Rethinking the COO Role in Law Firms

Law firms have always been led by lawyers. The senior partner was often both rainmaker and chief administrator, managing everything from finances to facilities. That model worked when the business of law was simpler and the competition was local. It no longer fits the complexity of today’s legal market.

It is time to rethink what this role should entail and who is best suited for it.

The Role of the COO

The main role of a COO in a law firm is to run the firm’s business operations. Partners’ time is best spent practicing law and building client relationships. Someone must ensure that the business runs efficiently behind the scenes.

The COO position includes creating the systems and discipline that enable partners to focus on client work. A strong COO connects the dots between finance, operations, people, and strategy. This relieves partners of this task and helps execute the firm’s goals.

The New Skills Required

The skill set for today’s COO has changed. Now legal COOs must be fluent in both management skills and technology. They must understand automation and AI applications that can streamline workflows and improve decision-making.

Strong COOs now act as translators between business strategy and operational execution. They can analyze profitability at the matter and client level. They can interpret financial and operational data to guide strategic investments. And they can communicate these insights to lawyers in ways that lead to action.

The most effective COOs combine four abilities:

  • Operational discipline to ensure the firm’s core systems run smoothly.
  • Financial literacy to create budgets and new pricing models.
  • Technology fluency to identify where automation and AI create leverage.
  • Leadership credibility to influence senior lawyers without authority based on title.

These abilities rarely come from the traditional legal path. That is why many of the most successful COOs in professional services come from finance, consulting, or technology backgrounds.

Why Some Firms Struggle to Empower the COO

Even when firms hire a capable COO, many fail to use the role effectively. In some partnerships, operations managers are limited to managing facilities, HR, or IT. This limits the COO’s ability to execute. Without clear authority, the role becomes reactive rather than strategic.

Empowering a COO requires the managing partner and the executive committee to treat the role as part of firm leadership, not support staff. The COO should sit at the table where strategic and financial decisions are made, with access to the same data and accountability.

The COO and Change Management

Law firms face rising cost pressures and technology-driven disruption. These challenges cannot be solved through individual effort or incremental change. They require systemic thinking, the kind that a professional COO brings.

A forward-looking COO can lead firmwide initiatives in areas such as:

  • Redesigning work allocation models that improve leverage and profitability.
  • Introducing firm-level KPIs and dashboards to measure performance in real time.
  • Managing AI adoption projects across practice groups.
  • Building training programs that develop “business of law” concepts among lawyers.

The goal is to help the Managing Partner execute on the firm’s strategic plan. The COO becomes the connection that links strategy with day-to-day execution. COOs can also take on many of the regular duties of the Managing Partner so that they can focus on higher-level firm strategy and leadership objectives.

What Law Firms Should Do Next

Every firm should begin by asking a simple question: What is our COO actually accountable for? If the answer sounds administrative rather than strategic, the firm may be missing an opportunity.

The next step is to align the COO’s role with measurable outcomes. Examples include improvement in profit per partner or percentage of work automated. These are results that move the firm forward and justify the investment in senior operational leadership.

Closing Thoughts

The modern law firm operates more like a business than a traditional partnership. Rethinking the COO role involves giving COOs more authority and accountability to give the firm a strategic advantage. This can also lead to non-lawyer COOs becoming CEOs or recruiting non-lawyer CEOs from other industries. Given the immense changes happening in the legal industry today, high-end professional management in law firms is becoming a must-have in order to succeed.

The Unseen Cost of Partner Misalignment

Law firms don’t often fail because their lawyers aren’t good enough. They fail because the partners aren’t on the same page.

Firms may look strong on paper if they are profitable and have good clients. But underneath, conflicting partner priorities and misaligned incentives slowly eat away at profits and stall innovation.

People often don’t notice this misalignment until it’s too late.

How to Tell if Your Partners Aren’t on the Same Page

When partners aren’t aligned, it shows up in small ways that affect both the way things work and the way people act. One partner is building long-term relationships with clients, while the other is maximizing billable hours. The result is that clients have different experiences and there is tension over how files are staffed.

Incentives that reward only billings or originations put partners in competition with each other, which makes it less likely that they will work as a team or share information. Leadership agrees on growth goals, but without support from all partners, strategic plans stay on hold.

The issue is not a deficiency of talent. It’s that the partnership is going in different directions.

The True Cost of Misalignment

Misalignment has a cost that can be measured in dollars. High-value clients go to competitors because the service is inconsistent. Associates leave because the partner they work for decides not to mentor and delegate. Partners don’t want to make changes that could hurt their pay, so investments in AI or changes to pricing models get put on hold.

Even small cracks in alignment can lead to lost revenue and a weaker market position.

Making Things Fit Together

To get everyone on the same page, firms need to deal with the things that really change how partners act. Compensation systems influence what partners should focus on, and they should reward working together and building client relationships. Plans must be directly linked to partner interests in order to be successful. If a strategy doesn’t make it clear how it helps each partner, it won’t get off the ground.

Firms need effective management that ensures decisions are made promptly and carried out. Without accountability, alignment quickly disappears. When these levers work together, partners start to pull in the same direction.

The Chance to Align

Aligned partnerships lead to huge benefits. Clients get the same level of service from every practice group and matter. Associates are less likely to leave because they get better training and mentoring. Partners see innovation projects as shared goals, not threats, which helps them move forward.

Alignment does more than just stop problems. It speeds up growth and profit.

The Bottom Line

The biggest threat to a law firm isn’t other law firms. It’s not being aligned inside.

When partners put their own goals ahead of the firm’s goals, strategies don’t work and innovation stalls. But when pay, strategy, and governance are all in line, the firm has a big advantage over its competitors.

The cost of being out of alignment is high. The benefits of alignment are even greater.

Partner Compensation: The Catalyst for Law Firm Innovation

Many firms get stuck at the same critical point with legal innovation. They’ve brought in AI and introduced value-based pricing. A firm strategic plan has been signed off on. Everything looks ready to go.

Then nothing clicks.

These firms struggle to identify the barriers preventing them from moving forward with their innovation efforts. They have AI that could make them efficient and effective. They have value-based pricing that could recognize their increased efficiency. They have strategies to implement everything and get it working in concert.

But there’s still a missing link: partner compensation.

The Four Drivers That Must Work Together

Real change requires four connected elements. Many firms focus on three and wonder why the fourth derails everything.

You need a strategic plan with clear firm goals that support legal innovation. Without direction, changes become random experiments rather than coordinated change.

You need a value-based pricing strategy that recovers efficiency gains. Fixed-fee billing and value-based arrangements reward results instead of time spent.

You need AI that improves effectiveness. The technology exists to streamline legal work dramatically.

And finally, you need a compensation system that incentivizes partners to achieve the tasks required to contribute to the firm’s innovation goals.

Why Compensation Is the Missing Link

You need to align your partner compensation system with your firm’s strategic innovation goals and modify compensation systems that primarily depend on billable hours.

Most firms are strongly opposed to changing their compensation system. However, it is often necessary to implement AI and value-based pricing. When compensation rewards billable hours above everything else, partners resist AI that reduces those hours. Their income depends on maximizing time billed, so they’ll protect that model regardless of firm strategy.

How Compensation Needs to Change for Innovation

Some ideas for linking compensation to innovation include focusing compensation more on revenues and nonbillable contributions instead of individual billable hours. Partners will be incentivized by proactive individual plans that help achieve strategic firm objectives, including AI implementation and value-based pricing. Management will oversee these plans and report on partner performance for comp purposes. Just a couple of the changes needed to foster innovation in law firms.

Most law firms focus on incentives for short-term profit, such as billable hours/production, and little on nonbillable innovations, like AI implementation and value-based pricing, which contribute to long-term profitability. This needs to change.

Clients are quickly catching on to the benefits of AI and will switch away from law firms that don’t adapt their processes, pricing and incentive systems to meet their needs. Therefore, partners currently married to time billing should be encouraged to transition to fixed or value-based pricing models where feasible.

The Urgency Is Real

You can’t escape changing your compensation system in this new environment. The legal market is shifting, whether you participate or not. AI will continue to advance, and client expectations will keep evolving toward value-based relationships.

The technology exists. The pricing models work. The only thing standing between most firms and successful innovation is their willingness to align compensation with their strategic goals.

Stop going in circles. Address compensation now, or risk losing clients and partners in an environment that demands innovation to survive.