Don’t Let Your Yule Log Burn Out

The holidays are a perfect opportunity to brace yourself for COVID Year 3.

It’s been 90 weeks since “two weeks to flatten the curve” became a thing. I don’t know about you, but that kind of statistic makes me need to sit down and stare off into the distance for a while.

The time-dilating effects of COVID world have been bizarre. March 2020 seemed to run for about six months, and the rest of 2020 was basically one long, endless slog. Then somehow 2021 flashed past, and we’re now staring down the last month of the year when emotionally it feels like we should be up to about the Fourth of July.

As law firm leaders, we’ve been running an ultra-long-distance marathon for what seems like ages. Our feet are bleeding, we’re exhausted, and there’s still no finish line in sight. We just want this to be over. But we need to recognize that COVID Year 3 begins in a month, and the challenges we and our firms have been dealing with aren’t going away any time soon.

Below I focus on some ways you can prepare yourself and your firms for 2022. But first let’s take stock of what the year has in store for us.

Everything’s Still Really Hard

For starters, just when it seemed like we were getting COVID under control, the Omicron variant enters the equation. It might be the next Delta, or it might be another minor bump in the road. Even if it doesn’t make all that many waves, it’s another sign that COVID is here to stay for the foreseeable future — along with all the complications it brings to managing a workplace.

And that’s just the COVID part of the equation. There’s plenty of other business dangers lurking around every corner. Clients continue to pressure us for lower rates, more deliverables, and higher cost predictability. Alternative legal service providers and the Big Four accounting firms continue to eat away market share directly or otherwise provide services to help clients clamp down on their use of outside counsel. Just a few weeks ago, for instance, Deloitte announced it’s pushing all in on legal-spend management consulting and software for in-house legal departments. State governments continue to explore opening the monopoly that’s long insulated us from normal market pressures.

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So don’t be fooled by the booming markets and strong gains. Running a law firm in 2022 will be as challenging as it’s ever been, and none of our industry’s issues are going to get any easier to resolve.

Getting Gritty With It

So what is a law firm leader to do? “Despair” doesn’t work, nor does “hide away from the world in your pajamas watching Netflix and eating ice cream.” As George Bernard Shaw said, “Forget about likes and dislikes. They are of no consequence. Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.”

As leaders, we need to be preparing ourselves for 2022 to be a time of stoicism. Perseverance and persistence are going to be our watchwords, because we don’t have any choice but to keep going.

And let’s be clear up front, dealing with these issues will be an emotional and physical drain. Even in the best of times, leadership can be a terrible burden. It falls to leaders to keep our chins up and keep pushing forward, even when we’ve got nothing left. We need to be prepared to carry our teammates when they fall, but we often feel like we can’t afford to fall ourselves for fear of what impact that will have on the teams we’re leading. So how do we keep pressing the gas when our tanks feel like they ran dry ages ago?

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Fill Your Stocking — And Your Team’s

A good start would be to take this holiday season to reexamine and reaffirm the boundaries between your professional and personal lives. Many law firm leaders (and I firmly count myself among them) spend an exorbitant amount of time on their professional lives. It’s easy to let the practice bleed into one’s personal space, and once that bleed begins it’s hard to stop. The practice of law rewards those who sacrifice their nights, weekends, and personal relationships at its altar. That sacrifice is one everyone in our profession needs to think about before it’s too late. There’s no point in having a fat retirement account if we don’t have anyone to share our retirement with, or worse yet if we stress ourselves out so much that we never make it to retirement at all.

Our personal time and relationships are how we rest, recharge, and grow as people. Time away from the office, ideally surrounded by loved ones and out of your normal headspace, is the perfect time to prioritize and strategize ways to make life better. Understanding your boundaries and keeping them firm are going to be crucial to surviving and thriving in the coming year.

Keeping your home life healthy is just half the battle, though. Once the presents are put away and the holiday decorations taken down, it will be time again to focus on the teams we lead. If the risk of the coming year is disconnection and burnout, the solution is reinforcing the bonds that keeps us together. Take time to get your teams together, building the memories and friendships that can carry them through the doldrums they’ll be going into with their own version of COVID Year 3. Grab lunch or happy hour with a co-worker not because you need to go over strategy or internally network, but because you want to spend time with them. Too many attorneys I’ve known, especially young associates, find themselves feeling like they’re slipping away from the team around them. The more we can do to reach out our hands and show that we value them, the better we’ll all weather this long coming year.

The marathon isn’t even close to over, but you’re not running this thing alone. Take care of your teams and your loved ones this holiday season, and you’ll take care of yourself in the process.


James Goodnow is the CEO and managing partner of NLJ 250 firm Fennemore Craig. At age 36, he became the youngest known chief executive of a large law firm in the U.S. He holds his JD from Harvard Law School and dual business management certificates from MIT. He’s currently attending the Cambridge University Judge Business School (U.K.), where he’s working toward a master’s degree in entrepreneurship. James is the co-author of Motivating Millennials, which hit number one on Amazon in the business management new release category. You can connect with James on Twitter (@JamesGoodnow) or by emailing him at James@JamesGoodnow.com.