How We Help

How We Help
The 8 Keys to Professional Firm Success
Planning for Success
Creating a Profitable and Sustainable Firm
Dealing with Transitions

How We Help

Law firms are our specialty. We are experts in how lawyers manage, lead, change, and work together. We recognize they’re not the same as executives. When they’re stuck, we help them bridge the gaps between knowing that something needs to be done, discovering what that something is, and actually doing it. We help lawyers get results.

Whether we’re acting as consultants, facilitators or coaches, our overarching goal is to provide lawyers with the tools and awareness they need to:

1. Lead with authority, intelligence and compassion,
2. Create and work in dynamic high-performing teams,
3. Discover fresh solutions to old problems and dilemmas,
4. Set and successfully implement strategy across all levels,
5. Resolve conflicts and minimize burdensome firm politics,
6. Overcome obstacles to personal effectiveness, and
7. Seize opportunities for future growth and productivity.

The 8 Keys to Professional Firm Success

We’ve identified eight activities that are the keys to success in law firms.

1. Persuade, Influence, and Achieve Consensus. Find the best way to get things done when you don’t have “control” over your peers and other members of your firm.
2. Listen to Your Clients or Lose Them. Learn what they want and what is most important to them so individual, departmental, and firm-wide efforts can be coordinated and effective.
3. Direct and Inspire Change. Anticipate and initiate change by thinking strategically while looking at the long-term and the big-picture. Set and implement practical strategies for firm growth, profitability, and succession planning.
4. Over-Communicate. Better delegation, request-making, feedback, and decision-making skills lead to lower turnover and higher productivity and morale.
5. Become Conflict Competent. Reduce infighting, rivalries, and burdensome firm politics by adopting new approaches to conflict resolution.
6. Engage and Develop Your People. View talent as your firm’s most important asset and create an atmosphere of openness and trust through better mentoring, coaching, and feedback.
7. Build a Dynamic Sustainable Firm Culture. Leading with strength and emotional intelligence improves morale and cohesion. Select, compensate, and empower your firm’s professionals and managers to ensure growth and profitability.
8. Begin by Developing Yourself. Set an example for others by improving your ability to manage time, stay organized, make decisions, set priorities, deal with stress, and keep your business development efforts authentic and on track.

Our engagements with individual lawyers typically focus on several of these essential activities.

Planning for Success

Few firms and lawyers succeed without having a clear idea of where they’re going and how they’re going to get there. Yet most struggle with strategic thinking and planning, if they do them at all. This is understandable – conversations about strategic thinking and planning are as difficult as they are essential.

Planning conversations, like any conversations about the future, are speculative and open-ended. At the same time, strategic planning requires that lawyers develop a compelling vision for their future, honestly assess whether there are sufficient resources (assets, skills and behaviors) to realize that vision, and then translate it into concrete steps. This entails a demanding mix of imagination, practicality, and self-reflection.

New Actions helps lawyers and firms through the strategic planning process. Challenging conversations are skillfully facilitated to continually move the planning process forward. Working collaboratively with clients, a strategic vision is created or refined. Questions of whether there are sufficient resources or whether the vision reflects the firm’s values are carefully explored. Measurable and achievable goals are assembled into a roadmap for success. Strategic planning isn’t a one-shot deal. It’s an ongoing process that’s returned to as goals are reached, milestones met, and new situations and challenges encountered.

Creating a Profitable and Sustainable Firm

New Actions helps lawyers create firm environments with high levels of communication, collaboration, and trust. Firms with these attributes are predictably stronger, more resilient, and more profitable than their counterparts. We help our clients develop the communication and relationship skills that are necessary for effective management and high morale.

We facilitate the “difficult” conversations that are often postponed or altogether avoided. Without these conversations, personal agendas and poor relationships thwart firm growth and profitability. Through these conversations, everyone gets on the same page – individual actions and firm policies align with shared goals, values, and priorities.

With New Actions assistance, partner relationships improve, lawyers and staff become re-energized, and office politics diminish. As delegation and accountability improve, matters no longer fall between the cracks and overlapping tasks are eliminated. Productivity and efficiency increase as more work gets done in less time without sacrificing quality. Ample time and energy can then be devoted to professional development, management, and mentoring.

In these environments, it’s easier for lawyers to find satisfaction in their work and to maintain a healthy balance between their professional and personal lives. All this adds up to a productive and profitable firm.

Dealing with Transitions

Law firms are in a constant state of flux. Lawyers and staff come and go. Firms merge, dissolve, move, and set up satellite offices. Their business and regulatory environments change. Opportunities in specific practice areas shrink and grow. With the constant pressure of urgent client matters, day-to-day concerns can easily obscure the larger picture of what’s happening at a firm.

We help lawyers and firms prepare for and respond to these transitions by helping them refocus on the big picture and the long-term. Whether it’s consulting, coaching or meeting facilitation, critical issues of strategy, structure, and values are addressed.

Immediate concerns can also overwhelm individual lawyers. They may find themselves without a clear idea of where they want to go or what is now important to them. Their career may be stalled. They may feel adrift and have forgotten what attracted them to the legal profession in the first place. Through one-on-one coaching, we help them redefine their goals and priorities, and examine how their current actions may or may not be supporting these goals. Once their actions are aligned with their goals, they pursue their career path in an energetic and focused manner.