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

As a law firm grows, how can lawyers -- especially firm leaders -- keep track of everything going on?

Bruce Stachenfeld

Bruce Stachenfeld

Consider if you start your own firm as a solo practice. The bad news is – well, you presumably know the limitations and I don’t have to go into them. The good news is that you know everything that is going on at your firm. You know the clients, the worries, the concerns. You know everything. There is no issue about information flow and how to deal with it.

Then you add a partner. Things are still pretty good if you sit near each other and you are friends – you hear about everything and you each know everything the other one is doing.

Maybe at some point you have five partners and ten associates. At that point everyone doesn’t know everything but probably the managing partner knows pretty much everything that is going on so it is sort of okay.

But at some point it just breaks down. There are just too many things for a single brain to keep track of. What happens then?

I follow this back in my mind over the years. I used to know every single detail. And even a few years ago I kind of knew what everyone was doing and what was going on. But now I have about 35 partners – about 35 associates – over 400 clients – and probably 250 to 500 active matters in the firm at one time. I am the managing partner but it is completely impossible for me to know what is going on. Yikes!

There are (at least) two problems that flow from this situation.

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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.

Yet I am “the face of the firm.” People, within and without, expect that I somehow “know” what is happening. I am for sure “responsible” whether or not I actually “know” what is happening. But this first problem is that I no longer now have the ability to really know everything, so I am in a quandary.

The second problem is even harder to solve. 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…..”

More subtly, the culture misses out on opportunities to build when people don’t really have ways to know what others are doing so they find it hard to relate to each other or build together. For example, if one person is hugely “into” a cultural issue (take your pick of one) but doesn’t know anyone else is “into” the same issue, these parties miss out on the opportunity to get “together” on something that would foster firm loyalty, friendship, etc.

These foregoing items might not sound like a big deal in any particular instance; however, if you multiply them a thousand-fold it becomes obvious that the firm is missing out on literally zillions of upside and opportunities – and without even realizing it.

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However, it can get much worse. These two problems, if not dealt with (somehow), can result in people feeling like they are just a tiny silo in a major organization and feel zero connectedness to the mother ship. This for the reason that the mother ship isn’t mothering them.

So what’s a mother to do……?

I admit I don’t have a great answer here to either problem, but I have been devoting serious thought to both of these issues and I will write about them in my next two articles. However, since I don’t have an answer, being very honest, I am hoping someone will email me with some magical solutions that I can not only put in the next articles, but also use myself at Duval & Stachenfeld.


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 [email protected].