Develop A Management Culture

To manage your law office best, make management part of your law office culture.

To manage your law office best, make management part of your law office culture.

Law firm managers have a lot to worry about — keeping track of client payments, making sure employees and partners are paid, making sure the computers actually work and the printers are filled with paper, and, of course, ordering enough booze and the best prosciutto in Brooklyn or on Staten Island for the holiday party.

That is, to be sure, a very, very incomplete list. The point is that law firm managers constantly need to make sure their firms run well. As with many professions, there just are not enough hours in the day. Managers need to develop systems (as I’ll discuss at some point) and train others to assist them and take their place someday (since succession is, as well, a key responsibility of law firm managers).

But to make sure that your entire firm runs well, and continues to be successful as you grow, whether you plan to open new offices or move to new cities or countries, managers must develop a management culture. Make every staff member at every level feel like it’s his or her job to manage the firm.

You can do this by delegating as much as you can. The office manager or chief of staff or whoever handles the day to day shouldn’t do everything. Delegate. This distribution of responsibility while also teaching everyone how to manage doesn’t just happen. It takes effort.

As everyone has some responsibility for management, it becomes part of your office culture. Not only does this free up the primary managers’ time (and they, of course, maintain responsibility for ensuring everything is taken care of), but it also means the firm gets management ideas from a variety of staffers at all levels, which helps the primary managers understand what management work must be done, even if those managers were themselves subordinates at one time (as they hopefully have been).

I’ve had the good fortune of working as a paralegal, a first-year assistant district attorney (where we had next to no support), a law firm associate, and a solo practitioner. I’d like to think that such experience helps me understand what it means, for example, to do paralegal work. But when I was a paralegal, Bill Clinton was in the first year of his presidency; it was a long time ago, and I can’t pretend things haven’t changed in the work of a paralegal. By working with other managers in my firm to delegate management responsibility to all staffers, the supervising managers receive better ideas about running our firm than we ever could have if we handled all management tasks ourselves.

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The best law firm managers delegate and develop a self-reinforcing management culture that promotes efficiency and continually generates good ideas about how to run the firm.


John Balestriere is an entrepreneurial trial lawyer who founded his firm after working as a prosecutor and litigator at a small firm. He is a partner at trial and investigations law firm Balestriere Fariello in New York, where he and his colleagues represent domestic and international clients in litigation, arbitration, appeals, and investigations. You can reach him by email at john.g.balestriere@balestrierefariello.com.

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