where the trigger warning really comes in, and in all seriousness is that that is a fine way to fundamentally engage with clients if that’s what they want to pay for. I have another one 12 rules of time. There was another one of those Twitter threads from way back in the day and it was ask your clients what they’re buying from you. If it isn’t time, then stop selling it.
(05:48):
lawyers and law firms are one of those rare businesses that insist on selling something their clients really don’t want to pay for. And if you think they want to pay for it, look how excited they are to read all those time entries in that monthly bill that they get. And so we’ve got this massive disconnect between the results clients want and the model that they’re charged for. And I go back and it’s easy to be angry about the billable hour, but I think where you and I have talked Debbie, and where I think that it’s a hundred percent true is it’s less about lawyers that are billing by the hour for clients, and it’s more that the time is the fundamental metric in which they measure their own success or failure inside their firm. And so if I think about the thing that keeps lawyers from innovating, and I’m going to say big firms versus small firms versus solos is the business model that is encompassed inside of their compensation model.
(06:38):
And so we have lots of law firms we work with and we don’t work with anywhere near a fraction of the number that you do, Debbie, but I know that we see this again and again is that even when law firms say, oh my goodness, we’re going to use alternative fees, we’re going to think differently about serving clients, we’re going to productize our offerings, we’re going to do really creative things that will make us look different than the competitors that our clients are ultimately comparing us against. You ask, well, how do you measure compensation at the end? Oh, we look at the amount of time people put in their time sheet, and that’s the measure of productivity and the compensation agreement inside law firms feels to me like the third rail. It is the one thing nobody wants to talk about because the pain and suffering required to change, it requires a visionary law firm leader or leaders to ultimately tell everyone in power in the law firm that the very thing that made them powerful and advanced them throughout ranks into leadership needs to change.
(07:36):
You look around law firms, you say, well, who loves the compensation agreement? Everyone who’s rich inside the law firm loves the compensation agreement. Now they complain in bits and pieces about, oh, I’m not getting enough origination or I’m not getting enough for this. Or Who’s lazy? Seems like they got paid too much this year because that should be dollars in my pocket. But the people who wish that you were measured based upon productivity, client service, satisfaction, innovation, community service, oftentimes those things don’t even show up in the compensation model or they show up with the number of hours I spent doing them versus the impact they had. And so the people who would benefit from a compensation model changing are either not in power to change it or have already left the law firm because of it, and thinking about the most innovative lawyers who embraced technology early and were able to get their work done three times faster than their peers, what are they rewarded with three times more work. No associate has got patted on the back by saying, Ooh, I got to go home at three o’clock every day because I managed to figure out a better way to do my work. It’s never happened in the history of law practice
Debbie Foster (08:51):
Fact
Matthew Homann (08:51):
On top of that, the lawyers who think, let’s invest in technology. Let’s think creatively about delivering this service in a unique way. Well, but how are we going to measure it and how are we going to track it? Because somehow effort equals value even though in absolutely every other part of business, it’s the exact opposite. You don’t pay extra to FedEx for taking longer to deliver your package across the country yet that’s the model that we embrace. So I can go on and on and on and rant a bit, but I know Debbie, that you thought a lot about this as well. As you think about this compensation plan and what it does to keep innovation from happening, I imagine you’re seeing it drives out the youngest lawyers, it drives out the most innovative because they don’t want to be stuck inside a business model that rewards their slowest most plotting deliberate peers the same way it rewards them.
Debbie Foster (09:42):
I think that that is true for some, but in order for that to be true, there would have to be young lawyers coming into law firms that really do believe that there’s a better way, and many of them, their dads, their uncles, their grandfathers, their neighbor was a lawyer, and the business model that quote unquote worked is the one that is being used by the law firm where they’re going to work. And so reimagining it requires, as we talked about before, a bit of blow it up. The only way it works differently is if you can’t do anything you’re currently doing, right? That’s a hard thing.
Matthew Homann (10:20):
There’s an exercise we use when we facilitate law firm retreats where it’s a rapid fire ideation. So we get people out of, we’re going to spend hours and hours deliberated on this problem, and it is this, your biggest client comes to you and says, they’re rethinking who gets their legal work. They’re going to give you a shot at it, but their only requirement is beyond flat fees or price certainty. They won’t let you track time on any of their matters, not build them by the hour, but track time. If they find out you’re tracking any minute on any one of their files, they want their money back. So that’s a bit of a ridiculous constraint. It likely would never happen, but the moment you give lawyers that fundamental challenge and say, how might you price your services based upon quality, satisfaction, responsiveness, et cetera, it becomes a dramatically different conversation and one they don’t ever get to have,
Debbie Foster (11:11):
Right? Yeah.
Matthew Homann (11:12):
So giving them a chance to just even start thinking differently about what’s possible, I think is the first step
Debbie Foster (11:18):
For sure. And there’s a couple of other pieces that are completely connected to what you just talked about around pricing, hourly rates and compensation. The first one I would say is around succession planning. So it’s another third rail topic, but it’s largely because it’s connected to financials. When firms call me and they want to talk about succession planning, it is almost always because there are people who have overstayed their welcome, and I always say succession planning is all about the people who are in their fifties that are going to retire 8, 10, 15, 20 years from now. Succession planning is not about the people in their seventies, and the reason why that conversation is coming up is because of the comp model origination. All of the things that you mentioned before still benefit those people who have overstayed their welcome. And so the only way to change the comp model is for some to make less and others to make more, but the only way that people want the comp model changed.
(12:24):
The ones that are fat and happy at the top are if nothing changes for them and things can change for other people. The other piece of this that I think is an important part is people are made equity partners or owners of a law firm a lot of times just based on a retention strategy. If I don’t make them a partner, they’ll leave. And so now we bring in our 13th person and instead of cutting a pie that is exactly the same size by 12, we’re going to cut it by 13. And that creates a huge problem. It creates resentment because it’s all related to how people are getting paid. People aren’t getting paid based on running profitable practices. There’s all kinds of comparisons to I share a legal assistant with three other lawyers. That person has their own all kinds of comparisons to the way that we get our work done and what is efficient. There are some beginnings of conversations around efficiency happening there, but when a lawyer doesn’t feel like they are in any way rewarded for working more efficiently, it’s not a far stretch for you to think about how they just fall into the trap of the way things have always been done. There are just so many, it’s like a giant Venn diagram. All of these things are connected into a really crappy business model that is becoming more and more challenging to sustain.
Matthew Homann (13:50):
Oh, and I think that as we see the rise of ai, but even before that, any software that purported to make lawyers more productive, it was a hard sell, right? Why do I want to be more productive, make my admin more productive, make my legal secretary or my paralegal more productive? But I don’t get any benefit from working faster at all, and especially in the billable hour because the market effectively sets your rates.
(14:15):
When I was starting practice 30 years ago, probably now, I remember there’s a lawyer in my small town. He was a great lawyer, but he was slower than I was at the time. And that was not just that by the way, that I would measure my time in 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 on a time sheet, but also in the way your clients would measure, or my clients would measure my time by looking at the calendar and I’d invested a technology, I could do things work quickly, but the moment I billed by the hour, it didn’t matter even though my clients were willing to pay for it. For me when I was practicing, one thing that really drove those 10 rules of legal innovation was that was starting to realize that the moment that I focused on a business model that looked like everyone else, I was effectively limited in what I could make, and it was impossible for me to dictate or to suggest to my clients that I might be better in certain ways because the ethics rules didn’t allow that.
(15:07):
But if I said, I’m going to price this way versus charge you by the hour and I’m going to deliver a guarantee to my services and so on and so forth, it allowed them to see me as someone different in a way that was quite refreshing. I didn’t keep a time sheet my last six or seven years of practice that was great, and I refuse to build by the hour now for so many reasons. But that’s the trauma for me is going back to that every six minutes of your day is worth the same, whether you’re spending them on a client matter, delivering brilliant insight or watching your kids’ baseball game, you’ve now commoditized every six minutes of your day.
Debbie Foster (15:41):
I was just talking to a law firm a couple of weeks ago about a strategic planning engagement, and I had sent them a proposal and one of the lawyers said, what is your hourly rate? And I said, oh, I actually don’t have an hourly rate. And he said, Debbie, everyone has an hourly rate. And I said, I guess everyone but me. I don’t have one. He asked me the question four different ways and I was like, we can talk for hours. I’m telling you I do not have an hourly rate. This is how much it costs. This is based on the value that I will provide to your firm. I do not have an hourly rate, can’t even comprehend it.
Matthew Homann (16:19):
One of the ways that I set value early when I started doing some of this consulting and facilitation work is I would give my clients a blank invoice. And two things happened. One is that my scope would almost always increase, and I would go from, am I doing a keynote to now? Can you leave the entire firm retreat? And the other thing is, especially with lawyers, and this wasn’t as hard for others, it was unbelievably difficult for them to think about the value because I would say at the end of, after I was done, pay me fairly reflect the value that I gave to your firm. And the first couple of times it was almost like 30 days plus, and I’m like, holy crap, they’re not going to pay me anything. I was like, oh my God, we’re having a difficult conversation about value that we never have.
(17:02):
And so even thinking about that, and again, it goes back to the business model. Everyone else has figured this out, right to that point that you said about you doing what others are doing in business versus what your peers are doing, there is a significant number of expert managers over the last thousand years who have figured out how to deliver services at a profitable way for an appropriate value that the marketplace will embrace without tracking every six minutes of your day. And you would think that would be true or it should be especially true even with lawyers who bill by the hour because they say their clients demand. It is how do you think of who still in our firm is best at it? Who is smartest? Who is mentoring our youngest lawyers who is not an asshole, right? I wish every firm had an asshole penalty of at least percent that if you’re an asshole, once you get a free pass because you had a bad day, if you’re an asshole three to four times or once a month, you’re taking a 20% hit for ruining our culture. But no, they kept their head down and built a lot of time and they’re smart. No other smart lawyers but the asshole in your firm, that’s a problem.
Debbie Foster (18:10):
So true. It’s so true. And there is example after example as we’ve both worked with law firms where it seems so apparent that there are culture challenges or roadblocks that are preventing people from even making a small incremental change that can help them do better, provide better services for their clients, think about their businesses differently, and the people who are dug in, the people who say, you can change anything you want as long as nothing changes for me, they’re the ball and chain or the anchor to the firms. And a lot of times the people, because I do think that there are more and more firms that I’m talking to now that want to think differently. They don’t necessarily know how, but I think there’s a weird dynamic, the lawyers that are generally speaking, thinking about doing things differently. Our younger lawyers in their forties, fifties, they still have 20 years to practice, but the ones that they have to convince are oftentimes their mentors, their father figures, the people who brought them up in the world, the people who said, you should pick that guy or that woman, make them an equity partner. And the thought of going against this generational thing, it’s like an insurmountable problem. And I sometimes struggle with how much I see lawyers giving up of the prime of their career to protect someone else. How do we fix that?
Matthew Homann (19:48):
It is interesting is that nearly, I’m going to be over broadly generalized here, is that so many of those firms that are less than a hundred years old night that are 30 years old, 40 years old, their senior lawyers left as young lawyers to start those new firms for a bunch of the same reasons. And in some ways they should understand it,
(20:07):
But they don’t or we’re just afraid to have that conversation. I think the other piece, and this is what I don’t know how you measure this, but every bit of lawyers who are innovative is stuff their clients can see and feel, and there’s lots of it. There are lots of lawyers doing some pretty cool stuff the way they embrace technology, the way they think about pricing, certainly the way that they deliver exceptional service in really hard problem heavy areas. But I don’t know how many awards and what kind of recognition there is for people who are changing the business model from the inside out. And what tends to, at least in our experience, and I think it’s the same for you, is when you’re doing innovative client facing work, but you haven’t rethought the business model on the inside of the firm, there is this tension that just becomes, it’s like a watch sprint, getting wound tighter and tighter and tighter.
(21:04):
If I’m someone inside a firm and we’ve pitched this and I’ve got an idea that is something worth asking, I’ve not been able to get a law firm to bite on this yet for all the reasons we’re talking about. He said, how can you experiment just a bit with some of this new business model? Lockheed Martin did this with the skunkworks, and it is one of the most fascinating stories read, if you don’t know what the skunk works are, Google it, read about it. But the skunkworks was a chance to say, we can’t do our work to innovate fast, to build the stealth bomber. Apple did the same with the Mac, the original Macintosh inside the structures, inside the technology, inside the rules and procedure of our normal firm. And so they carved out a small little bit way fewer rules, gave them a chance to experiment and try some stuff with just enough proof.
(21:50):
Mac did the same thing, right? When Steve Jobs was building the Macintosh. It was the exact same model. And I wonder if a law firm couldn’t say, let’s pick a practice, that practice area might be something that is uniquely susceptible to technology, to standardization, to flat fees leases as an example, right? The documents are relatively the same. It might not be litigation. Now that could be a start as well and say, we’re going to carve out a group of people to do this work and reward them differently, but their comp for the first handful of years is tied to a peer inside the old business model de-risk just enough their chance to try something new without worrying that they’re going to fall behind their peers who are billing thousands of hours a year with all the pyramid of leverage and so on and so forth.
(22:40):
And say, two things are going to happen. One is you have a chance to try some new things, embrace some technology, build a sandbox, and see how this works. But the other thing, and we haven’t talked about this, but I think this is one of the most fundamental problems of the current business model, and it’s something that is measured in almost zero firms that I’ve run across, is the cost of the current business model on talent. How many people leave firms to become laterals hoping for a slightly better comp plan in the new firm? How many women leave before they should? How many innovators disappear is if I said to a law firm, we have 500 lawyers in this firm, not even a hundred, we’re going to carve out 10 of them, five partners, five associates, and we’re going to build this new model and you will not have to keep a single time sheet. We’re focused on profitability, we’re focused on competence, we’re focused on satisfaction, we’re focused on the kinds of things that clients you’re serving are measuring every day. Who wants in on that? And when you see all of the hands go up among your associates, most of the hands go up among your non-equity partners and a handful of go up among the partners who you thought loved the current model. That’s your side.
(23:50):
Because if I think about this from an associate standpoint, if I lose an associate inside an average firm, it’s a half a million dollar hit. I have not had anyone argue with that number. Their salary is a hundred thousand to 200 or more the cost you spent to train them, the cost it takes to replace them if you’re paying recruiters and so on and so forth. And we burn through these young associates just thinking the cost of doing business is that they’re going to leave after a couple of years. We’ll keep the ones we like if we’re lucky and they’ll land somewhere else and we’ll pull in some laterals from somewhere else and it becomes this gigantic trade. But there are millions and millions of dollars even in midsize firms that are lost to having a business model that does not support your talent. And when I say to you, Hey, you’re doing really, especially to a young woman or a person of color, Hey, you’re doing great.
(24:35):
I’m also putting you on all these other committees that your other peers, you’re not getting delegated to the work you probably should for all kinds of reasons. You don’t look like us, you don’t act like us. Your name isn’t the same name as the managing partner, his or her son. That number is never tracked in profitability. If I’m a boss inside a traditional firm or in traditional business and we’re losing talent, that number someone’s paying attention to, I don’t think that number’s tracked or paid attention to at all. And so if you think about your margins, if you know what they are, you think about the profitability of matters, if you know what they are, also think about what a change in the business model might do for your talents acquisition and retention. How much better could you be with smarter people who are motivated, who also care for their families and their communities? What would that take? And that’s where I think the business model shift isn’t just about innovation, Debbie, I think it’s about talent and culture and it’s miserable tracking every freaking six minutes of your day. And no one loves it. Many have chosen, many have learned to tolerate it, but when I talk to lawyers, even when they are my peers 30 years out who are running firms, I’ve already cussed one. So we’re going to get the explicit rating on this. Nonetheless, it’s like, congratulations, you son of a bitch. How’d you get out?
(25:53):
And they’re not because the work isn’t cool, it’s because it is just frustrating to have to do so much of it to keep up with your peers regardless of your talent or your quality.
Debbie Foster (26:02):
And I hear that as two things that you’ve just mentioned as chief complaints from lawyers. The first one is it’s hard to find and keep good talent. And the second one is if they could wave the magic wand and not have to do some part of their job, it would be keeping track of time. And still all these years later, I have somewhere in my office an article from that was a faxed copy, an article that was in, is it
Matthew Homann (26:34):
Rolling up? Is it?
Debbie Foster (26:36):
It’s not rolling. It’s not rolling, but it was in the A BA journal, and it was from 1984, and it was about the death of the billable hour. That was the earliest article I could find on the death of the billable hour. And 1984 was a long time ago. You could do the math there. That was a really long time ago. And still it is alive and well, and we are still in situations where when I talk to someone on the executive admin side of things, what’s your biggest challenge getting lawyers to put their time in? Why are these receivables so old? Well, it took us a long time to get the bills out and no one wants us to call clients. And there’s still the same, these fundamental challenges around the business model is not only at a place where it doesn’t make sense, it is at a place where it is hard to manage because the lawyers don’t put their time in. We don’t get our pre-bills reviewed on time. We don’t get our bills sent on time. We don’t make our clients pay those bills. It’s just every part about the financial function is challenging, especially in small and mid-size firms.
Matthew Homann (27:43):
And so the numbers better than I do, but if I said to you, and you’re in the business of selling some of these software things that they’re engaging with to try and make this easier, and they still have lots of these complaints. If I said to you the overhead of keeping time, of tracking it, of keeping it, of pestering others to turn it in, not to mention the fictionalization of time. And I think that lawyers lie about time not to add to the bills, just they cut more time than they should because they’re not tracking it in real time. Your bills are fictional, first of all, in many cases. And clients don’t push you too much because they know you’re probably charging them less than you should, especially the sophisticated ones. But the cost of time of that business model is 10%. It might be 20%. And if I said to you, I’ve got one thing that’s going to require a little bit of investment but will improve your margins by 10 to 20%, there’s not another business who wouldn’t spend billions of dollars in some cases chasing that
Debbie Foster (28:45):
For sure.
Matthew Homann (28:46):
And law firms don’t even want to know percent because it’s, it’s not worth their leader’s lift to convince their recalcitrant partners that they need to change because they’re afraid they’ll leave. And so they’re stuck putting up with bad behavior we’ve already talked about as well as people who don’t want to change because the juice is not worth the squeeze.
Debbie Foster (29:06):
Yeah, it’s the path of least resistance wins out time after time after time. And sometimes it’s really around solving the wrong problem. We need to focus on pricing. We need to reimagine pricing, but pricing’s connected to compensation. So if we’re going to reimagine pricing, we’re going to have to reimagine compensation. Oh, well, no one’s ever going to go for that. Okay, well then how would you propose you reimagine pricing any differently than trying to add up the billable hours from the back to the front instead of the front to the back? What does that look like? And it’s hard because there are people inside of law firms who are saying, this isn’t going to work. We’ve got to figure out how to change it, but they can’t get the buy-in, which we should probably wrap this conversation up, but I’ll say one more thing about this and then let you have the last word.
(29:59):
It’s hard to get the buy-in because who is actually in charge In a law firm? You have 36 partners, air quotes, that all air quotes own part of the business. Maybe you have a managing partner in an executive committee, but there are things that the managing partner in the executive committee are not going to decide or overrule the person who is not on either not the managing partner or not the executive committee. And so it’s really hard to get to the who gets to make the business decision that makes the most sense for the business going forward, even though there are people who are dug into the old way. And the answer to that question in most law firms is no one, no one gets to decide that even after they have heard all of the things that everyone has to say about why that will never work, why that’s the only way moving forward. No one gets to overrule everyone on the business model change.
Matthew Homann (31:03):
You’re a hundred percent right. I think the only way it changes, and this has probably been true for a while, but it’s clear now to me at least, is that the reason why clients accept the billable hour model, even the most sophisticated ones to this day are because they think they win and they think they win. They don’t like a bill, they just push back and you cut it, right? You’ve got a business model that rewards your clients and penalizes you at every step. 30 years ago, I remember doing a client, a deposition for a client. I may have charged $500 for the deposition. This is how long ago it was, and they pushed back and said, 400 they had internally, it was an insurance company they had internally. They knew what they were going to pay. They were going to pay $400 for a deposition and not a penny more, but had I charged $300, were they going to say, Nope, you get a hundred dollars bonus because you did it less than we expected. We’re going to pay 400.
Debbie Foster (31:52):
No,
Matthew Homann (31:52):
No. You lose both ways.
Debbie Foster (31:54):
Yeah,
Matthew Homann (31:54):
Right? You charge too little and you lose, you charge too. Most you lose. So any benefit of the bargain always AURs to the clients. I think what’s different and what will change this perhaps, but again, we might be 35 years from now and having the same conversation, is that the people who are driving decisions inside of clients no longer exclusively in the general counsel’s office or in that seat because they have data. They have data that their lawyers and law firms inside the house don’t necessarily have access to, and this investment they’re making in ai, the investment they’re making in these decision tools isn’t because it’s to do legal work. It’s to make legal work unnecessary, and we have lots of lawyers unless the economy goes down and then lawyers stick around for another 15 years because every time there’s a drop and they don’t get another boat in a house, they feel like they’ve got to keep working for another decade.
(32:46):
But if this massive amount of lawyers retire, the other massive amount of people decide, I’m not going to go to law school because this AI stuff scares the hell out of me. And it kind of seems like what lawyers do. Maybe we’ll rightsize our way into the appropriate amount of supply and demand, but these clients are thinking about ways to not need lawyers and for the first time in perhaps a long time, they’ve got tools that they can deploy across multiple levels of their organization to help people make decisions faster to create at least the first draft of an agreement to do all of those things. And so that’s where the imperative comes from. It’s not that lawyers need to be innovative so they can make more money and be cool. lawyers need to start thinking about innovating so they survive, and if they don’t, it’s the two hikers in the woods with the bear and the one says, we can’t outrun the bear, and the other says, I just have to, I just have to outrun you,
Debbie Foster (33:35):
Right?
Matthew Homann (33:35):
The benefit of innovating in this uncertain marketplace is you get to be the hiker that’s running faster than your peers who are getting mauled by the bear because they were too busy with internal politics to make a shift in the way they think about their business.
Debbie Foster (33:49):
I think that is a really great closing comment on that topic. Outrunning the bear or outrunning your law firm next door neighbor, which one do you want
Matthew Homann (34:02):
To do? Eventually the bear will get us all right. I mean the robots are going to kill all of us someday, but at least get fat and happy while everyone else is getting mauled earlier than you.
Debbie Foster (34:12):
There you go. Okay. Matt, I want to ask you a question I want to circle back to. We talked about so much in the previous episode about meetings, and I want to end with a couple of practical tips on ways that law firms, I’m sure you like me, have been in some really bad meetings in law firms. I feel like we have pretty good meetings around here at Affinity, and so when I’m in a bad one, I’m super sensitive to, I’m in a bad meeting and I’d love to just kind of close this out with a few tips. If somebody wants to take a step in the right direction of thinking strategically and running their businesses differently, they’re going to have to have some meetings about it. How do we have better meetings around thinking strategically?
Matthew Homann (35:01):
Oh, there’s so many things to unpack. I will share a couple things, a couple insights one, and I’ll share this with you to put in the show notes. We build a meeting canvas that has literally walk you through step by step by step of how to think about a meeting. An agenda would be great for many, but it’s a best guess on what you think will happen. Instead, we’re gathering to accomplish. It’s important for us to do this together and at the same time because, and by the end of this meeting, we will just generally thinking about meeting hygiene. If you want to know why it’s important to get better at meetings, think about this. Think about, especially inside law firms, the number of hours of a meeting is not for a 20 person partner. Meeting for an hour is not an hour. It’s 20 hours, right?
(35:44):
lawyers, at least get that faster because that’s how they think about everything in the amount of time, but yet ask those people around the table, how much time have they spent getting better at meetings versus how much they’ve spent getting better at Microsoft Word or Westlaw or whatever it’s called right now, we’ve not made any investment in trying to improve our meetings yet. They have the biggest impact because that’s how collaboration happens as where meetings happen, and so I know there’s specific tips, but when you think about big meetings do in the room, things that require you to be together to do focus on insight, discovery versus information delivery. Too many of our big meetings are shoulder to shoulder facing the same direction, watching someone read a bad slide. We don’t need to be together for that. Think about how to do that asynchronously. Think about how to use documents with commenting functions, but information delivery needs to happen before the meeting and use the meeting to unpack those things. In a similar way, if we picture that big boardroom table with 20 to 30 people around it, meetings should not be taking turns telling people stuff
(36:48):
Because then everyone’s just waiting for their turn. There’s no collaboration that happens, and again, that could be a paragraph or a document that’s shared that we can spend time commenting versus me just waiting for my turn to tell all my cool stuff and ignoring all the others. That’s a massive waste of time. But I would suggest this, the kinds of meetings you have inside law firms, they’re all terrible. Most people believe, I certainly have seen that, and so just getting a little bit better at trying some things is helpful. I think more important, or at least as important is think about the meetings you do with your clients. How much money do lawyers spend making their offices and lobbies look impressive, even though everything’s on Zoom and teams these days? But if I said for example, Ooh, I don’t know how good my lawyer is. I waited 45 minutes for the meeting. The meeting was terrible, but man, their lobby was incredible and their snacks were delicious, said no client ever. If however, I show up for a meeting with my lawyer, whether it’s on teams asynchronously with a little bit of that, or it’s inside in person, I say, wow, that was really productive. I was prepared ahead of time. My lawyer was prepared ahead of time. We clipped around. We used this right amount. We’d use just the right amount of time, and I feel like, oh my goodness, my lawyer is competent and engaged because the meeting felt better. Invested in being better, even at just client meetings will have a measurable impact on your bottom line, but then you start to think about all the other things that you do inside meetings, and there’s so much room for improvement. I’ll give one last thing that is really important and something that we built. I can share a copy of this for you as well to share in the notes.
(38:26):
It’s around making decisions. We talked a little bit about this last time, but just getting better at making decisions, being clear on who’s deciding, getting clear what the decision is. Discarding alignment as a metric because no one knows what alignment is. We all define it differently, and being able to capture before the decision is made where everyone stands can be unbelievably important that we have a confidence compass that asks three questions. The decision I would make under these circumstances is I’m blank percent certain it’s the right one to make now because, and one thing that might cause me to change my mind, I mean, everyone fill that out. Should we expand to another city? Should we embrace this? Technology is important. It gives you some interesting data points, but it works even better if everyone shifts ’em around and reads someone else’s. Again, it’s not a decision making tool, but it’s a chance to inform what that decision will ultimately be. It is a wonderful practice and it gets the power out of the mix, and it allows people to share what they really think versus, yes, anding the person that has the most power or the most extroverted person who’s on the comp committee. That goes first.
Debbie Foster (39:37):
That’s awesome, Matt. Tell people where they can go to sign up for your most amazing Monday morning newsletter.
Matthew Homann (39:46):
So I have a newsletter called Idea Surplus Disorder. Go to idea surplus disorder.com. You sign up, it’s free every Monday, and I always wish I would’ve done this like every third Thursday, but every Monday, my newsletter used to be called the Monday Morning meeting, so I got locked in early on on this. Debbie, I share all the cool things. I find a bunch of inspirational quotes and a handful of fun things, but it’s really, if you want to think differently about business, there’s always a thought provoking link in there that should be helpful.
Debbie Foster (40:17):
There’s always a thought provoking thing. In fact, today, because it happens to be Monday when we’re recording this, you had a link to a little worksheet called The Calm before the brainstorm that I thought was excellent, and so you’ve been sharing resources, which I think is super helpful. I would encourage everyone to go check out idea surplus disorder.com and sign up. You will not regret it, and every episode will, if you read all of it, we’ll make you chuckle at least one time. So Matt, thank you for being here. Again, thanks for coming back for a part two of the podcast. I really appreciate it.
Matthew Homann (40:54):
Thanks, Debbie.
Debbie Foster (40:57):
And that’s a wrap. Are you feeling inspired? Take that energy and go make a difference today, and don’t forget to subscribe to Keep up with our latest episodes, and if today’s show really resonated with you, share this episode with your friends and colleagues. You’ll also find some resources and ways to connect in the show notes, so until our next episode, get out there and change the world.
