TRP 319: Partner Development with Yuliya Laroe

[00:00:10] You're listening to The Rainmaking Podcast, hosted by high stakes headhunter, author, and professional speaker, Scott Love. Scott Love Hey, this is Scott Love with The Rainmaking Podcast. Thanks for joining me again today. Our expert for this podcast is Yuliya LaRoe. Our topic title is Partner Development. Now,

[00:00:36] if you work in any professional services organization, this content is going to help you. Her expertise is just within the legal industry, though. Yuliya is the founder and CEO of Leadwise Group, an award-winning law firm consulting and coaching company. And across the industry, she's known as the law firm partner development expert and the coach who gets income partners promoted to equity. For nearly 15 years, Yuliya has coached and trained over 5,000 lawyers at Amlaw 100

[00:01:04] and 200 firms nationwide. Through thousands of conversations, challenges, and breakthroughs, she built the proprietary framework, diagnostic tools, and developmental systems that power Leadwise's work today, all grounded in realities of law firm life. Partner autonomy, billable pressure, and practice economics. I hope that you get some great ideas from my conversation with Yuliya. We put all of her contact info on the show notes. Also, on June 3rd and 4th, I'll be facilitating sessions at

[00:01:33] Rain Dance by Lasso, the legal sales and service organization in Chicago. Check out the show notes for the information on that conference. This podcast is sponsored by SharePoint Legal Insights, formerly known as Leopard Solutions, turning legal intelligence into opportunity. And the show is also sponsored by The Rainmaking Magazine. Don't lose business to the competition. Read this publication

[00:01:57] and keep business development top of mind. Visit therainmakingmagazine.com today to chart your course to greater rainmaking success. Thanks for joining me on the show, and I hope you get some great ideas from my conversation with Yuliya today. Thanks for listening. Hey, this is Scott Love with The Rainmaking Podcast. Our guest today is Yuliya LaRoe, and we're talking about partner development, a strategic imperative for law firms. Yuliya, thanks for joining me on the show.

[00:02:26] Thanks so much for having me, Scott. And it's nice to see you again. It was nice to see you at the NALP conference. It's good to have you back on the show you were on about a year and a half ago. And today we're talking about partner development in law firms. And so I wanted to kind of get my arms around a definition. What does that mean, partner development? Yeah. So when we think about partner development, what we're really focusing on is talent development of the law firm's partners.

[00:02:50] Traditionally, firms spend a lot of time and effort and resources developing associates or more junior lawyers. But once someone got to partnership, there was this almost assumption like, oh, you're there, you figured it out, so good luck. But things have really changed in the last few years in the industry. What do you think has caused that? What has been the biggest change that you've seen to where now this is a necessity for law firms? Yeah, there's an interesting kind of

[00:03:18] confluence of issues or challenges. So one is kind of commercialization in a sense, right? Or just kind of where the practice of law has been progressively and proactively becoming more and more like the business of law, right? So there's more expectations for lawyers, especially partners, to be showing up as true leaders and business leaders of the firm rather than being really excellent lawyers,

[00:03:48] right? So we really the kind of the main focus is the expectation is now driving that lawyers can't just be fantastic lawyers, right? But their leadership has to move beyond their desk, right? Expand beyond their desk, beyond their office, and really create that enterprise value. Clients have become a lot more sophisticated. And as a result, perhaps a lot more demanding of the value that they want to see

[00:04:16] coming from their outside counsel. And on the law firm side, the generational issues are really causing, and we know this is not just limited to law firms, but generational issues causing a lot of friction, a lot of tension, where more junior folks are saying, listen, I don't want to work for a partner who is terrible at managing their practice or me. So there are really a lot of things that are kind of coming

[00:04:43] together and creating this perfect storm where developing partners truly as leaders and business developers is now a necessity. I see that everything you said is spot on. And from my perspective, as a partner recruiter, niche recruiting corporate and finance partners in big law, I'll talk to partners that say, I just don't like the leadership here of the senior partners in my practice. And sometimes that's enough

[00:05:09] for them to move their entire portal practice to another firm. And the way I've kind of configured it in my own assessment and analysis, and let me know what you think, it's a very simplistic framework, but I look at it as a three-legged stool. You've got to have good legal skills and good legal acumen. Absolute necessity. But you also have to have good leadership skills. How do you treat people? How do you build trust? How do you draw people to you as a trusted advisor? And then third,

[00:05:37] business development skills. You've got to make rain and be a rainmaker and build a name. In spite of being with a firm that already has a name, you've got to have that name yourself to attract the business and be somebody. What do you think about that assessment? Yeah, 100%. Right. And it's interesting that you really, I mean, look, there's place in our firms for a lot of different people, right? We know there are people who are excellent technical experts and,

[00:06:03] you know, they might not be business developers. And in many firms, there might be a place for, you know, folks of different skill levels. But the true success and the most important thing is the true independence in private practice comes from mastering those three areas, right? It's having excellent legal skills. It's being a great manager of your practice and your people and being an excellent business developer. And the reality is, if you're missing one, something's going to give,

[00:06:30] right? Like you won't be able to reach your potential. So I'm 100% with you on that one. Yeah. So let's kind of dig into what law firms are getting wrong about partner development. Let's start with that. What are the pitfalls that they have? What are they getting wrong about partner development? Yeah. You know, I think traditionally, and, you know, we're not blaming anyone, right? It's just that things have changed. And I think that while the environment has changed, the development and

[00:06:56] the assumptions have not. And so one of the assumptions we see firms make and firm leadership makes is, well, if someone has reached a point where they're ready to be promoted to partner, they should already know these things. And the reality is the role has evolved, right? And there hasn't been a lot of clarity of what this role contains. So I think that's probably one of the

[00:07:23] biggest, biggest kind of challenges, which frankly is pretty easy to fix, right? One of the solutions is to create some clarity around it and transparency. Another area is not having development kind of curriculum put around those expectations. So let's say we have clarity. This is what we expect. We have metrics. And then we're sort of releasing our people and saying, okay, good luck, right? And that also is

[00:07:51] kind of layered on top of the fact that most firms now, and we've seen recent announcements, more and more firms moving in that direction, have two-tier partnership, right? So we're creating these non-equity partners, but we should not just create this tier without giving them the support, right? Because it shouldn't be ideally income or non-equity partnership level. It shouldn't be like a waiting room where people just sit indefinitely. It really should be a development runway.

[00:08:19] Yeah. So help me break this down. What do the firms actually do when they're doing it well? Are they doing training sessions? Are they doing cohorts? Are they doing online learning? Are they doing live seminars? What's kind of the framework that you've seen where you've worked with firms to really help increase these skills in these areas? Yeah. I think the most kind of progressive firms in this area

[00:08:41] do a few things really well. Number one, they think they really see new partners as its own cohort of learners, right? People who now have moved from one sort of state of being valuable, contributed to the firm into a completely different role. So one of the best ways to do that is to create your new partner cohort. Now, you have smaller firms that don't have large classes. You have bigger firms that have

[00:09:11] really large. You can have two people, right? It's a cohort. And develop a program that's going to take people through the first couple of years, ideally three years. Now, it doesn't mean that you have the same level of intensity or frequency of programming in all of those years, right? But just

[00:09:33] like associates who go through stages of junior, mid-level, and senior, so do partners, right? And what junior partners need is a lot of learning, understanding of the shifting role, right? Of the role of business development, of management and leadership skills that really were important,

[00:09:57] but not yet critical when they were associates. Right, right. And so what's changed then today? What capabilities do partners need today that were less emphasized 10 years ago that you think? Oh, I would say hugely important is management skills. Like it's the number, I mean, you know, at the NELF conference, I had a lot of conversations. And in fact, we did a, we called it a law firm

[00:10:24] leadership challenge exchange where we invited people to share what they felt with some of the biggest dominating challenges in law firm leadership right now. We had over 60 responses from folks from over 40 firms throughout the conference. And guess what? What do you think the top five challenges were?

[00:10:46] People skills. They were all people folks. Yeah. Yeah. The AI was on the list, but it was number five. It wasn't number one, right? Number one was generational differences and all the issues and friction caused by it. The second was leadership capacity, just the, right, the ability of leaders to manage change, to deal with sort of

[00:11:10] leadership issues. The third one was change management, right? How do we actually deal with managing change and communication, right? So these four were at the top of the list across a variety of different firms. And, you know, the funny thing, and my colleague and I were laughing is that, you know, we worry so much about all the new stuff happening, but it's always about the classics,

[00:11:35] isn't it? Right. It's people. That never changes. Yeah. And I've wondered, let me know what you think, because I talk to a lot of partners in my recruiting practice and I become friends with them and I've noticed that the correct client-facing persona is, I have the answers. I can solve your problem, Mr. Client. However, I think that know-it-all persona permeates into other areas of their professional life where it's just not healthy and they tend not to learn. These are people that are

[00:12:01] intellectually curious people that have kind of shut off the learning valve because that persona takes over the rest of their professional life. What do you think about that? That's kind of my thesis, Yulia. Yeah. I think as an industry, we're not doing favors to our people, right? Because think about how lawyers are judged or evaluated is based on their knowledge and their expertise and how well they know

[00:12:27] their stuff, right? So I think that's what puts the pressure on feeling like you have to be that person in everything you do. And that's why the sooner we get to people, right, with support, with development opportunities, the better. So ideally, we're doing this development work at the senior associate level, right? But the important thing is not leaving especially new partners without structured support.

[00:12:55] The other thing too is, you know, newer partners now are stepping into these roles. They have had a lot of development as associates. And when we're saying good luck, right? It's like, wait a second, what just happened? You just increased my commitments and obligations, right? Responsibilities, but you took away support. And so that just feels kind of incongruent with the importance of this role. And so ideally,

[00:13:25] firms are continuing, right, and creating that. And it also is a big retention tool. So let me talk in that regard about retention. How do you think partner management gaps affect associate retention and development? I'm going to say hugely. In fact, the associate experience is largely determined by the management habits of the partners. Because when you think about associates, and we've heard the expression,

[00:13:54] you know, people don't leave companies, they leave individual managers. It is very true for law firms as well, right? Associates don't leave the firm, they leave the handful of partners that they've worked with most closely. And if they don't feel supported, developed, right, if they don't see a path forward, then they might vote with their feet. And I think because the legal recruiting landscape has gotten so much more competitive,

[00:14:22] I know that there are peaks and valleys in it, but overall, it's much more competitive and aggressive because firms know they've got to be creative in how they attract that talent to them. And I think what I've noticed, people leave law firms either for leadership issues or strategy issues. It's one of those two. The leadership one is the one that's more passionate about, I want to move because of fill in the blank. And this is something I learned when I was a leadership trainer, when I was on active duty in the United States Navy, after I finished my

[00:14:51] C-duty tour as a leadership trainer. And I learned that leadership is something that can be learned. And the other flip side of that is that there's no end to the learning, that you have to continue to learn because there's always going to be some other crisis or some other issue where you have to understand that and be ready for that, even if you're managing a team of two associates. So what do you think about what I mentioned and how that's applicable in the law

[00:15:17] firm context, Julia? Yeah, it translates perfectly. And that's because it's still people, right? Leadership, it doesn't matter where you're leading, what organization, we're leading people, and that will always stay the same. It doesn't matter how many AI agents we have working for us, right? The people component will stay the same. People are complex, right? There's a lot of psychology and nuances, personality styles. And, you know, we can't outsource that. You know, we see

[00:15:46] that there's sometimes attempts to kind of see, okay, how can we, you know, automate feedback, for example. The reality is, if we don't help our leaders, right, our partners internally, to know how to manage the team, how to motivate their people, how to inspire it, how to provide effective feedback, how to delegate effectively, it's always going to create friction and bottlenecks.

[00:16:10] Yeah, that's right. I really love, Scott, the point where you said, guess what? Leadership is something you can learn. And that, that is, if we, you know, if we don't, you know, folks don't remember anything else from our conversation, really, that's probably the biggest point. It's a skill, right? Absolutely right. Let's talk about the other leg of the stool, business development. So, Julia, why is business development so difficult for many new partners?

[00:16:35] Yeah, I mean, you know, you think about business development and many folks think about it as, oh, it's networking. Oh, it's keeping in touch with people, right? But it's actually its own system, right? It's a framework of knowledge, of skills, of activities. And that's probably one of kind of the easier aspects of helping someone get a better handle on business development is helping them

[00:17:03] understand that business development is a body of knowledge, just like a particular practice area, right? And really spending time understanding and learning kind of, you know, what that framework looks like. So we have a framework we use called the Remasters for a framework. And it really helps someone, you know, a lawyer to really see business development from that big picture view, like what's the universe and how does it all fit together? And once we do that, right, then we start to look at

[00:17:32] things like what is your natural rainmaking style? How can you become an effective business developer as you? Not Scott, not Yulia, right? Not your fellow partners, but you with your communication preferences, your strengths, your gaps, right? We all have them. We talk about mindset, right? How can you have a stronger mindset around business development? What does that mean? How might it be

[00:17:56] sabotaging your efforts or helping them? And what are some of the more effective areas for you to focus, right? That's all about strategy. And only then we get into the activities and the networking and the calls and the follow-ups, right? Because if we don't have that structure, it's a lot of time that might not be used as effective. So I think there's, you know, a few different gaps that kind of causing

[00:18:20] it, but yeah. Let me ask you this question. In your experience, what's something that surprised you when you've been doing the work with law firms and their attorneys in their development? What's something that surprised you, Yulia? Yeah, I think the problem, and I mentioned it a little bit earlier. I think the biggest sort of aha realization for me was, is that we just, we sort of treated

[00:18:44] people who've reached a certain level of seniority as automatically assuming that they knew all these things, right? They somehow immediately overnight would figure out BD or leadership, right? Or people management. And obviously it's not, that's not the case, right?

[00:19:08] That's like any skill. It requires growth. It requires new learning. It requires testing and trying, right? And experimenting. Absolutely. It never ends. So let me ask you this then. If somebody were in a leadership role and they want to really get started implementing these ideas, if you would give them three action steps, what would those three action steps be, Yulia?

[00:19:30] I'd say number one, what I would recommend starting with is get clarity around what are the partnership expectations in your firm? And really break it down by partner level, right? What is it that we want, what we expect as a firm from our partners in their first year, three years of partnership? What about

[00:19:54] that mid-level stage? What about more senior partners, right? And then look at development opportunities that already exist, right? Because a lot of firms have, I mean, I'm, you know, I rarely, we rarely meet a firm that is not doing anything. There's like some things happening, but now what we want to do is look to see are the development opportunities that exist support the expectations that we have for

[00:20:20] these partners. And if, if folks want a more sort of structured way to think through these, these challenges, these opportunities, we've put together a guide to developing new partners where we break it down kind of in more detail about how you want to think about clarity of expectations and perhaps even developing a partner competency model, if that's something that's of interest,

[00:20:47] you know, what type of programming folks should think about, kind of what type of development opportunities. And folks can download it at our website, leadwisegroup.com forward slash partner dash development. That's great. And you know what, we're going to put that link on our show notes so everybody listening, you'll be able to download that directly. And Julia, thanks for being a guest on the show again. And tell us more about your consulting, your solutions. What do you do that

[00:21:16] you'd like our listeners to know about? Yeah, thanks so much, Scott. So at Leadwise Group, we focus on, we're 100% law firm, consulting, training, and coaching firm. And the two main sort of audiences that we serve are law firm partners. So it's partner development across leadership management and business development skills, and law firm operational leaders. So leaders who actually

[00:21:43] help us run our firms, right, IT, finance, BDE, professional development, but we help them become stronger leaders in their own right. Oh, that's terrific, Julia. Thanks again for joining us in the show. And like I mentioned, we're going to put all of your contact information on the show notes. And you know, it's great seeing you again today. And I'd love to have you back on the show in the future again, Julia. Thanks so much, Scott. It was fun.

[00:22:09] Thank you for listening to the Rainmaking Podcast. For more information about our recruiting services for international law firms, visit our website at attorneysearchgroup.com. To inquire about having Scott speak at your next convention, conference, sales meeting, or executive retreat, visit therainmakingpodcast.com.