Session Recap: Bringing Ease to Managing a Legal Team

The average cost of losing an associate who joined as an articling student is somewhere between $300,000 and $500,000. They tend to leave right around year four or five, exactly when they start becoming profitable. A significant driver of that turnover is management behavior that many firms have not figured out how to measure or reward.

That was the thread running through the session Sandra Bekhor of Bekhor Management and I hosted on June 25. See the recording here. Sandra has spent more than 20 years coaching lawyers on leadership and team management, with a particular focus on delegation and feedback. I came at it from the profitability side. What kept coming back is how directly management habits shape firm economics, and how rarely firms treat the two as connected.

Why Managing a Legal Team Is So Hard

We started with what most managing partners already know but rarely name directly: lawyers are not trained to manage people. Law school trains the critical, analytical mind. It rewards the lawyer who finds the flaw in an argument and who assesses risk before anyone else in the room does. Those skills are essential for legal work. In a management conversation, the instinct to find the flaw is usually the thing that gets in the way.

Sandra made the point that good management requires a different part of the mind: empathy and the ability to listen without immediately judging. Lawyers have those capacities. They are just not the ones that get reinforced in legal training or firm culture.

So when lawyers move into senior roles, they are expected to lead and develop their people, without much preparation for either. And without strong role models in the firm to learn from, most are expected to figure it out on their own, which usually means they do not.

The Cost of Withheld Feedback

One of the patterns Sandra sees consistently: litigators who will argue fearlessly in court will not give a direct piece of critical feedback to an associate.

Her explanation made sense to me. In court, everything is rule-bound. The norms for how to behave are clear, and following them is not seen as aggressive. In a feedback conversation, there is no rulebook. The associate is someone you work beside every day. So the conversation gets deferred.

The cost compounds. An associate who makes a mistake in January and does not hear about it will repeat it in February, March, and April. By year-end review, the associate is hearing critical feedback for the first time, on twelve months of work. That is not just a development failure. It is a profitability problem. You have a person billing on your behalf all year at a fraction of what they could be producing.

One point Sandra raised that I do not think gets enough attention: your strongest performers want feedback just as much as anyone who is struggling, if not more. High performers are driven to grow. If your firm is not part of that growth, they will find one that is. They tend to leave right around year four or five. That is exactly when your investment in them starts to pay off.

Why Delegation Does Not Happen

This is where the financial case becomes very direct. Work that goes to a $350 associate should not be sitting with a partner billing at $800 or $900 an hour. The billing math here is clear, even if the behavior rarely reflects it.

Sandra identified fear of losing control as the primary obstacle. That fear is legitimate and takes different forms. Some partners worry about their reputation if a file goes wrong. Some fear client complaints. Some are simply convinced the work will come back needing to be redone anyway.

I added the structural piece. In many firms, partner compensation is tied primarily to billable hours. A partner who delegates aggressively is reducing her own hours. Her compensation reflects that. So she keeps the work. That is a rational response to the system in front of her, but it works directly against your firm’s long-term profitability.

Sandra’s reframe on this: partners who invest in training their team lose some billable hours in the short term. But if the team develops and stays, profitability rises over time. In my experience, the partners who invest in their people tend to build the more profitable practices.

What to Do About It

The practical suggestions we landed on were straightforward.

At the start of each year, each associate identifies two or three personal goals in conversation with the supervising partner. Specific goals tied to that person’s career trajectory, not pulled from a firm-wide checklist. Then a check-in every 90 days. This gives the partner a natural framework for feedback that does not feel adversarial, and it signals to the associate that someone is paying attention. That signal matters more than most firms realize.

Sandra and I both referenced the Balanced Scorecard as a structural tool worth considering. The idea is to measure partner performance beyond billing metrics. Financial results matter, but so does how well partners are developing their teams and building capacity for the long term. For a managing partner compensated partly against a balanced scorecard, the non-billable work of developing people gets counted. That changes behavior.

The harder question, which an audience member put directly, is how you make management changes stick when partners are still paid primarily on billable hours. The honest answer is that you probably cannot, not at scale and not over time. Some portion of partner compensation needs to reflect how well partners are managing and delegating. Even five or ten percent signals that the firm takes it seriously. Setting those goals at the start of the year and reviewing them at the 90-day mark gives it structure.

The AI Question

Near the end of the session, an audience member raised a specific question about AI and delegation: if junior work is being replaced by AI, what do you do with your junior associates and paralegals?

One view: you retrain them as validators. Have AI take the first pass. Have the junior associate review the output and produce a corrected version, then send that to a senior associate or partner for a final pass. The skills shift from producing the work to interrogating it. That is a legitimate developmental path, and some firms are already building it into how they count billable hours.

Sandra’s point: whatever structure you build around AI tools, the management principles for developing your people hold.

None of what Sandra and I described is complicated. What makes it hard is that many small and midsize firm partner compensation systems actively reward the opposite behavior. If you want to think through what changing that looks like in your firm, reach out.

Managing a Legal Team With Ease: The Surprising Path to Higher Profit

Managing teams well is one of the most powerful and underrated profit levers in a law firm.

On June 25, Sandra Bekhor and I will co-host a live Zoom conversation on:

· Why managing a team feels harder than it should

· Why feedback and delegation are such sticking points, even for litigators

· How everyday management habits can either unlock or undermine your firm’s profit

Sandra Bekhor is a practice management coach who helps lawyers and other professionals build thriving practices. She coaches lawyers and other professionals on marketing, management, and mindset, so they can pursue their real goals for their practice.

I will bring my law firm management and profitability expertise: how leverage, write‑offs and partner bottlenecks show up in the numbers. I’ll bring a practical lens on how lawyers lead, give feedback and delegate so their teams work at the right level and the firm can grow.

I am the founder of Profits for Partners and the Law Firm Profitability Group on LinkedIn. I will act as moderator, and this will be a guided discussion between the two of us, followed by a dedicated Q&A segment.

Live on Zoom – Tuesday, June 25 – 11 am PT / 2 pm ET – Hosted by the Law Firm Profitability Group on LinkedIn.

Interactive meeting, limited to 100 participants. Advance registration is required to receive the Zoom link. Register here.

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with details on joining the meeting.

What to Decide Before Your Firm Touches an AI Tool

Your firm is already running on AI. Most managing partners have no idea how much.

That is the argument Kathy Serenko, Amy Adams, and I made during our June 3rd webinar on “Three AI Conversations Every Law Firm Needs to Have”, hosted by the Law Firm Profitability Group on LinkedIn. Not which tools to use, but what your firm needs to have decided before it touches any of them. The recording is here.

Kathy Serenko is the founder of AI Efficiency Labs, and Amy Adams is the founder of Gaia Allies and AIReady™.

Kathy led with the governance perspective. Her opening question: Are you already exposed? Her answer, based on what she sees in firms daily: almost certainly yes.

AI enters your firm in ways leadership cannot see. A paralegal uploads 300 pages of medical records to a personal ChatGPT account under a deadline. The summary looks clean. Three months later, the error surfaces in a settlement discussion. A vendor tool your firm approved last year has AI inside it you never examined. The tools you signed off on produce errors that reach binding deliverables before anyone reviews them. AI is designed to produce plausible output, and it will not tell you when it is filling in blanks.

Kathy’s second point: having an AI policy is not the same as having governance. Less than 40% of law firms have a policy at all, and a policy is only a statement of intent. The missing layer is the day-to-day controls built into your actual workflow. Without those controls, the policy and the reality of what is happening in your firm will not align.

Governance means a domain expert, not IT, is the authority over AI output in each practice area. Someone who reads a research memo and recognizes when the content is wrong. The errors appearing in court sanctions are content errors, and the people catching them are judges and opposing counsel. They are domain experts. Your oversight authority in each practice area needs to be one too.

Amy made the workflow case. Her rule before recommending any AI system: map the workflow first. She recently spent 90 minutes with a family law partner doing exactly that. In your firm, that work probably has not been done. If the process exists only in someone’s head, the AI system inherits every gap in it. The tool scales what is already there.

Before the workflow is designed, the economics need to be settled. If a matter that used to take 10 hours now takes five, and your firm is still billing hourly, you may be cutting your revenue in half for that work. Pricing needs to be decided before the workflow is built. Firms that build the workflow first and sort out the pricing later often discover they cannot make money at it.

Everyone in your firm is asking the same question in different ways: what happens to me? The concern is real at every level, and dismissing it does not make it go away. What is actually changing is what each role does. Paralegals are running AI systems that used to require associate hours. Associates who used to produce first drafts are now verifying AI output and building judgment through that review. Partners who used to do the work are moving toward designing the systems that do it. The firms handling this well are having that conversation before the tools arrive.

Leadership does not get to delegate this responsibility. You cannot hand AI governance to a technology committee and check back in six months. You have to understand where the exposure is and whether your compensation structure supports what you are asking of your partners.

Your partners who put their expertise into an AI system will watch their billable hours fall as the system takes on that work. That contribution needs to be reflected in how they are compensated. If your firm still pays only for billable hours, you will not get the cooperation needed to build something that works.

The firms moving ahead well on this have answered the harder questions before reaching for tools.