Megan Burns spent 20 years as a criminal defense attorney, a decade as a San Francisco public defender and another decade in private practice. When her Bay Area firm, Mirador Law, started growing its personal injury work, she faced a hard question: could she walk away from the practice that defined her career? Through Lawyerist business strategy support and a partner retreat, Megan and her law partner, Emily Domm, aligned on a shared vision, built a plan, and restructured the firm around one practice area. Mirador Law is now a plaintiff personal injury firm, and the team, including employees with nearly 20 years at the firm, came along. 

Running Two Law Firms in One 

Mirador Law is no startup. The East Bay firm has operated in Alameda County for more than 50 years, and Megan and Emily inherited it when founders Jules and Michael retired. For years it was known for high-quality criminal defense and plaintiff personal injury work. 

Having two practice areas made sense on paper. Criminal defense ran on flat fees paid at the start of a case, while personal injury paid at the end. One balanced the risk of the other. But the two practices had different business models, different marketing, and different demands on the team. 

“It really was like trying to run two law firms in one.” 

The workload made the strain obvious. In a single 12-month span, Megan tried a serious criminal case that lasted more than six weeks, plus two complex personal injury trials. On top of that, she was running a successful business. Having a foot in each world was simply too much. 

There was also an emotional pull. Megan built her career around helping people, and she wasn’t sure personal injury would feel the same as criminal defense. Beyond that, she saw an opportunity. Personal injury is a male-dominated area of the law, and she believes it needs more women in leadership. But it is also a competitive field, where well-funded out-of-state firms spend seven figures a month on marketing. 

Getting Aligned Before Getting Moving 

The first step wasn’t a strategy document. It was a partner retreat. Megan and Emily got out of the office, with a whiteboard and a space where no one could drop by with questions, and worked through their long-term vision. Where did they want the firm in five years? In ten? What cases would they handle? 

Megan’s advice to other firm owners with partners is to align on the vision first, and to clear your calendar to do it. 

“Every decision we make is together.” 

At first, the firm still tried to keep both practices going, using different methods to make it work. Eventually, the partners reached a conclusion. 

“If we’re going to do something really, really well, we need to focus on it.” 

After the retreat, Lawyerist Business Strategist Stephanie Everett helped them map what needed to be true at one, three, and six months, so day-to-day decisions stayed tied to the bigger plan. Megan and Emily scheduled interim meetings to keep momentum, restructured how the team worked, and realigned the firm’s finances. 

Bringing the Team Along 

For Megan, the people came first. Many employees had been at Mirador Law longer than she had, and some were focused mainly on criminal defense. Rather than asking them to adjust on their own, the partners made sure each person knew they still had a place at the firm. They built a plan to retrain and level up the criminal defense team members in personal injury work. 

Megan also leaned on a leadership idea she picked up from Lawyerist: leaders bring the weather. Change is scary, and she saw her role as setting a positive tone and showing the team this was the right direction. She also credits her own growth. A naturally goal-driven leader, she has learned to welcome teammates whose paths are less linear than hers. 

“Really caring about the people that work for you is your number one job.” 

The Results 

Today, Mirador Law is a solely plaintiff personal injury practice, with its team, finances, and strategy aligned around that focus. The partners found that their trial skills transferred directly. As Megan puts it, they still think of themselves as public defenders handling personal injury cases. She enjoys the creativity the work allows, calling each case a little puzzle to solve. 

The team stayed. Employees who have been with the firm for close to 20 years remain on board, and they’ve seen the firm grow into something very different from the one they joined. Megan sees that continued trust as a sign the firm is on the right path. 

Megan is now turning her attention to the next stage of growth: marketing, intake, and the processes that give clients a great experience from their first call through the end of a case, which in serious injury matters can take years. She values the push she gets from working with her business strategist. 

“I love that accountability measure for myself to say I have an ability to grow here.” 

Ready to Build the Firm You Want? 

Megan’s story isn’t about luck. It’s about making a hard choice, getting partners aligned, and bringing a team along. Lawyerist helps you do the same. Whether you’re weighing a major shift in your practice or trying to get your partners on the same page, join Lawyerist Lab today and start building the firm you’ve always envisioned. 

Ask a room full of law firm owners how to build a successful practice and you’ll hear the same advice you’ve heard for at least thirty years. Bill more hours. Raise your rates. Hire more lawyers. Be available whenever a client needs you. Work harder than the firm down the street. 

I have a question about all of it: says who? 

I mean that literally. Who decided these were the rules, and when did we last stop to check whether they hold up? I’m not saying raising your rates is a bad idea, or that hiring another lawyer is always the wrong call. I’m saying that “it’s how law firms have always done it” is a habit, not a strategy, and most of us are running on habits more than we’d like to admit. 

We Inherited a Business Model 

Most lawyers didn’t go to law school to run a business. They wanted to practice law, solve problems, and advocate for their clients. Then, they opened a firm and needed a blueprint, so they borrowed one from the firms where they used to work, from advice other lawyers gave them, and from whatever they picked up at conferences along the way. They built what they knew. 

That’s how a handful of assumptions got passed down for decades without much scrutiny. The owner should be the busiest person in the firm. More billable hours mean more success. Clients expect immediate access to their lawyer. Growth means adding people and revenue. And if the firm isn’t performing, the fix is to work harder. 

I’ve watched firm owners follow every one of those rules faithfully and end up exhausted, with a business that depends entirely on them. So I’m asking whether some of these assumptions are the very thing holding us back. 

Three Rules Worth Questioning 

Rule #1: Want to make more money? Bill more hours. 

This one might be my favorite, because the math stops working almost immediately. There are only so many hours in a day. A business that makes more money only when everyone works more hours isn’t healthier or more profitable. It’s just busier. 

The better question is how to deliver excellent legal work more efficiently and more profitably. That moves the conversation to pricing models, delegation, process, technology, and cutting the work that doesn’t create value for anyone. It’s a much more interesting conversation, and it’s one that actually changes the economics of the firm. 

Rule #2: Great client service means always being available. 

Lawyers feel obligated to answer every email immediately, take every call, and stay connected to the firm around the clock. But I’m not convinced that constant availability is what clients are asking for. I think they want confidence that someone competent has their matter under control. 

You can build that confidence without putting the attorney on call. Set clear expectations about communication up front. Send proactive updates so clients aren’t left wondering. Use a client portal, and train team members who can answer routine questions without tracking down the lawyer. Clients get a more reliable experience, and the lawyer gets their evenings back. 

Rule #3: Growth means getting bigger. 

Somewhere along the way, headcount and revenue became the scoreboard for law firm success. I’ve seen firms grow revenue while their owners made less money, worked longer hours, and liked their businesses less. I don’t call that success. 

I’d rather measure growth by what it makes possible: better profitability, stronger teams, financial security, more freedom for the owner, and a better experience for clients. For some firms, the right answer is to get bigger. For others, it’s to stay the same size and become far more profitable. Growth should serve a purpose. It shouldn’t be the purpose. 

The Real Cost of “That’s Just How Law Firms Work” 

What concerns me most about inherited assumptions is that they shut down experimentation. If you believe there’s one accepted way to run a law firm, you stop looking for alternatives. You don’t ask why your intake process has seven steps, whether your weekly meeting accomplishes anything, or why the owner must sign off on every decision. You rarely ask whether the business you’re building is giving you the life you wanted when you started it. 

Instead, we keep doing what we’ve always done, only faster and with more technology on top. But automating a bad process doesn’t fix it. It just helps the bad process run at scale. Often the most valuable improvement you can make starts with asking why you do something in the first place. 

Try This: The “Says Who?” Experiment 

I don’t want you to read this, nod, and go back to running things exactly as you did yesterday. So this week, pick one assumption about your firm that you’ve never seriously questioned. It could be big, like your billing model, or small, like requiring every attorney to attend the weekly staff meeting. Then work through three questions. 

First, who says we have to do it this way? Is there a legitimate business, client, or ethical reason behind the rule, or is it simply something you’ve always done? Be honest about which one it is. 

Second, what if we did the opposite? Don’t worry yet about whether the alternative is practical. Just let yourself imagine it. What if you eliminated the meeting? What if clients got updates before they asked? What if the owner stopped reviewing every invoice? 

Third, what’s one small experiment we could run? You don’t need to redesign the firm by Friday. Pick one change, run it for 30 days, and measure what happens. 

Here’s what that looks like in practice. Say your assumption is that clients expect to speak directly with their lawyer every time they call. For 30 days, you send proactive weekly matter updates and train a team member to handle routine status questions. You track the number of status calls, response times, client feedback, and how often attorneys get interrupted. If it works, keep it. If it doesn’t, adjust and try again. 

That’s how better businesses get built. Nobody waits around for the perfect answer. They question, test, learn, and refine. 

The Future of Law Firms Is Being Built Right Now 

I think we have a real opportunity to rethink what it means to own a successful law firm. Technology is changing what’s possible. Clients are questioning traditional service models. Employees want better places to work. And more owners are realizing that a profitable firm shouldn’t cost them everything else in their lives. 

But technology alone won’t build better firms, and neither will another conference full of good ideas. We must be willing to challenge the assumptions behind the firms we have today, and then do the work of building something better. 

That’s the thinking behind a big idea we’re bringing to ClioCon in Boston next week: BUILD DIFFERENTLY. We’re creating a community for law firm owners who are willing to question the old playbook. These are people who don’t just collect ideas. They test them, build systems, improve their businesses, and help each other do the same. We call them builders, and I believe the future of small-firm law belongs to them. 

If you’ll be at ClioCon, come find the Lawyerist team. We’ll be the ones in the ridiculously bright shirts, probably asking questions that make people a little uncomfortable. If you’re not going to Boston, you can still join the conversation. 

So here’s my question for you: what’s one rule about running a law firm that you think we should throw out? I’d love to hear your answer, because the next great law firm probably won’t come from following all the old rules. It’ll be built differently. 

Lawyerist Lab helps ambitious small law firm owners build healthier, more profitable businesses through strategy, systems, smart technology, and a community of people who believe there’s a better way to practice law.

See What We’re Building

“I’ll look at the financials once things slow down.” 

“I don’t really have a marketing plan. Work just comes in.” 

“I know I should raise my rates. I just haven’t gotten around to it.” 

Every one of those sentences describes a hobbyist, not a business owner. A hobby is something you do because you love it, on your own schedule, without much accountability for the outcome. Law school teaches you to practice law. Nothing teaches you to run a business. So a lot of firms get run the way a hobby gets run: enthusiastically, inconsistently, with no real plan behind it. 

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What a Hobby Firm Actually Looks Like 

• No written budget, and no real sense of profit margin. 

• Marketing is whatever feels inspired that month. 

• Rates were set years ago and never revisited. 

• The owner personally approves everything, because no system exists that doesn’t need them. 

None of this means you don’t work hard. Hobbyists often work harder than anyone, pouring in nights and weekends. The difference is that a hobby firm optimizes for the owner’s comfort in the moment. A business optimizes for a result, on purpose, whether the owner feels like dealing with it that week. 

Three Signs You’ve Been Running a Hobby, Not a Business 

• You can describe your last five interesting cases faster than your profit margin. 

• Your rates were set by what felt comfortable, not by what the market and your value actually support. 

• You have no system that works without you personally approving every step. 

How to Make the Shift 

First, build a real budget. Not a wish list, a good look at what comes in and what it actually costs to run the firm month to month. 

Next, pick one number you’ve never tracked before, your realization rate, your utilization, or your margin by practice area, and start watching it monthly instead of guessing at it once a year. 

Finally, make one decision this quarter you’ve been avoiding because it felt uncomfortable: a rate increase, a service you stop offering, or a role you finally hire for instead of absorbing yourself. 

This Isn’t About Loving the Law Less 

I know business thinking can feel like the opposite of why you became a lawyer. It isn’t. It’s what lets you keep practicing law on your own terms instead of whatever terms a stalled firm eventually hands you. Your Lawyerist Lab business strategist can walk through your numbers with you and help you make the first uncomfortable decision instead of the tenth comfortable excuse. 

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You can probably tell me your firm’s revenue goal for this year. You might even have it broken out by quarter, by practice area, by attorney. You know what you’re billing, what you want to be billing, and what must change to close the gap. 

Now answer this one: what are you doing this year to become a better leader? 

If you paused, you’re not alone. I’m Stephanie Everett, founder of Lawyerist Lab, and after years of working with small firm owners, this is one of the most consistent gaps I see. Nearly every owner has a plan for the business. Almost nobody has one for themselves. 

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Why Your Own Growth Keeps Getting Skipped 

It’s not that you don’t value it. Ask most owners whether leadership development matters and they’ll say yes immediately. The problem is what happens to your calendar once you agree. 

Strategic work, including your own development, rarely feels urgent. A client call feels urgent. A staffing fire feels urgent. Reading a chapter of a leadership book on a Tuesday afternoon does not. So the urgent wins, week after week, and the important work waits for a calmer season that never arrives. 

That’s the pattern. Here’s the part that’s harder to admit: your firm cannot outgrow your own capacity as a leader. Not your revenue ceiling. Not your team’s performance ceiling. Your own. 

What Caps Your Firm’s Growth 

Your firm can only grow as far as the weakest of the Four Cornerstones of law firm leadership. Here’s what they are. Leading Self is how you show up under pressure and whether your team can count on you. Leading People is developing your team through trust and honest feedback. Leading Operations is building the systems that let the firm deliver without you in the room. Leading Forward is protecting time to think strategically about what’s next. Most owners are strong in one or two. The rest involve skills you never had to build as a practicing lawyer, so they stay underdeveloped. 

You were trained to be an expert. Nobody trained you to delegate, to hold someone accountable, or to design a system instead of personally running it. Those are learnable skills. But they only get learned if you treat developing them with the same seriousness you bring to developing your firm’s intake process or your billing. 

Each cornerstone holds up the others, so a gap in one shows up everywhere. If Leading Self is shaky, your team can’t count on you. If Leading Operations is thin, everything routes through you. Gaps are normal. Ignoring them is what holds the firm back. 

Leadership is a journey we’re all on, me included. Nobody ever finishes it, and every owner can keep getting better. Not sure where you stand? The Next Level Leader Leadership Assessment shows how you’re doing in each of the four areas, so you know where to start and focus: https://www.beanextlevelleader.com/assessment/ 

How to Build a Personal Development Plan 

Start with the cornerstone that’s costing you the most right now, which probably isn’t the one you’re best at. Look for the gap that keeps creating friction: a hiring mistake you keep repeating, a financial decision you keep avoiding, a conversation with a team member you’ve rehearsed in your head a dozen times and never had. 

Then get specific about the skill underneath it. “I need to get better at leadership” is too vague to act on. “I need a repeatable way to have accountability conversations without losing a week of sleep over it” is something you can put on a calendar. 

Finally, choose one thing to learn from, whether that’s a book, a course, a coach, or a peer group of owners working through the same problem, and block time for it the way you would for a client deadline. Which one you choose matters less than whether the time is actually on your calendar and you protect it. 

Three Ways to Start, From Lightest to Most Involved 

1. Read one chapter a week of a leadership book and write down one thing you’ll apply before the next chapter. Low lift, but it only works if you apply it, not just read it. (need a recommendation, I’ll shamelessly plug our new book: Be a Next Level Leader: The Four Cornerstones of Law Firm Leadership) 

2. Prefer to listen? Check out the 4 podcasts episodes Debbie and I recorded on the 4 cornerstones of leadership
   1. Law Firm Leadership: How to Lead Yourself Before Leading Your Team
   2. Leading People in Law Firms: Building Trust, Developing Talent, and Holding Standards
   3. Leading Law Firm Operations: Building Systems That Reduce the Daily Firefighting
   4. Leading Forward: Why Great Ideas Aren’t Enough for Law Firm Strategy

3. Join a peer group of owners at a similar stage. The accountability of people watching your progress does more than willpower ever will. 

4. Get a coach or business strategist who knows your specific gaps and will name them before they cost you a team member. 

It’s Uncomfortable to Admit You Need This 

I get why this is hard to prioritize. Admitting you have a development gap can feel like admitting you’re not cutting it as a leader, especially when you’ve built a firm that looks successful from the outside. But leadership is a journey, and nobody finishes it. I’m still learning too. Every owner can get better at this, including the ones who look like they have it figured out. 

A firm capped by its owner’s leadership skills doesn’t fix itself with a better marketing plan or a new case management system. It fixes itself when the owner grows. Your Lawyerist Lab business strategist can help you figure out which cornerstone to work on first and build a plan around it, so it happens instead of staying a good intention. If you’d rather start with something already built for you, the Next Level Leader: Foundations November cohort, a six-week program Debbie Foster and I built around these same Four Cornerstones, begins November 5, with enrollment closing October 22. Details are here: https://beanextlevelleader.com/leadership-training/ 

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Hard conversations don’t come naturally to me. They never have. It’s something I’ve had to learn how to do, practice, and get better at over years—not a strength I started with. 

I know exactly why it doesn’t come naturally: I’m a high D, high I on the DISC assessment. The D in me wants the problem gone, fast—no lingering, no half-measures. The I in me wants everyone to still like me afterward. A hard conversation means picking one of those, not both, and I’ve spent more weeks than I’d like trying to find a third option that doesn’t exist. 

I’m Stephanie Everett. I run Lawyerist Lab, and I hear this exact hesitation from owners constantly. I’ve been there myself: I let a performance problem run four months longer than I should have, because having the conversation felt harder than living with the problem. By the time I finally dealt with it, the only option left was letting the person go—someone who, with an earlier conversation, might have fixed whatever was actually wrong. Might have. That’s the tax. 

If any of this sounds familiar, congratulations: you already know what needs to happen. You’re just waiting for permission. 

We call this the Avoidance Tax, and it isn’t unique to firing decisions—a hard conversation, a boundary, a phone call you’ve been putting off all pay the same tax. Every day you delay, you pay a little more: in energy, in credibility, in options that were open a month ago. Not anymore. 

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Feedback Has a Limit 

Sometimes one conversation is all that’s needed. The person hears you, adjusts, and that’s the end of the matter. 

Sometimes that’s not enough. Performance improves for a couple of weeks and slides back, you have the conversation again, and you get the same result. 

If you’ve had essentially the same talk more than twice without anything sticking, you’re not dealing with a communication gap anymore. You’re dealing with a fit problem, and no amount of additional feedback closes that. 

Ending things doesn’t mean you gave up too early. It means you finally believed what the pattern was already telling you. 

The Real Cost of Waiting 

Think about whoever on your team is covering for the person you haven’t dealt with yet. It’s not the extra work that wears them down—it’s watching nothing change while they do it. Five or six hours a week, easily, on top of their own job, and nobody officially asked them to take any of it on. 

At first they say something. Then they stop, not because it stopped bothering them, but because they’ve decided they don’t want to be the one who’s always complaining. 

They’re keeping score too, noticing exactly who gets held to the standard and who doesn’t. 

That’s before anyone resigns. When they do, you lose more than staffing—you lose what they knew, the relationships they’d built, and months while someone new gets up to speed. Waiting isn’t the cautious move here. Waiting is the costly one. 

The Kindness Trap 

Most owners don’t avoid this decision because they’re careless. Delaying feels kind: one more chance, a little more patience, a little more time to see if things turn around. 

I understand the impulse, but kindness isn’t really what’s driving it. Delaying is easier, and less scary. It’s the professional equivalent of leaving a note under someone’s windshield wiper instead of knocking on their door: technically you said something, but you also made sure you wouldn’t have to watch their face while you delivered the news. 

Delaying doesn’t make the cost disappear. The cost just moves somewhere else. The person doesn’t get the clarity to go find a role where they’d actually succeed, your team doesn’t get the relief of watching the standard hold, and you don’t get to be the leader who handled the problem early, while the problem was still small. 

The kindest thing you can do is tell them clearly, while there’s still time and dignity in how the conversation happens. Waiting doesn’t make the moment easier on them. Waiting only delays the moment, with less goodwill left by the time that moment arrives. 

Handling the Exit Well 

By this point, the decision’s usually already made. There’s a four-step path we walk through in our book, Be a Next Level Leader: The Four Cornerstones of Law Firm Leadership: 

1. A direct conversation 

2. A follow-up conversation if the first one didn’t stick 

3. A formal written plan with a real review period 

4. If none of that produces change, an exit. 

If you’ve genuinely done the first three, what’s left is executing well, and that means a real transition plan, honest communication with the rest of the team, and treating the person with respect on the way out, even now. 

Executing well also means not confusing “this is hard” with “this is wrong.” Ending a relationship that isn’t working is rarely comfortable, and that discomfort is usually just what the right call feels like when you’ve delayed the decision for a while. 

What to Do This Week 

The Avoidance Tax compounds the same way whether the delay is a firing decision, a rate increase, or a policy you won’t enforce. 

Name the problem you’ve been sitting on. Out loud, to yourself, in specific terms—not “things are a little off,” but “I’ve had this conversation twice, nothing’s changed, and I’m still hoping the third time is different.” 

Then ask what that problem is actually costing you: not in dollars necessarily, but in the redone work, the attention you spend every time their name comes up on your calendar, and what somebody else on your team is absorbing so you don’t have to. 

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AI ended our legal expertise scarcity. That’s not a metaphor. Here’s what it means for the law firm you’re trying to build. 

I’m old enough to remember what life was like before the internet. Things were…harder. 

When I was in middle school, my dad got a promotion, and my parents decided to buy a house. On weekends, we’d drive through neighborhoods my dad’s new job might put us in. When we spotted a for-sale sign, my mom would pull out a notepad and write down the address, the realtor’s name, the phone number. That was it. That was all we got on a Saturday. We had no idea how many bedrooms, what it was listed for, whether it was even in the same universe as our budget. We’d have to wait until Monday morning to call the agent and find out. 

I’ve thought about how many houses we drove past and didn’t write down. Because the outside didn’t look like enough. Because we assumed the price was wrong. Because the gate was closed and we didn’t have a key. 

The internet didn’t eliminate real estate agents. It eliminated their role as gatekeepers to basic information. When I bought a house a few years ago, I still used an agent. Not to find out how many bathrooms a listing had, but for someone who knew the neighborhood in ways no database captures. For help negotiating. For trusted referrals for the inspection, the repairs, the things that turn a house into yours. 

The same thing is happening to law. Faster, and with higher stakes. 

There’s now what you could call a legal brain on any device. Any laptop. Any phone with a $20/month subscription. It can’t replace judgment, presence, or trust. But it can replicate the output of thinking like a lawyer pretty well.   

At this year’s ABA TECHSHOW, the keynote speakers all agreed: the gate between legal expertise and people who need it is going away. And the wall is coming down with it. And, honestly, that was months ago. 

The gate between legal expertise and people who need it is going away. And the wall is coming down with it. 

If you’re a law firm owner, you’ve probably already felt some version of this. A client who researched their situation before calling. A prospect who asked questions you didn’t expect. A feeling that the information advantage you used to have is getting thinner. 

That feeling is correct. And the question isn’t whether to fight it. The question is what you’re going to do now that it’s true. 

Which parts of your practice are actually expertise? 

Here’s the self-diagnostic that every firm owner needs to do: look at your typical workday and sort it into two buckets. 

Bucket one: work that requires your judgment, your presence, and your specific understanding of this client in this situation with these competing pressures. The work where a wrong call has real consequences and only you—your experience, your character, your relationships—can navigate it. 

Bucket two: work that is pattern-matching dressed up as expertise. Document review. Routine drafting. Intake. Research on a question you’ve answered forty times. Work where ‘good enough’ has always been part of the equation, even if you’d never say that out loud. 

AI is coming for bucket two. Quickly, cheaply, and at a scale that makes your hourly rate look like a rounding error. 

That’s not a threat to your firm. It’s actually the best news your firm has gotten in years—if you let it be. 

The lawyers who are going to lose are the ones who can’t tell which bucket is which. Who treat all their work as irreplaceable craftsmanship when a meaningful portion of it is sophisticated-looking process. Who resist the audit because they’ve built their identity around the process, not the judgment. 

The lawyers who are going to win are the ones who do the audit honestly, hand off the loops, and double down on the work that really requires them. 

The work AI is coming for first isn’t your expertise. It’s the time you spend doing things that look like expertise. 

The end of the knowledge monopoly is good news for clients 

Take a step back from your firm for a moment and think about this from the other side of the table. 

There are people who know they have a legal problem but don’t understand enough to know if there’s a remedy. There are people who know they need a lawyer but can’t afford a consultation, let alone the engagement. There are people navigating situations that would cost tens of thousands of dollars to resolve with a traditional firm, and so they don’t resolve them at all. 

AI is changing that. The gap between people who need legal help and people who can access it is closing. That’s good. Unambiguously, morally, straightforwardly good. 

And yes—it will put downward pressure on prices for the work that is essentially information delivery. If you’ve been billing for access to knowledge that is now freely available, that part of your practice is going to compress. That’s real. But it was always a fragile foundation. 

What doesn’t compress is you. Your presence. Your judgment. Your relationships. Your ability to sit across from someone in the worst moment of their professional or personal life and help them figure out what comes next. 

That is not something a language model can do. Not because AI isn’t powerful—it is—but because what clients actually need in those moments isn’t information. It’s accompaniment. 

The three things lawyers will always be able to offer 

Jordan Furlong, a keynote speaker for this year’s ABA TECHSHOW, put the future of lawyering into three words: advise, advocate, accompany. 

Advise: the ability to give personal counsel. Not just what the law says, but what it means for this client, in this moment, given what you know about who they are and what they’re trying to achieve. 

Advocate: the ability to stand with someone in any forum—a courtroom, a boardroom, a community meeting—and say, this person has something at stake and I’m here to help them protect it. 

But the third one is the one that stood out. 

Accompany. 

A client who comes to you is almost always in a position where something is wrong and they need to get somewhere better. They’re at point A and they don’t like it. They need to get to point B—or E or L or Q, wherever that is. And your job, more than any other thing, is to walk there with them. 

That accompaniment and sense of partnership, that ‘they were with me when I needed them’ is what every client remembers most about their best legal experiences. It’s not a clever argument. It’s not the settlement amount. It’s the feeling of not being alone in something hard. 

That is your competitive advantage. Not your knowledge base. Not your research speed. Not your document production capacity. 

You. 

The firms that win aren’t the ones who fight the technology. They’re the ones who finally figure out what they’re actually for. 

What you can do right now 

None of this requires a transformation strategy. It requires honesty. 

Look at your last week of work. Seriously. Pull up your time entries or your calendar or whatever record you have of where your hours actually went. Look at each item and ask: could an AI system, with the right context and a good prompt, have produced something 80% as useful as what I produced? If the answer is yes, that’s a loop. That’s bucket-two work. And you should be thinking about how to systematically hand it off. 

Not because your time isn’t valuable. Because your time is too valuable to spend on work that doesn’t require you. 

At Lawyerist, we’ve been helping small firm owners work through exactly this audit and building the systems to act on what they find. The firms doing this work now aren’t just saving time. They’re clarifying what their practice is actually for. They’re rebuilding their client relationships around the work that matters. They’re entering the next chapter of legal with a foundation that doesn’t depend on a monopoly that’s already gone. 

The gate is gone. The wall is coming down. That’s not a reason to panic. 

It’s a reason to finally build something worth building. 

Ready to audit your practice and figure out where AI fits? 

We built the AI Readiness Package specifically for small firm owners who want to adopt AI strategically—not reactively. It walks you through the audit, helps you identify what to hand off, and gives you a framework for building around your actual strengths. 

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Take a Look

“My paralegal says she’ll get me the draft by Friday. Monday morning comes, and I don’t have it yet.” 

“I keep finding typos in my associate’s briefs. I’m mentioned it twice.” 

“We have a process for our client intake. Half my team skips it when they are slammed.” 

I’m Stephanie Everett, founder of Lawyerist Lab, and these are common complaints from lawyers we work with. They feel ignored.  They’ve set the standard, and yet it feels like everyone is just going about their merry way.  

Once you’ve set the expectations with your team, you must be willing to hold that standard.  

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Setting the Standard Is the Easy Part 

Naming the standard is a five-minute conversation. But holding someone to it, week after week, when they’re likable and busy and have a decent excuse every time, is the part that takes actual leadership.  

Most owners are pretty good at setting standards and pretty bad at holding them.  They don’t even realize it, because in the moment, letting it slide always feels reasonable. 

“They’re swamped this week.”  

“It’s just discovery responses, not a client-facing deadline.”  

“I don’t want to be the person who nitpicks a Monday morning.” 

Each of those is true in isolation. Stacked up over eight or ten weeks, they add up to a standard that exists on paper and nowhere else. 

What Enforcing a Standard Sounds Like 

It’s not a lecture. It’s definitely not a surprise performance review six months later. Enforcing a standard is a short, specific conversation, close to the moment the deadline was missed, that names exactly what happened and what needs to change. 

There’s a model I teach in Lawyerist Lab and in my book, Be a Next Level Leader: The Four  Cornerstones of Law Firm Leadership, called OIR: Observation, Impact, Request.  

It’s simple:  

First, describe what happened. Imagine a video of the scene replaying and name the undisputed facts. Never assume the person’s intent. Saying “it seems you don’t care” invites debate and defensiveness. Naming “you agreed to deliver the draft responses to me by Friday, but I didn’t get them until Monday” is a fact.  

Next, name the effect it had. “I had set aside time to review them and give them to the client for their review. The delay compressed all of our deadlines.” 

Finally, state the result you need instead. “In the future, we need to meet the deadlines we set. If you see that you aren’t on pace to hit a deadline, I need to know as soon as possible. What can you do differently in the future?” 

  That’s not harsher than “you need to be more reliable.” It’s just specific enough that there’s nothing left to guess about. 

What Happens When  You  Let Standards Slide 

Here’s where letting a standard slip gets costly, and it rarely shows up where you’d think to look for it.  

The real cost is what your senior associate is quietly absorbing. Every Monday, she’s the one doing the cleanup: reviewing what should’ve already been done, flagging what’s missing, redoing pieces that came in rushed.  

 She’s also keeping score. She’s noticing that the standard applies to her Friday deliverables and not to anyone else’s and that pointing it out hasn’t changed anything. The first couple of times, she mentions it. After that, she stops not because it stopped bothering her, but because she’s decided it’s not worth being the person who is always complaining about a coworker. 

A year later she leaves, not over one bad week, but because she spent that year concluding that reliability doesn’t get rewarded here, that being the one who follows through just means you inherit everyone else’s slack. And she’s not the only one drawing that conclusion. Whoever’s left is watching how you handled it and deciding how seriously to take the next standard you set.  When One Conversation Doesn’t Fix It 

Sometimes it does. You have the OIR conversation once, the pattern breaks, and that’s the end of it. Most performance issues, caught early and named clearly, resolve right there. 

When they don’t, the answer isn’t to repeat the same conversation and hope this time lands differently. There’s a four-step path we walk through in our book:  

1. A direct conversation  

2. A follow-up conversation if the first one didn’t stick,  

3. A formal written plan with a defined review period, and, if none of that produces change,  

4. An exit.  

Nobody wants to get to step four. But getting there isn’t the failure.  

Staying stuck on step one for a year having the same hallway conversation on repeat—that’s the failure. 

Consistency Is What Makes a Standard Real 

The fastest way to break trust in a standard is to enforce it selectively.  

If you address a missed deadline with one person and wave it off for another, your team doesn’t conclude the standard doesn’t matter to you. They conclude it never really existed, and that what actually determines the outcome is who you like better. 

This gets harder, not easier, with your best people. It’s tempting to give your highest performer a pass because everything else they touch is excellent. Do that enough times and you’ll find your best people are the ones testing the boundary the most, simply because they’ve learned there isn’t one. 

What to Do This Week 

Pick one standard you’ve been letting slide. Start with the one that has been bugging you for weeks.   

Write the OIR down: what you observed, the impact, what you need instead. Then have the conversation. This week, while it’s still a five-minute course correction instead of a six-month resentment. 

Your team already knows what you’re willing to tolerate. This week, show them what you’re holding them to. 

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For the past two weeks, we’ve walked through when to hire and how to hire. If you followed those lessons, you figured out who you needed for the role and ran a real process instead of grabbing the first resume that looked decent. You welcome your new team member. 

Then, six weeks in, the new hire isn’t performing the way you expected. And you start wondering if you picked wrong. You probably didn’t.  

I’m Stephanie Everett, founder of Lawyerist Lab where we help law firm owners build better businesses. In our work with small firm owners, the pattern shows up constantly: the hire was solid. What was missing were clear, explicit expectations before day one. Not an assumption that “they’ll figure it out.” An actual, written, standard for what good looks like. 

When you miss that step, it can result in working getting redone and the owner slowly picking the task back up themselves. This week, we’re breaking down what we mean by setting expectations, what it costs you when you skip it, and how to build it into your hiring process starting now. 

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Why Expectations Matter, and the Many Kinds You’re Actually Setting 

Here’s what makes this step easy to skip: expectations feel obvious to you. You’ve been doing this work, running this firm, and living inside these norms for years. Of course, the deadline is Thursday. Obviously, you flag a problem before it becomes a crisis. There’s no question you need to be ready to stay late the night before a trial starts. 

None of that is obvious to someone who started three weeks ago. What’s obvious to you is invisible to them, and the gap between those two things is where redone work, missed deadlines, and quiet resentment all come from. Expectations matter because they’re the only thing standing between a new hire’s best guess and your actual standard. Skip them, and you’re not really delegating. You’re hoping. 

And “expectations” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, because it’s not one thing. Most owners think they’ve covered it once they’ve named the task and the deadline. That’s a fraction of what a new hire needs to know: 

Performance expectations. What level of output counts as meeting the bar. Completing the task and completing it the way you’d have done it are two different deliverables. 

Quality expectations. The specific standard for how the work looks and reads, tone, formatting, and level of detail. 

Timeline expectations. Not just the deadline, but how far in advance you expect to hear if that deadline is at risk. 

Communication expectations. Response times, preferred channels, how much detail you want in a status update versus a quick heads-up. 

Availability expectations. Whether nights and weekends are ever part of the job, and exactly when, so nobody’s guessing about a boundary that was never stated. 

Decision-making expectations. What they’re empowered to decide on their own, and what needs to come to you first. Nothing erodes trust faster than a new hire getting corrected for a decision they had no way of knowing wasn’t theirs to make. 

Feedback expectations. How and when you’ll tell them how they’re doing, so silence doesn’t get read as approval. 

Cultural expectations. The unwritten norms about how people behave here, speaking up, disagreeing, asking for help, that never make it into a job description but get enforced anyway. 

Miss any of these categories and you haven’t set expectations. You’ve set a task list and left the actual standard to chance. 

Three Signs You Skipped This Step 

1. You’re Redoing Their Work 

This is the most expensive version. A new paralegal drafts a client letter. It’s not wrong exactly, it’s just not how the firm does it. You rewrite it. Then you rewrite the next one. Three months in, you’re spending more time fixing their work than you would have spent doing it yourself. 

If that’s costing you even four hours a week at $150 an hour in your own time, that’s $2,400 a month. Over a year, that’s close to $29,000 in redone work, on top of what you’re already paying them in salary. 

That’s not a performance problem. That’s a gap in the standard you never actually communicated. 

2. You’re Avoiding the Conversation 

Six weeks in, something isn’t clicking, and instead of naming it, you keep hoping it self-corrects. Meanwhile, the new hire has no idea anything is wrong. They think they’re doing fine because nobody’s told them otherwise. 

This is the “no news is good news” trap, and it’s expensive in a different currency: trust. By the time you finally raise it, three months of misaligned work have piled up, and the conversation that could have been a five-minute course correction in week two is now a performance conversation that feels like an ambush to them and a confrontation to you. 

3. You’re the Bottleneck by Default 

Because expectations were never set clearly, everything routes back through you. Every question, every judgment call, every piece of work that needs a second look. You hired someone to take work off your plate, and instead you’ve added a layer of review to your week. 

Firm owners we work with in Lawyerist Lab often describe this moment the same way: they hired someone specifically to get their time back, and six months later they’re spending as much time managing the new hire as they used to spend doing the work themselves. The math never improves, because the missing piece was never the person. It was the absence of a standard anyone could be held to. The new hire is missing their operating instructions. 

Notice that none of this requires more hiring skill. It requires a different habit: writing the standard down before the person needs it, instead of discovering the standard in your own head the first time someone misses it. That’s a fixable gap, and it’s a smaller lift than most owners assume. 

How to Actually Set Expectations 

Start With the Last Time It Went Right 

Don’t start by imagining the perfect hire. Start by remembering a piece of work from that role that landed well. What made it good? Tone, turnaround time, level of detail, who got looped in and when? That description, in plain language, is your starting standard. It doesn’t need to be polished. It needs to exist somewhere other than your head, and it needs to reach the new hire before their first assignment, not after their third mistake. 

Write It Down Before Day One 

A standard you’ve only said out loud once, in passing, during a busy week, isn’t a standard the new hire can refer to. Instead, build your operations manual. You don’t have to write the entire thing in a week. But do start capturing processes and details as you go. Generative AI is a big friend here and can help you capture your processes and expectations.   

Say the Unwritten Rules Out Loud 

This is the step almost everyone skips, because the unwritten rules don’t feel like rules to you. They feel like common sense. Say them anyway. How fast you expect a reply after hours. Whether you want to be told about a problem the moment it happens or once it’s solved. Whether pushing back on a partner’s draft is welcome or overstepping. None of this is instinctive. All of it gets enforced the first time someone breaks a rule they didn’t know existed. 

Match the Delegation to the Person, Not the Task 

A brand-new hire needs explicit, step-by-step direction: what to do, in what order, checked at each stage. Someone who’s been in the role six months needs less of that and more autonomy in everyday tasks for their role, checked in at milestones instead of every step. Delegating the same way to both people is its own version of skipping expectations. You either micromanage someone who’s ready for more, or hand full autonomy to someone who was never told what full autonomy looks like here. 

Put the Check-In on the Calendar Before They Start 

Don’t wait to see how it goes. Schedule several reviews of their work before their first day, not after you’ve already noticed something’s off. A short, specific check-in weekly for the first 2 months will catch misaligned standards while they are still five-minute conversations. The same gaps caught in month four are performance problems. Bottom line: don’t stay quiet.  

Confirm They Heard What You Meant 

Setting an expectation and having it land aren’t the same event. After you walk through the standard, ask them to repeat back what they heard in their own words. This takes two minutes and catches the gap between what you said and what they understood. 

The Foundation of Every Good Working Relationship 

None of this is complicated. It’s just easy to skip, because the standard already lives in your head and it feels obvious there. The work is getting it out of your head and into a conversation your new hire gets to have, before the first assignment, not after the third mistake. 

Do that, and you’ve given them something most new hires never get: a clear sense of what’s expected. This is the foundation the whole working relationship gets built on. Everything that comes after, trust, feedback, the freedom to eventually hand off bigger things without a second look, starts here. 

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