Law Firm Partner: How to Turn Your Tiring Workload Into Firm Growth Gold

As a law firm owner or partner, what if your work that’s particularly laborious and heavy is often like an amazing opportunity for one or more of your team members?

From having now worked with many law firm leaders over the last 5 years, I’ve seen that many assumed that the work they didn’t enjoy also wouldn’t be enjoyed by others so they never request other team members to take it on instead.

Often they also assumed that their team members were at capacity and couldn’t take on any more work without finding out by simply asking them so again, they often kept quiet and chose to handle burdensome workloads on their own.

Doing so might feel like you are caring for your colleagues but letting these assumptions hold you back from delegating away your tiring workload is literally stealing away the opportunity from your team members to prove themselves to you and gain the career progression they yearn for.

You don’t know what someone in your team is thinking or how they feel about certain work and you’ll never know until you make a request of them and see how they respond.

Assuming your team members won’t want to do your tiring work or that they are at capacity has a devastating impact on your firm’s profitability and everyone’s motivation because everyone gets to see you slogging away, doing lots of fee-earning work, having to work late and on weekends while they are forced to sit on the sidelines and not be given the opportunity to fulfil their potential.

The legal sector is renowned for having a high staff turnover and this is often caused by the juniors and middle-weight associate lawyers not getting the career progression they want within a reasonable time frame so they feel stuck and at some point want to leave.

If you are a law firm partner, I’m sure you know how frustrating and costly it is to have to constantly pay recruiters to find and replace candidates.

The solution to this is to make yourself free to be able to support your team members; to give them the support they need and that ensures they succeed.

The start of this is making clear requests of your team members to take your heavy work off your hands but it needs to be done in the right way.

Here’s how:

1. First list out all the work that takes up your time throughout the week.

2. Then circle 3 tasks on that list which require the lowest skill but that are tiring for you to carry out. Ideally, these should be activities that your firm can bill for.

3. Schedule a weekly one-on-one call with the team member(s) you’d like to take over this work.

4. On the first scheduled one-on-one call make clear that the reason for these calls is to ensure they succeed at what matters to them.

5. Ask them and find out why they’re working in their firm, and what results or targets inspire them. Is it time off? A pay rise? Or to become a partner?

6. Come up with a plan that enables them to fulfil what matters to them by taking on the work you want to delegate to them.

7. Make clear requests of the work you want them to take over while ensuring what you’d like done and agreed deadlines for each piece are clear.

8. On each week’s one-on-one call, check over their work, and ask them (don’t tell them) what they can improve as this will make them become problem solvers rather than employees who always need to rely on you for the answers.

9. When they start to complete work to a fairly high level of performance keep making requests of them to take on more items of work especially the work you find most heavy and tiring.

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10. As they become more independent, request that unless necessary (only when they really are stuck) they no longer contact you outside your one-on-one calls.

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11. Use your newly freed-up time to close new deals, solve your employment breakdowns, and do your marketing and everything else while greatly improving your firm’s profit (and your take-home profit) while taking some time out to get fit, and healthy and spend time with your family.

The first step is to stop assuming what your team members think about the work you no longer enjoy and just make bold requests for them to take it off your hands. As long as you create a firm culture where everyone is treated kindly and not shouted at when they make mistakes or are late on pieces of work, they’ll have a work environment that gives them the confidence to tell you when they are overwhelmed and need help. Also, put in place structures to provide the support they need from you or another manager that ensures that their work is of a high standard and that they succeed at fulfilling what matters to them.

If you do this correctly, you’ll build an exceptionally loyal team which will effectively support you to succeed at fulfilling your and your firm’s objectives. ?

This is what Kate Burt , one of my clients, posted on Linkedin after 3 months of implementing the above delegation procedure I guided her through:

“I write this post on the final night of my first family sunshine holiday in more than 6 and 1/2 years. Not only is the business still running whilst I've been away and not working, but it's also driving forward. The team have secured new business, interviewed candidates to grow the team, appeared as industry guest speakers representing the company, created and published content and diverted disasters. All without my input whilst I've been away.”

Not only this but Kate confirmed that financially she is more profitable than ever before and that she is enjoying investing these profits back into her firm to grow her business even further.

If you are a law firm?partner who’d?also like to free up your time and unleash your teams’ potential to greatly elevate your profits then take my 60-Second Profitability Assessment which is free and instantly receive tailored strategy insights that you can start implementing today.

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