“We really need to fix intake.” 

“I want to try a different pricing model.” 

“There has to be a way for this place to run without every question coming through me.” 

You probably have your own list. Some ideas came from a conference. Others came from answering the same question for the fourth time before lunch. A few have been around longer than you care to acknowledge. 

The ideas may be good. But if you’re still having the same conversation six months later, it’s worth asking what’s keeping you from doing anything with them. 

Sometimes, the answer is money or capacity. But usually, people are waiting until they have everything figured out and are afraid to ask for help.  

I’m Stephanie, founder of Lawyerist Lab where we run a builders’ club. One thing I know is that the desire to have it all unlocked can keep you stuck for a long time. 

The Problem Doesn’t Wait While You Think About It 

It sounds responsible to wait until you have time to work through a decision. You don’t want to rush into hiring someone, changing your fees, or replacing a system your team depends on. 

But look at what happens while you wait. 

• Disorganized intake means that clients don’t have a seamless experience and your team is busy chasing missing information. 

• Unclear decision authority means your team is constantly interrupting you because they don’t know what to do. 

• If you’re providing an unprofitably service, you may keep selling it without understanding the drag it causes on your business.  

Those costs continue whether you’ve made time to address them. 

You don’t need to overhaul the firm this week. I’ll be happy if you realize that leaving things on the constant to-do list might be costing you more than you realize.  

So, how do you get started?  

Asking for Help is a Sign of Strength 

Many of us carry a quiet worry that asking for help makes us look weak, or like we should have figured this out by now. Lawyers are trained to be the person with the answer, so saying “I’m not sure how to do this” can feel risky. 

But what if the opposite is true? 

Think about the people you trust most for advice. They’re rarely the ones who pretend to know everything. They ask good questions, admit what they haven’t done before, and find the answer quickly. Asking for help shows you’re honest about what you don’t know, and it usually gets you to a solution faster than working it out alone. A problem that would take you three weeks of stewing might take one good conversation. 

So the first step is simply saying what’s on your list out loud to someone who can help. 

Choosing Where to Start Is Part of the Work 

Maybe you have several things you want to change, and every one of them feels important. 

Better intake. Stronger finances. A team that can make decisions without you. A useful way to bring AI into the firm. 

It’s easy to treat each idea as its own project. But they usually overlap. Knowing your numbers might change which role you hire for. Settling who owns intake could fix a good part of the problem before you spend a dollar on software. Giving your team clearer authority might free up the time you need to take on something else. 

That’s why where you start matters. The easiest project isn’t always the most useful one, and the problem that annoys you most isn’t always the one to fix first. Sometimes, it turns out to be a symptom of something else. 

You don’t have to show up with a ranked list or a proposed solution. Sorting out which one to tackle first is part of what we do at Lawyerist Lab, so bring the whole messy list. 

Bring Us What’s on Your List 

We created the Builders’ Challenge for anyone with a list of things they want to fix and no idea where to begin. 

Here’s a quick video on how it works: 

Tell me what you want to build, fix, or change in your firm. It can be one idea, twenty ideas, or a description of something that keeps making the work harder than it needs to be. 

You don’t need to know which tool to buy, how a new process should work, or which idea deserves your attention first. Half-built is fine. 

I’ll read what you send myself and reply within three business days with my thoughts on where to start and any resources that might help. It’s free, and you don’t need to be a Lawyerist Lab member. 

You may already know what you want to change. You may need help figuring that out, too. Either way, send it in. 

Take the Builders’ Challenge and tell me what’s on your list. I’ll help you find your next step.

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.

“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. 

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. 

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. 

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/ 

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. 

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.