There’s a reason athletes have coaches, teams have managers, and musicians have agents. These people are watching out for them: they know the plan, notice drifts, and help them get back on track.
Lawyers spend years perfecting their craft. Then we ask them to build a practice on top of it, mostly on their own, in whatever time is left after the client work is done.
So it’s worth asking a simple question about your own firm: who is watching your lawyers?
Why good intentions drift
Lawyers will generally default to the urgent rather than the important. The urgent is the client matter on their desk. The important is the client they haven’t spoken to since the spring, the referral source they meant to call, the article they keep meaning to write.
That is what happens to any busy professional when nobody is helping them hold the line.
Last issue I wrote about the large middle of a firm’s bell curve, the lawyers with real potential who haven’t yet become rainmakers. In my experience, what most of them are missing isn’t knowledge or ability. It’s someone who notices.
I call that person a Watcher.
A Watcher is someone with the standing to remind, encourage, prod, and hold a lawyer to the commitments they’ve made. It can be a practice assistant, a fellow partner, a member of the business development team, a practice group leader, or the managing partner. Sometimes it’s more than one of them.
The title matters far less than whether anyone is actually watching.
Carrots, not too many sticks
When firms do build in accountability, it often arrives at the wrong end: a number at year-end, a conversation at compensation time. By then, there is nothing left to change. The lawyer simply learns that business development is something they are judged on, rather than something they are helped with.
The way I put it is: carrots, not too many sticks.
Notice that I don’t say no sticks. Firms are businesses, and expectations matter. But behavior changes through repetition, habits, and reminders, and most of all through someone who notices when a lawyer follows through and says so. A partner who hears “I saw you had lunch with that client. How did it go?” is far more likely to book the next one than a partner who hears nothing until December.
That is the difference between watching over someone and simply keeping score.
Three questions worth asking this quarter
Who is each lawyer’s Watcher? Ask a few of your lawyers directly. If the answer is “nobody” or “me,” you’ve found the gap.
Does the Watcher have permission? An assistant who’s been asked to flag a contact going cold, or a partner who’s agreed to a monthly check-in, can do far more than one who’s been left to guess whether reminding a lawyer is welcome.
What happens when someone follows through? If the only feedback a lawyer ever gets on business development comes once a year, as a number, the carrots are missing.
This doesn’t need a new program. All you need is a few people in your firm to see watching as part of the job.
From the coaching chair
One lawyer I coached set up not one Watcher, but several.
Her assistant watched over her list of important contacts, making sure she stayed in touch often enough to stay top-of-mind. A fellow partner met with her monthly to brainstorm marketing ideas, and they held each other accountable for what they each committed to. And she had a standing monthly meeting with a member of the firm’s business development team, to tap into their wisdom and the firm’s resources and find new ways to get in front of the clients she wanted.
What I love about this is that none of it was imposed on her. She built it herself, out of people who were already around her. Every one of them was there to help her keep promises she had already made.
That is what a Watcher does.
One question
If I asked five lawyers in your firm who their Watcher is, how many would have an answer?
And a harder one: if you are a firm leader, whose Watcher are you?
Keep building,
David Freeman, J.D.