They had a couple of partners who needed some help.

Both were thriving on paper: they had large books of business, their clients loved them, and plenty of new clients wanted to work with them.

The problem was that they were growing really quickly.

We are talking about books of business that had doubled in size or were on track to double.

The partners had started to realize, “Wait a second. I need some help!”

Kudos to those partners, because so many lawyers are afraid to ask for help.

This profession is allergic to coaching

Lawyers often don’t understand that it’s okay to ask for help.

In fact, one of the things we talk about all the time at our firm is:

“Ask questions! Ask questions early! Ask for help! You don’t need to solve everything on your own!”

I still want our team members to think for themselves.

But if you’re spending three hours trying to solve something alone when someone else already knows the answer, that’s not a good use of your time.

But I digress.

Back to these lawyers: they were realizing they had a problem.

You can imagine what those challenges are.

I’ve been there. Renno & Co has 5x’d its revenue since I joined, I’ve grown my own book of business from scratch, and I oversee dozens and dozens of people.

One of the things I said to the person I was talking to was:

Look, these are businesses. Each of these lawyers is running a business.

They have people, clients, accounts receivable to manage, systems, processes, and operations.

When their businesses were smaller, they never really had to worry about these things. There was one person you worked with. It was easy. None of this was rocket science.

As every business grows, the systems break.

The things that worked to get you here aren’t going to get you there

For most businesses, it’s only once things become painful that people start realizing they need to change.

We got lucky at Renno & Co because I’m a systems thinker.

As I was building things out years ago, I was thinking ahead to what was going to come.

I was building for scale.

As we’ve added so many new people over the last few years, sure, we’ve had to tweak tons of processes and rethink things.

But we were built to scale.

We built things so that roles could be shifted and tasks could be delegated. And that was only possible because knowledge was documented, processes were in place, and checks and balances existed.

That’s not normal at pretty much any other law firm, because almost no other law firm operates like a normal business.

As anyone who has worked at a law firm understands, most partners are running their own fiefdoms and operating however they want.

There is very little consistency among different groups.

Imagine your book of business triples, going from $2 million to $6 million or from $5 million to $15 million.

That means more lawyers working with you, more clients, and more things to manage.

Holy smokes, you cannot keep track of all of this in your head

When things start breaking down, they really start breaking down.

Suddenly, you have to think about:

That is hard, and I say that as someone who cares about doing good work for clients.

It’s hard because I know I could do a good job at this, but suddenly I can’t be the person doing all the work, right?

How do I make sure my team does a good job, is responsive, and does all the things that our clients expect?

It isn’t fair to a client if the quality of the service suffers.

So I said to the person I was talking to:

What you’re actually talking about is scaling a business

This lawyer is running a business. It’s a scaling business, and they need the same things every scaling business needs.

There is nothing unique about this in a law firm.

It’s a service-business concept, whether you’re running a standalone business like Renno & Co, my own practice within Renno & Co, or any of my other ventures.

It’s the same thing, and that’s what this lawyer needs.

I have never come across anyone else in this profession doing this kind of work.

I said to them:

“Look, this is what I do every day. I run a scaling business, I have my own clients, and I work with scale-ups that are growing, facing all the same issues, and dealing with the same challenges.”

They are service businesses, and they need the same things other businesses need.

I think we are quite fortunate at our firm because, by following a lot of these best practices, we have so much documented.

In the AI era, if you have good, clean data and well-documented processes, boy, does that make things easier when it comes to some of the steps law firms need to take.

But for most law firms, this isn’t their reality

Almost nothing is documented.

Things are written on pieces of paper, and most other information lives in people’s brains.

That’s why what law firms say about AI and what they are actually doing are two very different things, just as they always are when firms market something new.

I’m not sure that people who haven’t been in the legal industry fully grasp how unstructured the data is in law firms.

The nice thing, at least if you’re a huge law firm, is that, boy, do you have a lot of data.

There are tons of things you can do with that data that previously would have required lawyers.

At the same time, a lot of it needs to be tagged or coded, or at least reviewed by someone who understands it.

Finding people with the knowledge and skill to do that is going to be a lot trickier than people realize!

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I knew a lot more than the average lawyer, that’s for sure, and I was definitely better at it by nature.

But there were also a lot of things I didn’t realize, which I’ve reflected on over five years of training lawyers non-stop (both in my day job and on the side).

One of my biggest epiphanies was realizing this:

Almost no lawyers actually have a clue how to train a person.

They’ve never been trained properly themselves.

They’ve never realized that they’re people managers and that training is really a people management skill.

They don’t have time, or at least don’t believe they have time, to train.

Yet it’s ironic because lawyers have so many opportunities to train.

Every single file presents a new fact pattern that is perfect for training, but they don’t know where to start.

People talk about AI these days and say:

“Well, if AI can do this, then where are the opportunities to train new lawyers? I’m worried about those lost opportunities”

The argument seems to be: if AI removes those opportunities, then we shouldn’t use AI.

Obviously, that’s a very stupid argument at the best of times.

It’s not a reason not to use technology, and if you run a business, it’s certainly a terrible idea.

Training will look a bit different

But I don’t think people realize: wait a second, how are you talking to AI? How are you doing things? How are you approaching these tasks?

There are so many training opportunities even there.

I’m a huge believer that, as AI use becomes more prevalent, the value of certain people goes up, and the value of a lot of others goes down.

I think it was already true that certain people were a lot more valuable than others, but suddenly that difference becomes tenfold.

The person who can do nothing but execute and needs everything spelled out for them becomes way less valuable

Their value has probably declined tenfold.

The creative person who can problem-solve, understand things, and manage people well has seen their value go up tenfold.

Suddenly, they can get a lot more done.

There are a lot of people whose value have changed.

Of course, the market, at least in law, doesn’t reflect that change yet, but it will at some point soon.

I go back to some of my thoughts on training and realize: yup, there is definitely a way to train people.

We’ve institutionalized that at our firm.

I’ve had to reverse-engineer how to train people by reflecting on best practices from outside the legal profession.

There are ways to train people, and for the most part, those things are still going to hold in the AI era.

I find it both astonishing and not at all surprising that people are so worried about AI, when they forget that we haven’t been doing training well, even at the best of times.

We’ve been doing it terribly, with enormous adverse mental health implications.

As much as people are saying, “Oh, well, if we do this [new thing], then that [bad thing] will happen,” very few have actually stopped to ask:

It’s been interesting in some of the coaching work I’ve done with different firms and in certain courses.

You teach people some basic techniques, and suddenly they realize they can do these things without adding much extra time.

The light bulbs go off:

“Oh, training isn’t this thing I just do once a year. Feedback isn’t something I give only when I happen to find the time, which is never.”

You teach them practical ways to do that.

You may have all these things happening in a day, but you know that junior doesn’t understand them well.

They’re never going to understand unless you teach them.

So are you going to wait for them to magically acquire that knowledge, or are you going to teach them now?

How do you do that? How do you think that way?

There are so many learning opportunities every day, and one of the things I never realized I would have to do was teach people how to train.

In some of the consulting work I’m doing with smaller firms, what I’ve come to realize over the last few years is that…

Today, you have to teach people how to train others.

You have to teach people how to give feedback in real time in a practical way, and everything else will fail if you don’t do that.

At a lot of firms, the challenge is that there aren’t enough competent people to do the work that needs to get done properly.

The bottlenecks are the more valuable people.

If those move valuable people simply use AI in the future instead of working with less valuable people, then yes, you’re losing training opportunities.

But every firm would prefer to have more competent, high-value people.

The question is: how do you get more of those?

But that’s not something people talk about.

AI actually opens up so many training opportunities because you can build interactive training so easily.

You can take real files as they come in and turn them into training for other people.

You can run all these incredible simulations and do all of that, but people aren’t thinking that way.

Instead, they’re thinking:

“Oh no, how will the status quo change?”

As usual, the status quo wasn’t very good for most people.

Almost no one knows how to train people well.

So few associates, if asked, would say, “Oh yeah, my firm was great at training”.

So again, we have this bizarre thought process, and that’s fine.

The fun part about running a law firm while also doing all these things on the side is that the slower everyone else moves, the more we get to eat their lunch.

So far, their lunch has been pretty tasty, and I’m happy to keep eating it.

But I really would prefer to see this profession move in a better direction, with firms making better choices for the good of their people.

Our oldest, who is four, is pretty much a carbon copy of me.

At least I’ve learned a ton over the last five years how my brain works, which has been incredibly helpful to his development and to my ability to be a supportive parent.

Lots of energy, lots of ideas, a massive shit disturber, but generally a very cute and funny kid.

Our youngest just turned one, and it’s been fun going through parenting things for the second time.

As I reflect on five years out of BigLaw, I’ve been thinking a lot about what being a parent of young kids while being a lawyer in private practice.

Obviously, I say this as a man. I know things are very different for women, and I don’t pretend to speak to that here. And of course, everyone’s journeys are completely different.

But I don’t recall any lessons about parenting that I was taught in BigLaw.

Other than: “Spend money, hire a nanny, and make sure your wife also doesn’t work.”

To be clear, those weren’t necessarily express lessons, but they were pretty clearly implied in some cases.

I see this growing gap between older partners who had the stay-at-home wife, bought houses when they cost 1/3 of what they do now, had a full-time nanny, and really don’t understand the reality of younger lawyers in a very different financial situation.

In some cases, the younger lawyers are living in very small spaces because of the cost of housing. They have a lot of debt. Their spouse works. There is no full-time nanny.

I’m definitely grateful I didn’t have kids when I started most of my ventures because it’s almost impossible, especially with young kids. That’s something I didn’t really understand until I had kids, and it’s so hard to understand until you go through that process yourself.

Recently, I was speaking with a colleague who has a kid due soon, and I was thinking : “What advice do I have for you?”

Obviously, this isn’t general advice, but I thought it was relevant to share.

I said to him:

“You’ve got to get used to your schedule changing, and you’ve got to be able to get things done in different places.

The power of voice notes and voice-to-text is unbelievable these days, and it is so underused in this profession.

At our firm, we use a ton of voice notes. We love asynchronous communication, whether it’s in writing or through voice notes.

It’s better in general, it’s way more flexible, and it works especially well because our team is scattered around the world. You need an async-first culture to make that work.”

I think back to when my youngest was under 3 months old.

As I used to say: “My hands are literally occupied. The kid has no head control, and if I’m feeding him a bottle, I can’t do anything with my hands.

“But I can do a lot with my voice, and I have a lot of time spent doing very boring, tedious stuff that needs to get done.”

In fact, there’s a lot of boring time as a parent.

I really like being a parent, but there’s just a lot of stuff you have to do unless you’ve outsourced every single thing.

I think especially for someone like me, who has a lot on the go and a lot of things they want to do, you have to learn how to use that time wisely.

I’m recording this post through voice-to-text as I feed our youngest a bottle.

My wife is out, the other kid is out, and I’m on parenting duty, but I’m still able to get things done and pay attention to him.

I’m engaged, I’m smiling, and I assume he’s learning some words because I’m certainly saying a lot out loud.

Those are the kinds of things you often don’t think about.

It ties back to some of the material I teach in one of my time management courses, which is about using what I call low-ROI (low-return-on-investment) time better.

As a parent, you’re stuck at a doctor’s office.

You have limited time at the computer because they’re home.

There’s bath time, bedtime, mealtime, and whatever the normal chaos is, and you’ve still have to get stuff done.

There’s still so much to do, especially if you’re in private practice or running a business.

You can’t make more time.

And if you’re tired, which many parents are, asking yourself to be perfectly productive isn’t realistic.

Bleeding into the late hours and sacrificing sleep is definitely not the answer.

But there are techniques, and they come from time management best practices and other related areas.

It’s really about finding ways to systematize things and be consistent, while also asking:

When I’m stuck doing these things I have to do, how can I get things done without sacrificing anything and actually make the time more enjoyable?

And that was my biggest takeaway for him.

If you want to be an engaged parent (and you should obviously want to be) while also being in private practice, you have a bunch of choices depending on your financial situation.

A lot of the old choices (the choices people made in the past) just aren’t an option anymore, or they’re not good enough.

They assume a spouse who doesn’t work.

They assume all these resources you may not have.

These aren’t things we talk about at law firms.

Instead, it’s: “Figure it out. Get it done.”

No one really gives people the strategy to fit these things into reality.

The strategy is usually just to outsource it, and outsourcing is great, but it’s not an option for everyone, and it’s not always practical.

It is an incredible privilege to be able to work from home.

I’m an enormous advocate for working from home and not forcing people back to the office.

From a neurodivergent standpoint, it’s the right decision.

From a young parent’s standpoint, it’s the right decision.

For so many other reasons, it’s the right decision, and yet it’s something we don’t see many organizations do.

I’m really grateful that our team is remote-first, especially for people who are having kids and returning to work after whatever leave they choose to take.

They can be engaged parents, not just for the sake of their kids but also for the sake of their spouses.

I think back to the level of support I was able to provide, despite working full-time, because I was physically at home.

My wife needed to take a shower. My wife needed to do something else.

Or the kid was asleep, and I had the monitor, so she could do something else while he napped.

Just literally being home, with a monitor next to me and being available to help, has gone such a long way.

That is simply not a luxury you have when you’re stuck working in an office.

There aren’t too many lawyers out there who are actually entrepreneurs who run businesses (or, in my case, run multiple businesses while also being a full-time lawyer!).

Probably because those people are sane and I am less so.

I can’t even begin to describe how many conversations I have with clients where I’m like, “Yeah… I’ve been there. It is so unbelievably frustrating when you have to…”

Often, they’re a little behind us on the entrepreneurial journey, and I can see them painfully learning lessons we’ve already learned.

I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had on the employment side where an employer is looking to fire someone, but the employee has access to passwords (that aren’t in a shared vault) and, therefore, leverage.

The biggest thing stopping the employer from firing the employee is the fear that the employee will abuse that leverage and refuse to hand over the passwords or that the employer won’t be able to get what they need from them without a huge fight.

I dealt with that at our firm three years ago, and it was not fun.

The first batch of people I needed to fire, especially after I started taking over the firm, had not done a good job of setting things up on the back end.

That meant everything was wrong, and I had to figure all of it out before we could get rid of them.

As an employer, you worry about that leverage and fear that an employee might take advantage of it, especially if they see things differently and don’t quite realize how they (the employee) are underperforming and causing issues.

That’s painful.

I vividly remember how frustrated I was with certain former members of our team who were causing us so much grief and had not done what they were supposed to do.

I have clients where, if the money doesn’t come in from an investment round, they won't be able to make payroll.

Others have been funding things out of their own pockets in anticipation of a contract coming in.

I think back to four years ago, when I literally didn’t pay myself at Renno & Co so we could make payroll.

That shouldn’t have happened, to be clear, and it was never part of my deal when I joined the firm.

But it was what needed to happen to keep the firm afloat because, at that time, let’s say our collections process wasn’t what it needed to be.

In fact, we had a situation recently where one of my colleagues said to me, “Hey Aaron, I thought you didn’t accept credit cards over a certain amount.”

I said, “Well, yeah. Let me tell you why that policy is in place.”

Four years ago, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars were being paid by clients through Amex, and we lost 4% right off the bat.

These are the things where, when you’re running a business, you get it.

You’re thinking about cash flow. You’re thinking about hiring. You’re thinking about attrition. You’re thinking about firing.

You’re thinking about all of these things, and you realize how much there is to juggle as an entrepreneur and business owner.

Law school definitely doesn’t prepare you for this.

BigLaw definitely doesn’t prepare you for this.

You start running your own law firm, especially one you have to build essentially on your own from scratch, and suddenly it’s:

Obviously, we’ve outsourced most of these things at this point, but we had to figure them all out on the fly in a regulated industry, which isn’t easy.

One of the things I try to teach our team these days is what reality looks like as an entrepreneur, especially at a startup or scale-up.

You have a million problems to deal with.

There is no shortage of them, and you’re in firefighting mode.

I don’t think most lawyers understand that.

I know a lot of the clients who are drawn to our firm have worked with traditional firms, and they’re sick of them.

I think so much of that comes from lawyers never having been in the shoes of their clients.

With pretty much every single one of my clients, I can put myself in their shoes.

I can empathize.

It doesn’t mean I always get it right, but I can understand where they’re coming from.

I can ask the right business questions, and I can tailor my advice based on that.

On our regulatory team, we are probably the only firm in the country that has had multiple people who have been in-house chief compliance officers and are also lawyers.

On our crypto team, the same is true (no other firms deeply understand crypto and are embedded in the crypto ecosystem like we are).

There’s basically nobody who gets it.

As I’ve worked on a crypto M&A deal recently, I’ve dealt with a bunch of things that, five or six years ago, would have been complete crypto gibberish to me.

I found myself explaining to some of our newer team members what it all meant.

It was a good reminder of how much I’ve learned and what a unique value proposition we have on the crypto side.

In crypto M&A deals, you need to understand both M&A and crypto at the same time.

That doesn’t exist at a lot of firms, because they aren’t actually immersed in the underlying industries (whether crypto or others).

It’s been interesting.

I think the ability to empathize, teach people, and understand what it’s like to be the client is something I never saw at my old firm.

No one ever said, “Hey, Aaron, you’re dealing with this type of client. Here’s how they think.”

Ironically, I dealt with a lot of the same types of clients at my old firm (that I currently do at Renno & Co), and I sort of figured some of this out before I was a real entrepreneur myself.

I think about all the bad lawyering I see, whether from opposing counsel or from people I’m mentoring or coaching, and I keep coming back to the same thing:

No one has taught them about the client.

What a shame.

What a lost opportunity.

What a gap in this profession to provide better client service and truly improve its reputation.

The irony is that law societies are so concerned with the reputation of lawyers, but they do so little to teach people what clients want, how to think like them, and how to truly empathize with the client perspective.

In one of my coaching engagements, I told the people I was coaching:

“You’re going to go out and try to understand what it’s like to be a client of a law firm. You’re going to pretend to be a prospect, book an initial consult, and go through that process with another law firm so you can understand what it feels like to be the client.

“You’re going to see what it’s like from the client’s standpoint for the first time.”

It was eye-opening for them.

They had never thought about it, and most lawyers never think about these things.

From the client’s standpoint, it’s really, really a shame.

I can’t believe you can graduate from law school without truly understanding the client perspective, but then again, look at who’s teaching law school courses, and you have your answer!

I was doing coaching through Build Your Book, running podcasts, and all sorts of other things.

All of that really came from this view:

Holy smokes, nobody in this profession understands business development.

To be clear, I surely didn’t understand it a few years before that.

I had embarked on this business development journey by accident with a partner at my old firm.

I helped them make a lot of money and bring in a ton of clients, and then realized: okay, well, I can probably do this myself.

More importantly, as part of that journey, I realized that I didn’t know what I was doing and that I should probably work at it.

That started a journey into understanding sales, as the real world calls it (or business development, as lawyers call it), and understanding it as both an art and a science.

It was fascinating, because I looked at my old firm, and almost nobody there understood how to sell.

So many people were supposed to be building a book of business, but none of them knew how to do it, and the firm had no guidance for us.

There was no playbook, and I thought that was nuts

How can you ask people to do this without giving them a playbook or the tools?

We launched our podcast and our courses, and they went great, at least in terms of educating and helping people.

For some people, it’s been incredible to see the progress they’ve made over the last five years, while, of course, I’ve been on my own journey.

It’s been so rewarding to see some of them build successful careers and really, really do work they’re passionate about.

That’s amazing.

On my end, I’ve spent the last five years less focused on building my own book and much more focused on helping build others at Renno & Co.

Having built several multimillion-dollar books at this point, not to mention building my own, it’s been great to put this stuff into practice.

I say all of this because I gave up business development coaching outside our firm for the most part a few years back and really focused on other things.

But recently, I took on a business development mandate with a smaller firm, working with some of their associates, and it’s been like 2021 all over again.

I had forgotten that many of the things I now take for granted are still not being taught at all in this profession.

It’s the basics.

I’ve also been rereading some books that I read five or six years ago, one of which was “Never Eat Alone,” which is fantastic.

Rereading it brought me back to 2021.

It also re-inspired me with so many ideas for things to do, motivated not so much by making money, but by helping people, connecting, and finding all these ways to do it.

If I’ve learned anything over the last five years, it’s that systematization is the name of the game when you’re running a scale-up, which is certainly what I’ve been doing.

I was also on a call not too long ago with a few people who’ve been launching new businesses (some in the legal space; some outside it).

It’s amazing to see people taking these big jumps to start a business, but doing it without clients.

I see them making the same mistakes I made because I made all of them.

At the time, I also hadn’t yet read the books I needed to read.

I’ve read them since, including books like “The Mom Test,” which is fantastic and which I tell anyone starting a business to read.

“Never Eat Alone” is another great one, along with so many others, whether they’re psychology books or something else.

I said to them:

“The answers are all right here, but don’t make the same mistakes I did. Don’t fall for these things.

There is a road map here, and it’s unfortunate that, in the legal industry, these things are not talked about.

We are here in 2026, and I am five years on from when I started this kind of work, and, amazingly, we have made so little progress.

It’s an unfair opportunity.”

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At Renno & Co, I don’t think we’ve even scratched the surface of our business development potential.

Our revenue is growing dramatically, but we’re fortunate to have a bunch of people with really good business development skills.

I’ve been able to support them and help build their books

We brought in a new lawyer a few months ago. Instead of taking them on as a coaching client, I said:

“Why don’t you join our firm? You’ve got a smaller book; you clearly could use some help, and we can help you.

You don’t need to run your own firm anymore, right? We can take care of all the back and forth.

We’ve built this machine. You can come in, get some coaching on the business development side, make your life much easier, and really thrive.”

It’s been its own fun business development journey for me over the years.

It was also really interesting to go back and remember what it’s like externally.

It’s a whole different world out there.

It reminded me how much all of these things still need to be taught in law schools, at traditional firms, and in general.

It's extremely energizing for me to talk to like-minded people who are doing interesting things or trying to innovate in the legal profession.

I’ve also spoken with people innovating at law schools and firms (all of whom are trying to move the industry forward) as well as many other coaches.

I can't get over this overwhelming feeling that nothing has changed in the last five years.

Of course, in some ways, everything has changed. The world around us is completely different (whether you’re thinking about the political climate, the prevalence of AI, and all sorts of local issues. I don’t recall smoke-filled summer days being a thing 5 years ago!).

We live in a completely different world.

Yet, as I reflect on five-plus years of running 4L Academy and really thinking about training both at our firm and at my various ventures, it feels like so little progress has been made. And that is is absolutely astonishing to me!

To be clear, lots of people are doing great work, but at a macro level, so little has changed.

One thing I find so bizarre, although we're seeing it outside the legal industry too, is that everyone is so focused on AI and almost no one is thinking about the basics.

I've always been one to zig when everyone else is zagging. That's probably my autistic nature, but I can't stop thinking about this:

It doesn't make sense.

I think about people management skills, which the legal industry has never taken seriously despite the enormous implications for both mental health and profitability.

Yet so many firms are focused on AI without knowing how to apply it. They do not know what they are doing, how to get people to change, or how to understand people.

To be clear, you could argue that AI will reduce the number of people firms need and that they should not be investing as heavily in them.

Some very small companies with only five employees will indeed be worth a billion dollars.

Do I believe the nature of law firms will change? Yeah, but it's not happening overnight.

At the end of the day, you still need people.

You still need to think about AI, but it’s strange to me that, as I speak with more firms, I keep seeing the same thing: they have significant needs on the people side, whether in training, coaching, or teaching basic skills.

Leadership is saying, "Focus on AI, focus on AI, focus on AI." They're doing it in such a bizarre and confusing (or dare I say, illogical) way.

I say that as someone who literally runs a law firm where we're thinking about and obviously implementing tons of AI-related things, but it all still comes back to people.

It's always been about people, and it still is.

I’m toying with a couple of initiatives right now, some within the legal industry and others outside it.

In terms of the legal industry, I can’t shake my belief that there is a need, although maybe I’m wrong, for associates (mainly mid-level and senior associates, but also junior partners) to have someone literally teaching them how to do all the things they’re supposed to magically figure out and that their firms, at least for now, aren’t formally investing in.

My gut is it's a podcast.

It's free. It's a way to take everything I've learned, everything I've done, and share it with people at scale, but part of me wonders: will anyone care?

Do people want to get better at this? I think they do, but I don't think waiting for firms is the answer.

I've seen how slowly most firms move, so my thought is, why not go straight to the consumer and literally make it free?

For example, having a resource that can really help a mid-level associate who's new to managing people and new to this role of having to execute on more complicated tasks while overseeing juniors.

For the senior associates whose roles look quite different and might be thinking about partnership, they also need to juggle the mid-levels, the juniors, and the people above them, and all of this. Again, there's nothing really out there for them that I've seen at scale.

Of course, for junior partners, it's a whole different ball game.

Suddenly, you're supposed to be bringing in business and doing all these things and overseeing larger teams and trying to figure out how to handle these scaling things that you're a part of, not to mention all the client management stuff that is never properly taught at all.

It is sort of funny to me how, despite large firms having these large professional development departments, none of them are really teaching these skills, and the lawyers certainly aren't either.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe no one wants this. I really am not sure, but if any of this resonates, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.

I know, certainly from what I've seen from the people we've worked with, whether it's my coaching externally, my work at Renno & Co, or really quite frankly anywhere else, there is a glaring need for this, but there is this funny disconnect in the legal profession between what is needed and what happens.

That is, I think, at the core of so many challenges in this profession.

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I planned on writing an article every week, and I kept hitting snooze. The reason is really simple: I haven't had time.

The Last Ten-Plus Months Have Been Chaos

They started with our second kid, who was born at the start of August 2025. As anyone who's had a kid knows, those days are busy. Not to mention, we had a three-year-old to contend with as well.

On top of that, I've been working crazy hours and billing big hours despite working at a smaller firm, which was never the plan.

The reality is that this is part of what being a founder or entrepreneur is like: you take a bunch of hits for the team and for various reasons to keep things afloat. That meant that I needed to do a lot of work

It also meant I needed to give up some of my resources (the people who were helping me the most with files) to help other parts of our team.

While that was great for the firm, in that it helped solve a bunch of problems, it also was not so great for me because it meant I was putting myself last, which, as I have learned, I am prone to do.

That means getting back to doing the things that bring me joy and that, at least in my mind, can add value to the world. Many people, of course, will disagree at least with that last point.

Since May of last year at Renno & Co, we've hired about 25 people, which is wild.

The level of transition, intentionality, and time has been a lot. The smaller you are, the harder it is. I am one of the only lawyers out there who works with scaleups who gets their reality. I get what it's like to be in their shoes because … I live that too (in addition to my day job as a full-time lawyer, which a lot of people don't realize)!

Every single person we hired, I hired. They went through the application process that I built. I was involved in every single thing.

They were onboarded. I oversaw that. They got integrated into the team. I oversaw that too.

I’ve had to do all that while also doing all the client work and running a million other things.

Thankfully, we put a great team together, and it's great to see things really coming into shape.

Having the right people in the right roles has made a really big difference

But to say it has been easy… it has not. It has certainly been time-consuming and intense and draining and exciting and all of those standard things at the same time.

I think anyone who's ever started a business and especially grown or tried to grow a business from the startup to scale-up phase and through that scale-up phase knows exactly what I'm talking about.

You have days where everything is going amazingly, and you have days where you're like, "What the fuck am I doing here? Why do I keep doing this? Am I insane?"

I have my wife on one hand, being like, "Shouldn't you be leaving and starting your own firm? It would be so much easier!" and I'm on the other hand saying, "No, trust me, I can see the plan. We're going to make it work. We just need to do this and this and this and iterate and pivot as we go."

But that's how startups work.

I always laugh when I see the rosy depictions on social media of people running growing businesses.

It's also why I like doing consulting and coaching and working with other people who are running scale-ups, because I get it and I've also done it.

When I do work with other law firms and they're dealing with issues, I often find myself saying, "There is no issue at your law firm that I literally have not already dealt with and likely already solved."

That's what happens when you rebuild a law firm on the fly, grow it, do the work at the same time, and also have to figure out:

• Hey, what the fuck are we doing on this AI thing?

• Hey, how are we going to handle the fact that we now have all these people in different countries?

• Hey, how are we going to handle this?

• How are we going to handle that?

Yeah, I've literally had to think through pretty much every single issue you could have in a law firm.

It’s been interesting, for sure. But that was never my plan!

When I left Big Law five years ago in 2021 (it is hard to believe it’s been 5 years!), I planned to be a part-time entrepreneur on the training side and a part-time lawyer.

Never in a million years was my plan to run a law firm, grow a law firm, and do all that.

At the end of the day, I planned to be an entrepreneur. It just happened that I have spent most of my time over the last few years on building, sustaining, and then growing a law firm.

I aim to get back to weekly posts

On exactly what topics? I'm not sure. Let me know what you're interested in hearing about.

I have a million ideas, and in classic ADHD fashion, I will probably go deep on some and then move on to others, but I want to talk a lot more about what we've been doing at our firm, what we've been seeing, and what I'm hearing from people I talk to in the industry in general as we navigate these strange, confusing times in the world of law.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who is sick of obviously AI-generated content literally everywhere, lacking in authenticity and full of gibberish.

There'll be none of that here. That much I can promise!

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You have thousands of perfect fact patterns in front of you that would be perfect to train your associates (or anyone else at your firm).

The problem is that you're ignoring them!

At this point, I've taught more than 1,000 legal professionals. And coached dozens of others.

Most have never thought about real time training or using real fact patterns that are coming across their desk every day.

Training is foolishly seen as something you do for new hires or people on an annual basis (or something involving talking heads and free lunch).

That's really stupid.

(Especially when seemingly everyone in this profession complains about how shitty the juniors are at their jobs. Of course they’re bad - nobody bothered training them!)

I've trained up multiple corporate lawyers at our firm from 0. And I've done that while juggling a million other things.

I've been able to do that because I use real stuff in real time.

Take the other week.

A client sends me a contract to review.

I immediately press record on Loom.

I record my entire contract review, talking outloud as I go and explaining what I'm doing.

And most importantly, why I'm doing this.

Why did I change this indemnity clause.

What am I thinking about at the business level that is informing my legal changes.

How am I anticipating what the client likely wants (based on what I know about them) and making changes based on that while drafting NTDs (notes to draft) at the same time.

In literally 0 extra time, I've both done the work and built a training I can reuse with every new hire and multiple associates.

Then I just create a simple fact patterns.

Here's the email from the client. Here's the context (urgent review, client is practical and does not want overlawyering, client will want you to make judgement calls for them but flag your rationale, here's the crappy draft I got sent), do your review.

I'll give them this as a mock task. They do it themselves (at whatever time works for them) and they send me the output and a Loom walking me through their logic.

Once that's done, I send them my actual Loom from when I did the task.

They review and VM (voicenote me any questions). I answer those questions when I'm out for a walk taking a break or doing dishes or doing some other low ROI thing.

They learn. I get better output. I don't invest any high-value time.

They get better, and over time, I can more confidently delegate work to them.

It's that simple.

All you have to do is start by identifying real time training opportunities (hint: they are everywhere).

If you can't talk as you go, then record a short video after you're done

Spend 2 minutes building the fact pattern.

And then start giving out mock tasks!

You’re associates will thank you for it. And future you will thank yourself too!

I don't blame them, as complaining is a great past time.

Complaining is also great since it is an easy way to dodge personal accountability.

Is it those lazy Gen Z? Or is it bad training coupled with some parenting trends that may not have been a great idea?

Are Boomers tech illiterate? Or are they.... Well maybe. But who was responsible for training them effectively?

The classic law firm challenge is that nobody is accountable for anything?

Ask yourself this: who is accountable for training associates? The people who run the associate programs? The people who run the learning and development programs? The actual lawyers that delegate to them? Those pesky law schools that refuse to evolve?

The answer, of course, is nobody.

Nobody is accountable. No one believes they are accountable. And no one wants to be accountable.

Because being accountable means you can't dodge responsibility for outcomes.

And it also means there is nowhere to hide.

And if you were accountable, you'd have to have metrics to track things. The days of running on vibes and bullshit stories that aren't backed up by any data and are more of a blaming everyone but yourself would be over.

My advice to lawyers - and it's the only thing I've seen work for people - is to take accountability for your career.

Because once you're accountable, then it's easy.

If you want to get better at delegation, read books and listen to podcasts about this. There are tons of good ones.

Hire a coach. Take a course. Do something to get better.

Unfortunately, lawyers tend to be resistant to these concepts.

My standard approach when I was starting out was to be curious.

I wonder how I can effectively project manage 10 files at the same time?

How can I get my assistant to be better, when she seems to be resistant to feedback?

How do I train juniors effectively?

I got curious, and I also got sick of not having the answers and feeling the pain.

Lawyers know they are in pain. But they resist change.

Partly because they feel like they don't know how to change or that change is scary.

But not enough lawyers independently start these journeys on their own, much to their own detriment.

The things that I'm really good at are the result of reading and listening to experts in other industries and implementing best practices.

It's that simple.

So why not get curious and start now?

Some days you're worried about having too little work.

Other times you're getting your butt kicked with too much work.

And for a lot of people, when there's too much work, it's not a problem they can solve easily.

Often people haven't been cross trained or lack certain skills, so the end result is either everyone is too busy or some people are way too busy and others aren't busy enough.

In short - you're constantly searching for that balance and bemoaning the fact that it's never there.

The solution is both very simple and yet very hard at the same time.

It's simple, because it truly is simple conceptually: document stuff thoroughly, train people properly, and delegate effectively.

If you do these things consistently and properly and have hired the right people, everything becomes easy.

Hire the wrong people or skip any of these steps (or don't do them properly and thoroughly), then you will likely fail to accomplish whatever you want.

In upcoming articles, I'll dive more into detail on what we've been doing and the mistakes we've made.

I'll also share the things that I've seen from people I've coached - both at our firm and at dozens of others - that repeatedly hold people back.

Although ironically, training lawyers - no matter the topic - tends to involve 2 things: massive mindset shifts and exposing people to modern concepts that are completely foreign to most people in the legal profession.

The more a lawyer resists, doesn't follow through, or makes excuses - the longer their journey will be to accomplishing whatever goal they have in mind.

If you want competently written articles about the legal profession, then this isn’t the place (you should, however, check out Jordan Furlong’s Substack for that).

But I do want to share my perspective on things, since I tend to see an odd mix of things given the various hats I wear.

In today’s post, we’ll talk about what I am hearing. In upcoming posts, I’ll talk about what I’m seeing and what I fear.

What I Hear - Firm Policies

It is shocking how many large law firms still have no idea what their AI policies are. That astounds me.

To be clear, we haven’t done the best job at our firm of expressly setting out an AI policy.

But our general policy can be easily summed up as:

• Experiment with things

• Don’t train AI on client data

• Use it regularly

You’d be amazed that conversations in mid-2025 with many law firms go like this on calls:

Me: “Gotcha - so you’re looking to run a training session to help lawyers improve how they draft articles and make them less boring. What’s the current stance on Gen AI for this?”

Them: “Uh… we’re still trying to figure that out. “

Me: “No problem - lots of firms are in that position. So for this course, should we build in an AI component?”

Them: “…”

We’re talking about non-billable work that everyone is incentivized to do faster, not to mention software that can take boring garbage and make it more interesting very quickly.

Not to mention that substantive article drafting (which I think is a terrible way to do BD, but what do I know) can often be done by seeing what other firms have written about the subject and doing some gentle re-writes.

So if that’s how they’re thinking about non-billable work, then you can imagine what things are like on the billable side.

—

What I Hear - Gen AI Training

I used to get asked regularly by firms if we could train them on GenAI.

My initial stance was no, since… I didn’t feel equipped to do that. When I run sessions, I want to know they’re going to be great. And I didn’t feel equipped to do that.

I have since realized that the bar is so low, and I now tell people we run them. And we have. And they have gone well.

The reason for that is actually quite simple: using GenAI is just a function of trying to figure out what you need to do (or want to do) and how to get there. It’s merely a tool.

For whatever reason, however, many firms seem to believe they need to train on GenAI in isolation. Probably for the same reason that they had standalone DEI teams that weren’t integrated into things like management, onboarding, HR, etc.

That reason being: well, let me know if you find out.

The real reason is likely a mix of optics and confusion.

What’s funny is that a year ago, some firms were holding off on training associates in other areas because they wanted to focus on GenAI training.

That is delusional, since if you’ve ever used GenAI for anything, you will know that GenAI is most powerful in the hands of people who know what they are doing.

And if you don’t know what you’re doing, GenAI is perfectly positioned to feed you wrong answers presented in a very high conviction manner.

If GenAI is going to replace grunt work and lower level tasks, then you better believe you’ll want your people better trained on all sorts of things.

Look at the software industry. Why would you hire a new grad if you can hire a mid-level software engineer who knows what they are doing and can leverage AI extremely effectively to do more with less?

The same goes with law.

Do we really think that a well-run law firm would want to keep hiring a ton of juniors who have no idea what they are doing, if AI in the hands of more experienced folks can do a way better job (and do more with less)?

Perhaps you astutely noted that I said well-run law firm, and so therefore this doesn’t apply to most firms. And that is a fair point.

And perhaps you noted that the current business model would support this type of hiring, so yes, they’ll still do it.

But it’s hard to imagine that being the world we live in forever.

I generally think law will be slower to change - as it always is.

But as I watch law school application numbers grow and grow (due to general economic crappiness), I wonder if any of these applicants really understand what they’re in for.

I have no idea what the world will be like when they graduate, but I can only imagine that the value of the average new law grad to a law firm is only going down from here (irrespective of what starting salaries will continue to look like in BigLaw).

In this post, Lachina shares the absurdity of getting accommodations for the Ontario bar exam and how bad a job the Law Society of Ontario (LSO) website did at making the process clear.

It’s nice to see her follow in my footsteps, since if there’s anyone who is a fan of criticizing the very people that regulate them, it’s me!

(See this article for more context)

I’m also a huge fan of anyone criticizing the bar exam process, and I’ve done that on many occasions (you can dig through various LinkedIn posts for that).

The bar exam - in its current form - is dumb, inequitable, and an absolutely terrible assessment in pretty much every state and province.

And yet…

Bars to inclusion

(editor’s note: I wish I had come up with that title myself!)

By Lachina McKenzie

I recently applied to this summer’s bar exams. Navigating the LSO website was difficult, but, with a lot of effort and a fair bit of assistance, I was able to send out my application. Specifically, I applied for:

· Registration with the bar

· Registration for the barrister exam

· Registration for the solicitor exam

· Paying the fees for the bar exams

· Paying the fees for the bar exam study materials

These steps are the same for all applicants. They are not, mind you, just as easy for all applicants. If they were easy for you, I’m impressed.

The next step, however, is distinct to disabled applicants: applying for accommodations for the bar exams. But why am I complaining about this? To have trouble with this, you’d have to be…well, mentally disabled. Which I am, so I did. I couldn’t find where to apply for accommodations – I looked for “Requests and Applications,” but that section only had requests and applications that I’d already made, which didn’t include a request for accommodations, because I hadn’t made one yet, because I didn’t know where to find it. There was no search feature, either.

I asked for help, and was told I had to go to “Requests and Applications.” I explained that I’d looked there, but couldn’t find it, and included a screenshot. I often give screenshots to bureaucrats, because bureaucrats have a habit of sneering at those who don’t happen to know the bureaucracy they work in. After all, it’s obvious - they do it every day. It’s even worse, of course, if you’re obnoxious enough to have a disability. They give you easy instructions, and you arrogantly fail to understand them.

But if you can give screenshots, you can showcase your pitiful attempts to navigate their obvious system, and they can tell you what you’re doing wrong, which is all you need to know. Indeed, once I showed off the “Requests and Applications” section, they revealed the problem: I was looking in the wrong “Requests and Applications” section! Actually, there’s one “Requests and Applications” section that you find in your profile, and there’s another that you find on a set of squares, and these are two different links. They just happen to have the same name. It would be like confusing London, Ontario with London, England![1]

After figuring out where to apply for accommodations, I could then see the instructions for what I had to do. I needed a doctor’s note explaining that I need accommodations. So, I asked for one, but I couldn’t get a response in time. Not to be deterred, I combed through all the files on my old computer, and found the forms I’d used to get accommodations in law school (a process which I’ve previously written about here, which was similarly difficult). After all, the LSO accommodations policy says that “individuals are welcome to provide letters setting out specific forms of accommodation provided in other situations in the past (such as employment, other services, during law school or paralegal college, or from the National Committee on Accreditation).” One might expect this to mean that, in the absence of a doctor’s note speaking about the bar exam specifically, they will at least accord some weight to past accommodations – in fact, it would be absurd for it not to mean that, since otherwise the LSO “welcomes” applicants to waste their time.

That would be a very sensible interpretation, but it was not the one that was given when the LSO refused to grant me accommodations on the summer test. They gave the grounds that my form didn’t speak to the bar exam in particular. Indeed, it didn’t: it merely spoke to the nature of my developmental disability and exactly how it impacts my ability to do tests in the context of law school.

To deny that a form justifying accommodations for law school also justifies accommodations for the bar exam is to suggest either that the bar exam is nothing like a law school test or that the bar exam is somehow easier than any test in law school.

And such a narrow interpretation of accommodations ignores their entire purpose: I get accommodations because of my developmental disability, a pervasive condition that – while it is a part of me, and tied to my identity – does make a wide variety of tasks difficult for me. It does not simply turn off in slightly different contexts – much less the differences between the bar exam vs. a test in law school.

It is also against the principles behind granting accommodations in the first place. The Accommodations Policy states that it is designed to foster an environment where everyone is treated with dignity and respect – not distrust and dismissal. The LSO recognizes a duty, where there are systemic barriers to participation, to accommodate to the point of undue hardship. Perhaps the LSO honours these principles in general. But they certainly did not honour them in my case.

You may be inclined to respond that “it’s the rules.” The rules say that the LSO officials have discretion in whether to grant accommodations, and they require any paperwork to speak to one’s ability to perform on the bar exam. So, even if the LSO’s interpretation was highly literal and narrow, it was within the rules.

But who made these rules, and on what grounds? As we have seen, it is not rational for accommodations on legal tests to fail to justify accommodations on the bar exam. Following systemic rules, at most, exonerates an individual actor. Systemic rules cannot exonerate themselves, that would be circular. And it is systemic change that I am advocating for, just as I have done all my life.

For the LSO to validate its promise of removing barriers to inclusion, it must make accommodations easier to get. I have specific suggestions:

· Make LSO Connects easier to navigate. A search function would go a long way, as would differentiating the names of profile links and main-menu links – “Requests and Applications” vs. “My Requests and Applications.”

· Broaden the range of acceptable paperwork to anything that would logically justify accommodation on an LSO procedure, not merely forms that specifically demand it

· More broadly, acknowledge the difficulties in obtaining forms from a doctor, and remedy these difficulties by providing the services of their own doctors.

· On top of all this, consult with disability experts to proactively find barriers to inclusion and get their advice on eliminating them.

Not only will this improve the lives of disabled applicants – and make us feel welcome in our chosen career – but it will likely improve the experience of many applicants without disabilities. This is the curb-cut effect: eliminating barriers to minorities also improves the lives of the majority. This is why we have accommodations, and why – with apologies to Trump et al. – we have DEI principles and laws!

[1] People do this. Often. Even if they’re not disabled.

In this post, Lachina shares some of her thoughts on how law schools are doing a pretty poor job for everyone (including neurodivergent folks).

Now that’s something I can get behind, since… I believe law schools are doing an all-around atrocious job and running an absolute racket of a business.

I’d open my own law school tomorrow, except… it turns out their oligopoly is incredibly well protected and I’d need approval from the Senate of Canada to do that (which is… both absurd and yet quite fitting for a profession that really does not like deviating from precedent).

Will the real normal law student please stand up?

Lachina McKenzie

There is an implicit assumption, among both the field as a whole and in communities of disabled lawyers, that most people in law are not disabled. You might get a single lecture on being a lawyer with ADHD, but that’s the exception to the rule. Most lectures will assume the audience is not disabled. They’re not directed at “neurotypicals” or “able-bodied lawyers.” They’re directed at capital-L Law Students. Normal law students. Not abled law students, because that would entail using a disability lens, being conscious that some people aren’t abled. The idea of a normal law student is implicit and unexamined. The normal law student does not need accommodations – that’s why you need to proactively apply for accommodations in law school. The normal law student can manage the usual workload.

In neurodivergent circles, we often talk about neurotypicals. That’s a term for people who don’t have autism, or ADHD, or mental illness. The kind of person with a normal brain. Notice the symmetry with the idea of the normal law student – in abled circles, there’s an assumption that Most People Are Normal, Like Me, whereas among neurodivergent law students, there’s an assumption that Most People Are Normal, Unlike Me. The neurotypical law student can manage the usual workload.

But what if we’ve got it all wrong? What if the normal law student did not exist?

You might ask, surely isn’t the average law student normal by definition? No. The average law student is average. The idea of a normal law student goes beyond averages – it’s the idea of a student for whom the usual workload is doable and who has plenty of company, existing in a majority. It is the type of student that law school is for. But there is scant evidence of this fabled creature. Most of us have heard anecdotes of failing mental and physical health, and as many of us can give those anecdotes ourselves. The average law student is not the normal law student who doesn’t need support, but a picture of struggle and burnout.

Formal studies paint a similarly bleak picture. A study by the CBA found that, among law students, lawyers and judges, 58% experienced significant stress/burnout, 48% experienced anxiety and 25% suffered from depression. Another study found that 43-49% of articling and law practice program students suffer from moderate depressive symptoms. For comparison, the lifetime prevalence of a depression diagnosis among Canadians overall is about 13%.

This evidence reveals the destructive irony of law school: it both mistreats and creates disabled students. The weak struggle, and the strong are weakened. Now that we know this, we have a responsibility to stop this vicious cycle. Workloads and pressure must be reduced.

The social Darwinists among us – more than we’d like to think – may see this as a feature, not a bug. They went through law school, so if others can’t get through it, that only proves that those others must be inferior to them. Law school filters the strong from the weak, and that’s a good thing.

One problem with this notion is the lack of evidence. As Christopher Hitchens said, “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” The onus should be on those willing to keep the status quo to prove that the extreme pressures of law school actually do lead to better lawyers than if the workload was more manageable. After all, we know that law school is associated with higher rates of depression, and we know that depression is associated with worse performance in jobs. Simply assuming that the benefits outweigh the harms is unscientific.

Another problem with the idea that law school filters good students from the bad is that law school doesn’t do that. Law schools in Ontario grade on a curve. At my own school, Lincoln Alexander, the policy is that most students will receive a B, and that generally only 20% will receive an A- or higher, and another 20% will receive a C+ or lower. If the grade distribution diverges too strongly from this, the grades are adjusted. Queens University Faculty of Law has a very similar grading curve. In the prestigious U of T Faculty of Law, 45-55% should “pass with merit” and no more than 10% should “low pass,” indicating subpar performance.

So the stresses of law school cannot be by design, to filter out poor students, because law schools are not designed to filter out poor students. If you wanted to filter out poor students, you certainly wouldn’t make sure most students get a “B.” With apologies to the social Darwinists in the profession, law school genuinely isn’t meant to be this hard. Sometimes, lawyers simply make mistakes.

Lastly, even if law schools were designed to filter out poor students and produce “only the cream of the crop,” this goal would be deeply misguided. There is already an access to justice crisis in Canada, with only a fraction of those with legal needs being able to get legal services. People need more lawyers, not less.

Yet “less lawyers” is precisely what we get from the current rates of burnout. Burnt-out lawyers are leaving the field at alarming rates, with the CBA giving associate attrition rates of around 20%. The social costs of losing a lawyer are hard to calculate. (Notably, the CBA article linked recommends, as I do, more flexible, less stressful work arrangements, including remote work!)

One last reason for alleviating the pressure on law students: they face a dramatically elevated risk of suicide. Sometimes, this risk materializes, and a law students kills themselves, sending shockwaves through their school. Even one law student suicide is too many.

Law schools must recognize that the workloads are too high for anyone. Struggling with law school is not the exclusive province of people with identifiable disabilities but an experience common to most law students, and therefore most students need more support and less stress.

What if we didn’t need accommodations to succeed at law school, because law school was already designed to meet our needs?

• I was working under people I didn’t respect

• I was expressly banned from working on passion projects externally that were all about helping others (and would have helped the firm too)

• I was subject to all sorts of internal rules that I disagreed with

• I was praised for not speaking up and criticized every time I spoke up

Basically, I was prohibited from doing the things that made me feel fulfilled. These were all things that I enjoyed doing, that I was good at, and that I loved doing.

Not exactly a recipe for fulfillment.

Side note: if you or anyone you know is new to managing people professionally, I’m running an affinity group for 10 people starting in July. It’s free, and it’s open to anyone in Canada. All the details are here.

Finding Ikigai

I’ve been fortunate over the last few years to find a ton of things that check off all those boxes, and I’m even more fortunate to be able to be paid to do many of them.

• I get to solve puzzles for clients and help them accomplish their goals

• I get to run trainings for law firms that help lawyers do their jobs better and have more time for themselves

• I get to help make the world more neurodivergent friendly

• I get to build out my vision for what a law firm should look like and get to ignore what 95% of other firms are doing

To be clear, I’ve worked my ass off (as my wife and others can attest), and the journey to get there has been anything but linear or straightforward.

But I also recognize how lucky I am.

It took me a while to realize the things I like doing the most are helping others and mentoring/coaching.

Part of the confusion was probably my general hatred of people (or at least my hatred of dealing with certain types of people in certain situations).

But as I reflected back on what I like doing (and apparently did a lot of), it was always helping other people:

• Coaching sports for years

• Tutoring tons of people throughout university

• Making things easier for people in university (including all sorts of wacky initiatives, along with lots of mentorship)

• Helping people accomplish the things they wanted to accomplish

An Upcoming Initiative

One of the initiatives I’m most excited about is an upcoming affinity group for first-time people managers (it’s completely free - more details here).

We’ve run these before, and they’ve always gone incredibly well. I expect nothing less here.

But this one is more meaningful to me because it’s the first one we’ve run completely from a neuroinclusive lens, and it’s the first time we’ve partnered with a leading organization in the neurodiversity space to run it.

My general thesis is:

• People suck at managing others, since they need to learn best practices and nobody teaches them

• Most best practices are neurodivergent friendly

• If we teach people best practices, it is better for everyone

• Holy crap do I have a lot of lived experience of bad management for neurodivergent folks (and also lots of experience of good management based on running a very neurodivergent-friendly law firm)

It’s one of these initiatives that fits perfectly into my Ikigai. And I’m incredibly grateful for that.

If you or anyone you know is a first-time people manager (in their first year of managing people professionally), you should encourage them to apply to join the affinity group.

We can only take on a max of 10 people, so for once, there are truly limited spots available!

All the details are here.

In this post, Lachina shares some of the challenges that she faced attending law school in person.

Many people underestimate the barriers that autistic people face, and it’s no surprise that most law schools - despite having plenty of autistic students (I suspect most undiagnosed or certainly not self-disclosing) - have little idea how to properly assist them.

I think the entire post-secondary system is ludicrous in its current form - from the fact that people who are hired for their research abilities are the ones teaching students, to the fact that most education is lecture-based (even though that is a terrible format for learning)!

And I especially think it’s absurd that after the past few years, most universities and colleges have seemingly learned nothing from COVID and have reverted back into old, bad habits.

Not Even Remotely Good

By Lachina McKenzie

The practice of law is resistant to change to the detriment of clients and lawyers. This is more true, but not exclusively true, for disabled people.

COVID proved that the profession’s insistence on doing everything in-person was unnecessary, yet when the lockdown ended the profession returned to doing everything in-person.

My own law school, Lincoln Alexander, opened during the lockdown, starting out remote. This was a great milestone for accessibility.

But the Dean could only see a disgrace to the law school – part of the university experience, after all, is being there, in person. So, by the time I was to start my legal education, she made a policy of all classes being presumptively in-person, with remote or hybrid classes discouraged. This policy tied the hands of professors who might prefer remote classes, and was unpopular among many students.

As soon as I read this policy, I wrote to the Dean asking her to reconsider. I hold out hope that Lincoln Alexander, and other law schools, can offer more remote opportunities, like they have proved they can do – if only they’d get over the shame of adapting to new technologies and disabled students’ needs.

I’m in the last few days of law school now. Most of it has been a great strain on my body and mind. One of the hardest things is having to commute into school each day there are in-person classes (which was often every weekday). To get to the school from Union station, I have to ride the subway, taking about ten minutes – assuming the subway works, which it often doesn’t. That’s not so bad. But to get to Union station, I need to take the train from Oakville station, which is about 45 minutes. And to get to Oakville station, I need to take the bus. That’s another 30 minutes.

And, of course, I need to do all that in reverse when I return home. So, between the time I take travelling and the time it takes to wait for the transit, I end up spending three hours in transit every single day I have to go in to school! If a school day started at 9, my day actually started at 7 – that’s the latest I could afford to get up, if I was very quick, and perhaps got some help. On a long enough day, I could wake up early, go to school, and come back at night.

This was especially hard for me because of my sensory issues – light and sound are exhausting to me, and can even give me migraines. Indeed, even on days when I got back early, I usually went straight to bed, and often needed painkillers. One time, the migraines got so bad that I couldn’t stop vomiting and was sent to the emergency room of the local hospital.

Needless to say, I don’t think this was a cherished part of law school, much less something I needed as part of my university experience. It’s nice to have friends, but it doesn’t help if you’re too exhausted to have good interactions with them. Indeed, several of my friendships in law school fell through, at least partly for this reason. How do you navigate difficult interpersonal issues, tied up in the traumas of queerness and disability, when all parties can barely stay awake?

I was always grateful to those professors who were able to make at least some of their classes remote. This always gave me more energy and time – often when I needed it most.

So you won’t be surprised that, when it was time to search for a placement, one of my most important criteria was to find a firm or clinic that offers remote work. After all, I’d be working every weekday, and I had no desire to repeat the experiences that left me in the ER.

I found a place at Renno & Co, working primarily for Aaron Baer. Me and Renno were an odd couple. A transgender goth chick who studied psychology and writes horror stories is hardly the portrait of a business law intern, much less at a firm that specializes in cryptocurrency. But we had one important thing in common: we were both excited about the future, embracing new technologies and discarding traditions that only make people’s lives worse.

The most material instance of this was Renno’s policy on remote work, which amounted to a thumbs up. They don’t care about you going in, they care about you doing your job. Indeed, if they had insisted on my going in, I would have been less able to do my job. Perhaps there might have been some very nice water-cooler conversations, but you don’t have a job for water-cooler conversations. So I have a lot of respect for that structure, and I hope that more law firms will follow Renno’s example on that front.

Legal education and legal work is already taxing. Why add the de facto job of travelling for hours a day if that isn’t strictly necessary?

In this post, Lachina shares some of the challenges that she faced getting accommodations in law school.

Many people underestimate the barriers that autistic people face, and it’s no surprise that most law schools - despite having plenty of autistic students (I suspect most undiagnosed or certainly not self-disclosing) - have little idea how to properly assist them.

Accommodations are only valuable to the extent you can get them

By Lachina McKenzie

When I went to Lincoln Alexander School of Law, I did not get accommodations automatically – it was assumed, as in most schools, that a student isn’t disabled until they show they are. I had to proactively apply for them. The trouble was that I didn’t know where to look. Luckily, I had a friend to help me out. It turns out that the reason I couldn’t find Accessibility Services (AS) in the law school was because it wasn’t in the law school, it was part of Toronto Metropolitan University as a whole. No big deal, right? It just means I need to apply through the broader university’s system. So I got my accommodations.

Brief reminder:

My upcoming workshop is on neuroinclusive hiring and onboarding, and it’s on May 14 at 12pm EST; you can register for free here.

This is meant for anyone who is involved in hiring or onboarding people (in any industry), so please help spread the word to anyone who might be interested!

But it turns out there are downsides to accommodations being segregated from the law school. Around 2023, AI became more broadly used – including for assignments. Lincoln Alexander responded by requiring new software for exams, a program called Examplify. This was the start of some serious problems. One was that Examplify used a word processor with small, blurry text – some of my colleagues with visual disabilities struggled to read what they were writing. Another issue that came to me as a nasty surprise was that Examplify could not be installed onto any of AS’ computers. They could run Word just fine, but Word doesn’t lock you out of using the internet and using the dreaded AI, so it wouldn’t do for the law exams. The computers we were given to write our exams couldn’t run the software we needed to actually write our exams.

Now, this wouldn’t be a problem if you ‘just’ had a laptop. Technically, I did…but the screen was severely damaged, requiring it to be plugged into an external monitor and rendering it unusable as a laptop. Apparently, things were so disjointed that the law school had rolled out Examplify without checking to see if AS could run it, and without checking to see if any disabled law students actually needed the computers they provided. It was easy to feel like we were an afterthought, that the school was more preoccupied with some clown using ChatGPT to write law exams for him than with the well-being of disabled students.

The Assistant Dean was kind enough to help me by visiting AS and delivering a laptop from the law school – this one could run Examplify. He instructed me to use it and leave it with AS, so for my next exam they could give it back to me. This was a sensible protocol, so I agreed. I finished my exam and then turned it into AS. They said that they couldn’t. I explained, no no, the Associate Dean of the law school himself instructed me to do this, it’s surely alright. They explained that it simply wasn’t AS policy to hold items on a student’s behalf. Once again, the law school’s lack of coordination with AS posed a very serious problem – one that would not have come up if not for the existing problem caused by lack of coordination.

I returned the laptop all the way from AS to the law department. This isn’t a very long trek unless you’re disabled, carrying something heavy, or extremely tired, such as from writing a long and difficult exam. I used the excruciatingly slow elevator to the fourth floor. When I got there, I found the department was closed. With no place to return the laptop, I just took it home with me until the department was open again. I just straight-up stole a laptop because I was physically unable to return it because the law department and AS were not coordinated even a little. The Assistant Dean frantically emailed me, clarifying that there must have been a misunderstanding, you weren’t supposed to take it home with you, so I explained the situation. I was allowed to hold on to the laptop until my exams were over.

This cascade of failures ended up being more stressful than the exams themselves – and that’s a very high bar! The takeaway of all this is right there in the title:

Accommodations are only valuable to the extent you can get them.

U.S. law firms are in the middle of an incredibly stupid change.

And no, I’m not talking about how they’re caving to the U.S. government.

And I’m not even talking about how they’re cancelling DEI.

I’m talking about another incredibly stupid change: how they hire law students.

OCIs were a terrible way to hire law students. They were inequitable, inefficient, and a massive waste of time.

Naturally, if you’re stuck with a broken system, it makes perfect sense to … break it even more!

And that’s what law firms are doing. Welcome to the pre-OCI world of recruiting for BigLaw jobs in the US, where quite frankly, nobody wins and everyone is confused.

Anyone stuck in that world is probably not going to come to my upcoming free session on Neuroinclusive Hiring & Onboarding on May 14 (12-1pm EST).

My upcoming workshop is on neuroinclusive hiring and onboarding, and it’s on May 14 at 12pm EST; you can register for free here.

This is meant for anyone who is involved in hiring or onboarding people (in any industry), so please help spread the word to anyone who might be interested!

In classic law firm fashion, when one big firm does something, the others tend to follow.

If you raise your salaries, we raise our salaries.

If you paid mid-year bonuses, then we pay mid-year bonuses.

If you start recruiting earlier, then we start recruiting earlier!

(I can’t wait until 6th graders start having national rankings, like they do in a lot of sports. Why stop at 1L hiring, when you can get started way earlier!)

What Law Firms Should Be Doing

If I ran a law firm (oh wait, I do), I’d be doing things a lot differently.

I’d be doing things like:

• Actual assessments, not just ‘screeners’ where you try to figure out if they like skiing in Aspen or summering in wherever people summer

• Real training, not just a summer of schmoozing to be followed by full-time work where people realize the actual job is not a ton of fun

• Trying to figure out our values and then making sure the people we hire our actual values fits

• Skipping the early hiring processes entirely, and instead aiming to find great candidates later (vs. assuming T14 students are make better lawyers)

• Reading books and listening to podcasts about hiring, onboarding, and other best practices

• Making sure that we weren’t overlooking candidates who may not be able to ‘mask’ as well or who may not have as much experience in certain social environments since… maybe they weren’t born into privilege

• Basically anything other than what other firms are doing

Neurodivergent-Friendly Hiring and Onboarding

Perhaps the law firms are doing what they’re doing since DEI is banned these days.

It’s at least one plausible explanation, since the new process seems to be even more biased towards certain candidates than before.

But one thing I know is that any firm that understands neurodiversity (all 2 of them, I presume) can’t be thrilled with these changes.

I don’t think people quite understand how bad the existing system is for neurodivergent candidates, especially autistic ones.

And the new changes only make things worse.

It will be interesting to see what the future holds. Of course, most law firms have 0 data on how their expectations of a candidate line up vs. reality (and even fewer actually reflect on that).

If there’s one thing we did a ton of at our firm, it’s reflect on why certain hires were disasters and why others were so successful.

That’s been key to us ensuring we’re making good hiring decisions and not wasting time with people who are unlikely to end up working out for us.

For better or worse, I’ve had to become an expert in hiring and onboarding since… until the robots replace us all, it turns out that who you hire is one of the most important things in any organization (especially a start-up or scale-up).

My upcoming workshop is on neuroinclusive hiring and onboarding, and it’s on May 14 at 12pm EST; you can register for free here.

This is meant for anyone who is involved in hiring or onboarding people (in any industry), so please help spread the word to anyone who might be interested!

Back in 2021, I wrote a LinkedIn post talking about a racist incident that may or may not have occurred at a law firm I may or may not have worked at.

The powers that be weren’t happy since it made the firm look bad, so they decided to write a long email chastising me (after first telling me they supported the post).

I was reminded of this yesterday when I was preparing for an upcoming neuroinclusivity presentation (more details on that here; it’s free to register)

I’ll spare you the details, but one quote from that email jumped out at me and seemed even more absurd today than it did back in 2021 (especially in light of the Paul Weiss nonsense and all the firms backing down on their DEI commitments):

It goes without saying that it’s a weird time in the U.S. And when it comes to DEI, it’s definitely not a good time.

In the U.S., we’re seeing firms remove DEI references from their website.

In Canada, firms are still claiming to care despite most failing to address systemic issues in their firms.

Part of the challenge is that - at least in law firms (though I suspect this is true more broadly) - many firms didn’t integrate DEI into the firm. Instead, they had DEI teams with limited power floating around and running ad hoc DEI events.

I suspect that was partly by design - this was an optics thing for many firms, so optics were what mattered most.

And I suspect it was partly just bad leadership and management - those aren’t areas where lawyers tend to be very good.

In any event, while some DEI initiatives succeeded (I think at least; who knows if there were any metrics), I suspect most failed in driving systemic change.

What’s Next

I have no idea what comes next (at least once all the rebranding is done), but I definitely have some thoughts on what should come next.

To be clear, I come at this from an angle focused on:

• Management + leadership best practices

• Neuroinclusivity

• Running a successful business

I come at this from no other angles, and I don’t pretend to speak for other groups. You know the drill.

In any event, most organizations don’t actually care about DEI. We know that, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise.

Unfortunately, their focus is on the bottom line - and often the short term bottom line.

And I get it - I run several businesses, and I understand that you need to keep the bottom line in mind.

But… my general view remains that DEI - done properly - is good for the bottom line.

Neuroinclusivity

I’m grateful to be working with the Sinneave Family Foundation on a series of workshop and sessions this year all focused on neuroinclusivity.

(they do great stuff to reduce barriers and enhance opportunities in education, employment, and housing for Autistic youth and adults)

But I’ll let you in on a little secret. Almost nothing I am doing is about neuroinclusivity.

Everything I’m doing is just focused on business best practices:

• How to give feedback

• How to hire and onboard

• How to manage teams

• Etc.

These are business concepts.

It just so happens that when you follow best practices, you cover at least 85% of what most neurodivergent people need.

The problem is that so few people are trained on best practices (and in the legal profession, that number is close to 0).

All of these things reduce attrition, increase productivity, and make businesses more money. They just happen to be neuroinclusive.

Well-run organizations embed these best practices across the organization. They aren’t things that are only done by the ‘HR team’ or ‘People team’ or ‘DEI team’.

They’re things that every people leader understands.

In law firms, basically everyone is a people leader since… law firms are some of the most stupidly structured ‘businesses’ in existence.

And yet nobody is trained on any of these things, which is a shame.

Alternative Workshop Titles

Maybe we should have called the workshop:

• How to reduce attrition, improve morale, and get what you want

• How to get your incompetent colleagues to finally do their jobs properly

• How to make more money without having to work harder

But instead - perhaps foolishly - we called it “Neuroinclusive feedback”.

Because after all, that’s what it is about. And - thankfully - it’s for an organization that actually cares about neuroinclusivity, since… that is literally all the organization does.

It’s a shame we’re stuck in a world of nonsense optics.

But - if there’s a bright spot in all this nonsense (and that is a big if) - it’s perhaps that it’s time for organizations to actually think about how to integrate best practices throughout their organizations that are better for everyone.

And if you’re a law firm, it’s time to actually train everyone on how to manage people and to train your leaders on how to lead teams.

I was lucky enough to do well in my first semester of 1L, and that meant that I had a few interviews for the rare 1L jobs at big firms. Of course, I had no idea how that process worked, let alone what any of these firms were like. At most, I probably could have named 1 law firm when I started law school.

To prepare for the interviews, I spoke to a few upper year students who had worked at these firms. I quickly determined that at the 3 firms that were willing to interview me, there was 1 that I had no interest in working and 2 that seemed somewhat interesting.

I was lucky to end up with a job by the end of the interview process - especially since I really had no idea how things actually worked. Let’s just say that, knowing what I know now, I would have done things very, very differently.

My First Summer

I was 21 when I started my first job in BigLaw. I knew nothing about how this stuff worked.

One of my first assignments was to attend an AGM (annual general meeting) of a company and do something or other. The AGM was about a 45 minute drive from where I lived, and I didnt have a car. No problem - I was told to take a taxi (remember those things). We’d expense it to the client.

And we’d also charge the client for my time to get to the AGM. Which meant that the taxi ride was about $300; ~$60 for the actual taxi ride and ~$240 for my time. This didn’t make much sense to me, and I remember thinking ‘is this really how this works? We charge the client $300 for a taxi ride?’

I added little value at the AGM, which will come as little surprise since I didn’t know the first thing about AGMs. I’m pretty sure I opened doors for people (literally, not metaphorically), helped take attendance, and did a bunch of relatively simplistic tasks. All of which the client paid for at my exorbitant hourly rate.

That - it turns out - is just how things worked. And over time, that concept became something you just accept. Our rates are very high but it makes sense. Clients are happy to pay for them.

Of course, that concept would stop making any sense to me several years later because…

My First Few Years as a Lawyer

Over the course of my 2L summer, articling, and first few years as a lawyer - it became glaringly obvious to me that the legal profession was bizarre. And the most confusing part was that it felt like nobody else understood this. People had simply worked in the profession for so long and not experienced anything else in so long, that everything felt normal.

After all, the other firms worked that way too. Therefore, it was normal. And the firm made so much money and had so many clients, that clearly this was all normal. After all, if clients weren’t happy, surely they would have left. Therefore, it was normal.

Of course, this was all nonsense. Nothing about how the legal profession operates is normal. Very little about how the legal profession operates is efficient or smart or well-thought through.

Because when you live your life in a regulated profession that functions like a monopoly, you don’t have to do any of those things.

Oh the joys of being self-regulated and preventing competition, while at the same time insisting that change is hard. All as there is a massive access to justice crisis happening and denying your role in that. Did I mention how expensive law school is and how much law schools have to blame for the current challenges of junior lawyers?

I Wish I’d Known

I wish someone had told me that how we were doing things made no sense. That there were other jurisdictions taking very different and more innovative paths. That the lawyers I was working with may have known more law than me, but that they may not have known more about business or process than me. And that so many things they told me were true were merely their opinions that were based on pretty flimsy facts and logics.

And I wish I’d known that you can have a legal background and use it for an atypical career path that didn’t require you to do things the way they’d always be done.

I wish I’d known that law firms are some of the worst run successful businesses in the world. I wish I’d known that so many lawyers were looking out for their own interests more than others, despite publicly stating the opposite.

I wish I’d known that most law firms are fiefdoms, and the job of the managing partner/executive is to protect the interest of the key rainmakers over pretty much everyone else.

I wish I’d known the profession will resist change and generally punish those who speak up.

But I also wish I’d known that there were so many people out there like me who recognized these issues and wanted to help. Who saw the inequity, the hypocrisy, and all the other issues - and truly wanted to drive change.

I’m glad I now know that despite the absolute absurdity of so many things in this profession, that change is on the horizon. It won’t happen quickly - it never does in this profession - but it is happening. Much slower than I would like but… at least it’s happening.

In some ways, I’m glad I was so naive. Had I known what I know now, I would have left this profession ages ago.

But I also believe that knowledge is power. That knowledge helps create a more equitable profession. And that so many negative experiences that people have in this profession were avoidable if they had mentors and sponsors to guide them along.

While we can’t do it all ourselves, at least we can do our part to help improve things.

That’s why it’s so important to me to leverage my platform to share other people’s stories (more on that below!).

3 Simple Things You Can Do To Help

Do you hate helping? Are you a bad person?

We didn’t think so.

Here are 3 simple things that will make a huge impact on the legal profession and barely take any time on your end!

• Encourage Sharing of Stories

  • Know someone whose story deserves to be heard by the legal profession? Encourage them to share their story on The Authentic Legal Professional with our audience of several thousand legal professionals.

  • And if that person is you, then… please share your story!

  • All stories can be shared anonymously if that’s the writer’s preference.

• Encourage People to Subscribe (1-on-1)

  • The more subscribers, the more people hear these stories

  • There must be at least 2 people you know who would like the stuff we talk about (if not, you may want to reconsider who you spend time with)

  • Please encourage them to subscribe to The Authentic Legal Professional here!

• Spread The Word on Your Platforms

  • 1-on-1 outreach is great, but what’s even better is spreading the word on your platform

  • Do you have a podcast? A Substack? An affinity group you’re part of? A law firm committee you lead?

  • It would be incredible if you could spread the word about what we’re doing and encourage people to subscribe to The Authentic Legal Professional here!

    Thanks for reading The Authentic Legal Professional! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

If you’re in an even smaller minority, you might actually look at those goals before the year is over.

A plan without a goal is just a wish, and a goal that you set and forget is… just a complete waste of time.

That said, Step 1 is setting goals.

Step 2 is writing those goals down and ideally sharing them with others

Step 3 is KPIs (whatever those are), lead/lag indicators (whatever those are), and OKRs (whatever those are).

As noted above, you’re lucky at a law firm if Step 1 happens. You’re even luckier if Step 2 happens. And if Step 3 happens then… you’re likely at a relatively well-run firm.

Step 3 is a big focus at Renno & Co in 2025, as we shift to running the firm the way I want it to be run - and the way any good services-business is run!

But in the meantime, if you’re interested in Step 1 and Step 2, then… see below for what you’ll need.

To be clear, this is a template that we used with our legal professionals as we planned ahead for 2025 (i.e. it works for legal professionals who choose to embrace it)!

While we could have simply used ‘OKR’s or ‘SMART Goals’ or ‘Wildly Important Goals (WIGs)’, I went with a bit of a hybrid approach, as I figured it would be easiest for our team!

Goal Exercise

Instructions

• Setting SMART goals is a recipe for success. It’s also a way to track how you are doing vs. what you set out to do (i.e. you can measure them)

  • Specific

  • Measurable

  • Achievable

  • Relevant

  • Time-bound (in this case, we’re focused on next year!)

• If you can measure things, then you can see how you’re doing. And then you can iterate in order to achieve your goals. Without measurable goals, you just have wishes.

• And as you’ll recall, “A goal without a plan is just a wish”

• You don’t need to figure out your plan quite yet. But you do need to figure out your goals to start. Your plan will follow of course.

• Good goals for a year are stretch goals

  • A stretch goal is an ambitious and challenging target or objective that goes beyond what is typically considered achievable or expected

  • Unlike regular or incremental goals, which can be easy to achieve, stretch goals are set to push individuals, teams, or organizations outside of their comfort zones

  • Stretch goals inspire you to innovate and strive harder than you might have with more modest aims. The idea is that even if you don’t fully achieve a stretch goal, the momentum and effort you put in trying to reach it can lead to substantial improvements

  • Essentially, if you work toward a stretch goal, you’ll stretch your limits. Doing this might be uncomfortable. But it also opens the door to far higher levels of success than you ever could have achieved with goals that are within reach.

• If you set a flimsy, really easy-to-achieve goal well… you’ll achieve it, but what’s the point? You won’t be satisfied, and neither will the firm

• We expect you to set SMART stretch goals and to do your best to achieve them

  • To be clear, if you read the page I linked to, they’ll tell you SMART and stretch goals are different. And they’re probably right

  • In any event, we’re looking for stretch goals, and we’re looking for them to be specific and measurable and relevant and time-bound. Stretch goals should be achievable too, but you shouldn’t be setting the bar too low

• Each team should have 3-5 goals.

  • You absolutely need a revenue goal (it’s more of a target, but we’ll call it a goal here)

  • You should also have goals about how the team operates, client-related goals, culture/morale goals, etc.

  • The key is to be SMART. Revenue goals are easy to make SMART. But you’ll have to think more about how to make your other goals SMART.

    • Giving up because goal setting is hard/providing goals that don’t meet the criteria above is not a suitable outcome.

    • Feel free to leverage ChatGPT if you need help (in fact it’s probably something everyone should use, as part of their brainstorming process).

    • But to be clear, the goals need to be your goals (not ChatGPT’s goals) and the output you add to the database needs to be your output (not ChatGPT’s output). ChatGPT is simply a tool you can leverage to help you brainstorm and iterate)!

Exercise

See the PDF below!

Goals Exercise

26.4KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Download

3 Simple Things You Can Do To Help

No, we don’t want your money or your donations. So don’t worry about that (though if we’re talking big-dollar donations, that’s a different story!)

But if you can do these 3 things (will take barely any time), it would make a huge difference!

• Encourage Sharing of Stories

  • Know someone whose story deserves to be heard by the legal profession? Encourage them to share their story on The Authentic Legal Professional with our audience of several thousand legal professionals.

  • And if that person is you, then… please share your story!

  • All stories can be shared anonymously if that’s the writer’s preference.

• Encourage People to Subscribe (1-on-1)

  • The more subscribers, the more people hear these stories

  • There must be at least 2 people you know who would like the stuff we talk about (if not, you may want to reconsider who you spend time with)

  • Please encourage them to subscribe to The Authentic Legal Professional here!

• Spread The Word on Your Platforms

  • 1-on-1 outreach is great, but what’s even better is spreading the word on your platform

  • Do you have a podcast? A Substack? An affinity group you’re part of? A law firm committee you lead?

  • It would be incredible if you could spread the word about what we’re doing and encourage people to subscribe to The Authentic Legal Professional here!

    Thanks for reading The Authentic Legal Professional! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.