Counsel to Counsel - Career Advice for Lawyers Stephen Seckler: attorney career, marketing and leadership coach

We’ve talked a lot on this show about sales and marketing and how selling legal services is different than selling a product.  That’s good news for those of us in the legal industry because many of us don’t like the thought of being a salesperson.
Selling legal services is about relationships building.
The challenge, however, is that clients generally don’t need your services all the time. You don’t know when a client, potential client, or referral source will have a need or hear of a need.
That’s why it is important to stay top of mind over a long period of time.  But how do you do that?  How can you make yourself memorable whether you are delivering a pitch, giving a presentation, or simply building relationships in the community.
In this episode, Merry Neitlich talks about that.
I’ve know about Merry for years, but we only met more recently through the ProVisors business network.  Back in the early 1990s when legal marketing was starting to take off, Merry was one of the pioneers in the legal marketing community.
Merry Neitlich  has over 25 years of experience in law firm marketing, business development, and strategic planning. She provides attorneys and law firms with tools to grow their business and to successfully identify, court, and convert targets into clients.
She has conducted hundreds of client feedback interviews and has a lot of experience helping firms with branding,
Merry has been an active member of the Legal Marketing Association. She is a frequent national speaker and author.   In 2017, she was inducted into the Legal Marketing Association Hall of Fame.
She is also an accomplished nationally ranked adult competitive figure skater.
Additional Resources
If You Are Not Memorable, Don’t Expect to Be Remembered

I've had a number of guests on this show speaking about leadership. A large part of this is that I'm very interested in the subject. But I also feel that this is a skill set that is often neglected in the legal profession.
As lawyers, we learn a lot about our craft in law school and even more once we are in practice.  As professionals, we are taught to analyze the law and help our clients to identify legal risks.
Our job is to be skeptical and to apply dispassionate reasoning to the situation so that our clients can protect themselves from legal exposure and comply with the law.  We work to get our clients the best possible outcome whether it is in a litigation matter or in a corporate or real estate deal.  We help our clients to achieve their personal or business objectives in a way that avoids legal risk or accomplishes their legal objectives.
But the same skills that we cultivate in practicing law can interfere with our ability to be an effective leader.
Whether you are a managing partner, a practice group leader, running your own law firm, serving as a general counsel, or managing other members of the legal team as an assistant general counsel, you need a different skill set to be successful.
In particular, emotional intelligence is one skill that you need to cultivate in order to be successful in a leadership role.
In this episode, Susan Schwartz provides great insights on that subject.
Susan Schwartz is a leadership coach and management consultant. She equips technical experts and teams with the skills they need to become excellent leaders.  Her tagline is :  Transforming expert professionals into emotionally intelligent leaders.
Additional Resources
Episode 129-Law Firm Leadership with Kristi Royse 15 Tips For Leadership Success  Episode 121-John Buckley on Building Your Executive  Presence    Episode 103-Ben Sachs on Building High-Performance Legal Teams  Episode 80-Leadership for Lawyers-Moving Up in Your Law Firm or Corporate Law Department

The practice of law has evolved a lot in the three decades since I graduated from law school. Technology has replace many monotonous functions and computers have replaced paper.  The internet has revolutionized how legal research is done and how law firms market themselves.  It has enabled remote work and interaction in a way that was unimaginable in the 1980s.
At the same time, there are some fundamental things that have not changed.  The practice of law is still a service business that requires a lot of human interaction.
Law firms are still challenging places to work. Clients can be demanding, the stakes can be high, and the billable hour can create unwanted incentives.
In addition, lawyers like their autonomy.  Managing a group of lawyers is not for the faint of heart and takes a skill set that is very different than the skill set needed to practice law.
So what do you need to know to be an effective law firm leader?  How can you inspire partners, associates, paralegals, and administrative staff to give it their all?
Kristi Royse joins me in this episode to answer those questions.
Kristi Royse is the CEO of KLR Consulting.  She is a nationally recognized speaker, facilitator, management consultant, executive coach, and trainer. Since 1987, Kristi has been coaching executives to be stronger leaders and helping organizations optimize their most vital resource - their people. Kristi works with law firms and other organizations to help their leaders build the skills they need to thrive in rapidly changing circumstances. She helps leaders, teams, and leaders-to-be tap their potential, improve their leadership abilities, and strategically shift their perspective.

For a long time, I’ve been meaning to invite a judge onto Counsel to Counsel to talk about judicial careers.  Going on the bench is a logical next step for many litigators and I wanted to speak to a judge who could offer some practical wisdom on the subject.
When I met Paul Wilson at an ABA conference in late 2022, I realized right away that I had a great prospect. 
At the time, Paul was still sitting on the bench, so we decided to wait until he reached mandatory retirement.
Paul is in fact now retired; but he remains very active in a number of law related activities.
In this episode, Paul shares his wisdom on judicial careers.  What does it mean to transition from litigator to judge?  What are the pluses?  What are the potential minuses?  And how do you position yourself for a judgeship?
In the Spring of 2023, The Honorable Paul Wilson retired from the Massachusetts Superior Court, the highest trial court in the Commonwealth.  He sat for over a decade on the Superior Court after being in private practice for 30 years at the law firm of Mintz Levin.
Paul spent most of his career doing real estate, land use, and environmental litigation.  He has always had a strong commitment to public service and has received a number of awards for his pro bono and volunteer efforts.

In the legal press and even in popular media, larger law firms tend to get a most of the attention.  In truth, a high percentage of lawyers in the United States practice in firms that are under 20 attorneys.  And many of those are solo practitioners or very small firms that have broken away from larger firms.
While I know that there are many lawyers who are satisfied with practicing in a large or mid-sized firm, as technology has continued to improve over the last two decades, I have seen many attorneys realize the benefits of running their own practice.
Being your own boss is not for everyone, but I can say as a solopreneur, it can be very rewarding.
I have worked with quite a few lawyers who have left comfortable law firm jobs to go out on their own or join forces with a handful of colleagues.  Most of them are happier on the other side.
The challenge for lawyers who are contemplating this type of move is that they have never run their own business.  Where should the practice be located?  What services should the firm provide?  And perhaps even more challenging:  What technology should you be using to run your practice? Should you hire anyone? What are your obligations to employees? How should you set up your books? Who should do your website or maintain it? and What things should you be outsourcing?
To answer those questions and provide some tips on how to be successful as you launch your own practice, I invited Diane Camacho.  Diane is the owner of DLC Consulting Services, LLC.  She and her team work with established law firms to improve operations and increase profits.  They also help attorneys start their own firms.
Diane has worked with many partners who have decided to break away from much larger firms. She has helped them get set up so that their launch is smooth, and they are set up for future success.

When I graduated from law school in the late 1980s, there was no internet, no email, and fax machines were widely in use.  I used a Dictaphone to generate correspondence and had an assistant to transcribe the tapes.  While working remotely was possible because of the telephone, going into an office was the norm.
In the intervening years, the rate of technological change has been truly astounding.  And while the internet, email, and social media have continued that evolution, in my opinion, the explosion of AI in the practice of law has been the most significant change in my lifetime.
Never before has it been easier to run a practice as a solo.  The array of tools for research, communication, analysis, and drafting are replacing human labor.
I’ve always been interested in technology and while I do try to keep up, technology is not my major. So I’ve invited Colin Levy to talk about the state of the art in legal tech in the practice of law.
Colin S. Levy is a lawyer and legal tech author and speaker. Throughout his career, Colin has seen technology as a key driver in improving how legal services are performed. Because his career has spanned industries, he witnessed myriad issues, from a systemic lack of interest in technology to the high cost of legal services barring entry to consumers.
Now, his mission is to bridge the gap between the tech world and the legal world, advocating for the ways technology can be a useful tool for the lawyer’s tool belt rather than a fear-inducing obstacle to effective legal work. 
Colin is the author of The Legal Tech Ecosystem which discusses the development of the legal tech ecosystem over the past two decades, and how legal technology can help lawyers work more efficiently.  In addition, he is the editor of the Handbook of Legal Tech.
A few years ago, I began seeing Colin come up a lot more in my LinkedIn feed and I realized that is was time to sit down with him and pick his brain!
In this episode we discuss his overall philosophy about the use of technology in the law, his book, the Legal Tech Ecosystem, the biggest obstacles the legal industry faces when it comes to adopting new technology, and his role at Malbek.
Additional Resources
Episode 120-Scaling Your Law Firm with AI Episode 107-ChatGPT and Trends in Legal Marketing Technology-with Jared Correia