You Will Have It in the Morning

I am often asked to submit a proposal which will describe how my team and I might approach a problem and what our services might cost. The person requesting the proposal often intends to share it with others inside their firm.

The question is, when should the proposal arrive on their desk (metaphorically speaking)?

In this article, I make the argument that you should do what our late partner, Ed Wesemann, would do. He would have that proposal delivered to the person requesting it by the next day.

I’m sure you have many arguments to support the notion that it will take you a lot more than one day to respond to a request with elegance. However, you would not have convinced Ed that any of those arguments would hold water.

I still remember conversations with some of Ed’s clients who would recount that they were “blown away” by the speed with which Ed would get a proposal to them.

Here are just a few benefits of proceeding with haste:

• You will still remember the conversation(s) that led up to the request (as opposed to trying to piece together horrible notes two weeks later).
• Your client will be impressed by the priority you attached to responding and speculate that you might attach the same priority to doing the work. (If it takes you two weeks to get a response to a request for proposal how long will it take you to do the work?)
• Your recipient will receive your proposal while the same conversations are fresh in their mind.

Ed frequently recited the popular saying, “Do not allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.”

He would argue that we were delusional to think that a proposal that took us weeks to write would somehow be so far superior to what we could put together right now that it would somehow impress the prospective client and win the day. Wrong.

You know 95% today of what you will know in two weeks regarding the proposal you are writing. If there is a gaping hole in your knowledge, you can pick up the phone to a colleague or other resource and get the information you need promptly.

The truth is, many of us want to procrastinate. . . . It is more comfortable than doing the task now because:

• We want to do it perfectly
• We want to succeed in being chosen
• We want to be impressive and maintain or enhance our brand

Ed had virtual staff that could proofread proposals before they were delivered ­– but that proofreading would be done overnight, not over a few days.

The most compelling reason you should learn from the wisdom of Ed Wesemann is that he was consistently the top rainmaker in our global consultancy and had the best score at being chosen to proceed to do the work that was proposed in his responses.

Ed was a winner. We who worked with him for so many years have the enduring benefit of having his philosophies and wisdom well ingrained in our memories. We aspire to come close to his level of accomplishment. . . and through this article, I know he would be proud to share this framework with you, and for you to benefit from it as well.

So next time you are asked to submit a proposal, say what Ed would have said: “You will have it in the morning.”

Ed Wesemann on Leadership

In a recent Edge International Communiqué we paid tribute to and farewelled our fondly remembered late colleague, Ed Wesemann, a pillar of the law firm consulting world for the past 30 years.

In support of a conference program on leadership I was running in New Zealand in 2015, Ed kindly prepared a short video on leadership. I thought readers would find it interesting to read excerpts from the video:

There is probably no other topic which has had more discussion and training and writing than leadership – we have talked about whether leaders are born or whether they can be trained, we have talked about styles of leaders, the concept of level 5 leaders, and there has been a lot been said about it – the presumption being that the firm with the best leadership wins, and that leadership equates to success.

We have also had two decades of success in the legal profession, unprecedented growth in number of lawyers, growth in revenues and growth in profitability, so there is a natural tendency to say ‘let’s look around at the most successful firms and if the presumption is that the most successful firms have the best leaders, let’s see what the traits of those leaders are’.

Well, not surprisingly we didn’t see a whole lot of consistency among the leaders we looked at.

I tend to think of leaders the way I think of symphony conductors – it is their job to hire the musicians, to select the music and decide how it is going to be played, and when certain sections should come in, how loud they should be and how fast should they play and finally, to get everyone to start and stop at the same time. We have an orchestra nearby here and they call it the Democratic Orchestra. What happens is they audition musicians by a sort of consensus process. The whole orchestra identifies them and interviews them and they also select the music on a consensus basis. They have groups who get together and decide what the music will be that they will play, and they annually elect their conductor. In candour, it is a terrible orchestra but they succeed, and they succeed because there’s not a whole lot of competition.

And that in fact may be a little bit what law firm leadership is like in relationship to how successful law firms have been. If you ask a managing partner of a successful law firm what he or she does, the answer is often that ‘I am responsible for building consensus’. But, one of the difficulties is that we are seeing a breakdown in the way you build or are able to build consensus in a law firm. Part of this issue is pure size; for instance, when you think of a law firm of a couple of hundred people or even a couple of thousand people it is hard to go around and measure and also build consensus. Then you build in the international element with different time zones, different languages and vast cultural differences, and you further add to this things like Swiss Verein structures that limit the real cultural glue and it complicates it further.  As a law firm is depending on the firm’s loose configurations or confederations of lawyers, you end up with a sort of a breakdown of the culture that’s necessary to operate on a consensus basis.

So the result is the legal world is changing dramatically and very rapidly for law firm leaders: they can’t simply just enunciate what is popular. For a long time they have been able to look around and see what’s popular or what’s acceptable by the partners and use that as essentially the basis upon which they create their vision. It’s a bit like politicians who decide their policy positions based on what people say in the polls. It doesn’t quite work like this anymore for law firms, and increasingly it’s going to be difficult to do that in future.

So what’s the future going to look like!? I think we are going to see three things from leaders:

1. The first thing is that they are going to have to become extraordinary visionaries. Visionaries have the ability to look into the future and through creativity and intuition understand where the world is going, where the marketplace is going, where clients are going, where the practice of law is going and interpret all that for their firm;
2. The second thing is that they are going to have to be extraordinary communicators. Now this is not just about being a good public speaker. They are going to have to be able to be storytellers and present a compelling picture of the vision in words. They won’t simply be saying ‘This is the vision,’ they will be saying, ‘This is how it will affect you and your firm and this is what I want you to do’;
3. The third thing is they are going to have to be builders. By builders we mean they are going to have to be able to implement the vision they see. Now generally implementation is a real weak point in law firm leadership and management but it’s going to become more critical, not only in developing strategies but to be able to create alliances within the firm notwithstanding that many firms are now spread out both geographically and culturally and also need to form alliances with other organisations that they are going to have to work with.

So, in short, the easy money that was to be made in the practice of law has been made. We have had the good years. The years in future are going to be much more challenging. As a result, simply being in the right place at the right time won’t work in terms of being a successful leader. The leaders are going to have to do what we’ve been giving them credit for doing for lots of years, and that is going take some very extraordinary people.

New Year’s Resolutions for Law Firm Managing Partners

It’s a shame that we tend to make New Year’s resolutions on January 1^st.  For law firm managing partners, this time of year is so busy with closing the books and compensation meetings that we barely have time to focus on anything beyond what went right and wrong in 2010.  Let me give you a suggestion for this year.  Pretend that 2011 really starts on the Ides of March and that is when your resolutions kick in.  Between now and then, send your assistant Blackberry messages (or Tweets if you’re accomplished in the social media) with resolutions as you think of them.  Then, start with a clean slate after all the yearend rigmarole is over.

In the meantime, here are my suggestions for 2011 Managing Partner resolutions.

1. Make clients pay upfront. Take a hard look at your receivable problems and profile your over 180 day deadbeats. Odds are that you’ll document what you already know: your greatest credit risks are small businesses and individuals.  Create a simple policy requiring a retainer from all new small business and individual clients equal to 20 percent of the overall project or some other reasonable amount.  If they balk it’s a good sign that they have no intention of paying or are counting on a retroactive contingent fee deal if their project fails.  Retainers reduce write-offs, improve cash flow and show clients that your firm understands business.

2. Put the Chiefs to work. Law firms have created all sorts of Chief positions: COO, CFO, CMO, CIO, CHRO, CDO, CVO, etc.  But, in most law firms, the individuals, even though well qualified, are not given the authority to justify the title.  If you are a managing partner (or CEO) who constantly bitches about not having enough time to get everything done, try giving your people more rope.  Start by getting the “Chiefs” to rewrite their job descriptions to accurately describe what they can do without first seeking approval.  In most firms, senior staff members can do nothing greater than make recommendations, which means that every issue beyond how many pencils to buy hits your desk.  If you are successful in delegating authority you will have gained time for more important problems that others can’t handle for you.  If your Chiefs show that they can’t deal with greater responsibility, you can replace them with lower level managers from whom less is expected.

3. Focus on Process. Firm-wide for one year focus virtually all of your CLE on learning how to perform legal services more efficiently.  Legal project management is more than just an implementation tool for alternative fees.  It is the big enchilada for general counsel of all sized companies.  Don’t waste resources on business development until you have something to sell.  Make sure you get someone in to teach every lawyer in the firm – especially the senior partners and biggest rainmakers – project management skills.  The payback is huge.

4. Mine the data. What is your firm’s greatest source of new business?  What is the volume and size of the deals of your corporate practice compared to your competitors?  How much work is referred between offices?  These and literally dozens of other questions can be answered from data that is probably already available within your firm but no one is looking at.  Reassemble your strategic planning committee and put them to work developing the key strategic questions for which you need answers and determining where the data is collected.  Don’t immediately jump to an IT solution unless your staff can demonstrate that it won’t cost a fortune in programming.  Instead, hire a bunch of college or even high school kids at minimum wage to sift through the data.  Don’t worry about accuracy – odds are you’re looking for general information, not statistics to the third decimal.  Want to have some fun?  Give the college kids a couple of hours a week to creatively look at the data they are working with and give a one hundred dollar bill to the person who finds the most interesting correlation.

5. Rebuild one aspect of your firm. Select one staff department and make a project out of its reconstruction. Don’t choose your big problem areas.  Start with a manageable function that people don’t pay a lot of attention to – maybe the file room or accounts payable.  Create a small committee of a couple of senior staff and lawyers to look at a function and decide, “If we were going to create it from scratch, what would it look like?”  Make sure the committee looks at technology, staffing, operating costs as well as the possibility of getting rid of the function or outsourcing it.  Create an objective to cut the cost or improve the service to lawyers by 25 percent.  That may not be doable but it is a good objective to start with and you don’t have to implement changes immediately.  The redesign can be a model to move toward over time.  When you finish with one function, pick a new area.

Bonus resolution:  do the same thing with practice groups.

Seriously…make some resolutions for change in 2011.  If not the ideas suggested here, then find others that are specific to your firm.  Even if you don’t complete them, odds are the act of targeting the issues in your own mind will make you more effective in the coming year.