Reinventing The Law Business: A Potential Impediment To Growth, Culture, And Client Development (Part III)

Establishing something in a new a culture is a heck of a lot easier than changing an established culture.

Bruce Stachenfeld

Bruce Stachenfeld

Two articles ago, I wrote about the problems that arise when a law firm gets too big for a single person — a single brain — to be able to keep track of everything that is going on within the firm, including not only legal matters with clients, but culturally as well. Speaking from my vantage point as managing partner of my law firm, I identified two major concerns that flow from this situation:

The obvious first problem is that I don’t know if bad things are happening, even though I am responsible for them. For all I know, a partner is abusing an associate, a lawyer is mistreating a client, or any of a myriad of bad stuff is going on.

The second problem is even harder, which is how does each lawyer know what the other lawyers are doing?  This is a pernicious issue and has numerous repercussions. For example, if lawyer A doesn’t know that lawyer B is an expert in widget law, she will miss the opportunity when the client says to lawyer A:  “I wish I could find a widget lawyer somehow…..”

In my last article, I did my best to come up with solutions to the first problem.  In this article I am doing my best to come up with solutions to the (harder) second problem, so here goes…..

Historically, what I have been doing for years is for me to make it my personal mission to find out what my partners and associates and administrative team were doing, and then when I would learn these things I would email everyone and tell everyone what was going on.  I did this for years, but finally reached a point where I just ran out of time.  I also realized that it was a foolish plan — to have the managing partner spend his time as the news source for the firm.  Plus — being perhaps too honest — people start to get sick of getting too many emails from me over time.  I still do this as much as I can, but this initiative has run out of steam as the firm has grown too big for it; hence, the search for new ideas.

We considered “requiring” people to announce deals and other things, but that didn’t feel right.  It also seemed like people just wouldn’t do it irrespective whether it was “required”, so we rejected that.

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We considered a committee that would be a “Communications Committee” and be responsible for learning what was going on and communicating it to others at the firm.  I believe this might be a good idea, for the reason that any repeated method of communication becomes stale over time, so the committee’s goal would be to change and modify itself over time with the one mission statement to make sure everyone at the firm has access to as much information as possible about whatever everyone else is doing.  We haven’t done this yet but it is a possibility and might be a very good idea.

We considered a newsletter but rejected it because it would be too infrequent and suck up a lot of time making it look good and it seemed like just something that would “sound” good but not solve the problem.  Then — to my surprise — a member of my administrative team came up with a very interesting idea for a newsletter type publication that will strive to disseminate information and at the same time be interesting.  I immediately said, “Great idea!”, and I am awaiting the first issue in the coming weeks.  It is going to be called The Hedgehog Chronicle (which reflects our hedgehog principle).  Hats off to the team here spearheading this, and I am hopeful this will have some positive effect in solving this concern.

We had the idea of creating a ticker that scrolls across everyone’s computer screen and puts in news that is relevant about goings on at the firm.  We didn’t pursue this too deeply because as we thought about it we ran into a combination of technological problems, logistical problems, plus a realization that it still had the same base issue of concern in that we still needed someone to hunt down the content if people didn’t post voluntarily.

A daily all-hands meeting seemed like a great idea at first.  The Ritz Carlton (a brilliantly run organization) supposedly has this at every hotel.  The entire staff meets for 15 minutes every morning and chats about goings on, plans for the day, accomplishments, and other things.  I “loved” this idea; however, after reflection I chickened out since I would have had to “require” everyone to show up and people who were busy would find it an imposition, so we discarded this plan.  I will say this — if I had a small firm of about 5 or 10 people I would embed this in the culture early on and then as the firm grew it would just be part of the DNA.

So these are my thoughts.  I obviously haven’t found a “killer app”; however, I believe solving this problem is a major issue as my firm grows.  I am fortunate — and blessed — to have a really great place at my firm right now. No exaggeration. People really like being here.  No one hides anything.  But try to get someone to remember to tell everyone else she just closed a major deal or has something else to share — and it just doesn’t happen.

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One thing is for sure — if you establish this into the culture when a firm is very young and small it is a lot easier to pull off than once you have a culture to the contrary.  Establishing something in a new a culture is a heck of a lot easier than changing an established culture.

Since I admittedly don’t have super answers here, I am hoping someone will email me with some magical solutions that I can not only put in future articles, but also use myself at Duval & Stachenfeld.

Earlier: Reinventing The Law Business: A Potential Impediment To Growth, Culture, And Client Development (Part 2)
Reinventing The Law Business: A Potential Impediment to Growth, Culture, And Client Development (Part 1)


Bruce Stachenfeld is the managing partner of Duval & Stachenfeld LLP, which is an approximately 70-lawyer law firm based in midtown Manhattan. The firm is known as “The Pure Play in Real Estate Law” because all of its practice areas are focused around real estate. With more than 50 full-time real estate lawyers, the firm is one of the largest real estate law practices in New York City. You can contact Bruce by email at thehedgehoglawyer@gmail.com.