Recipe for Success
Over the past few years, I’ve done a lot of reading, thinking and learning about what it takes to be successful. While I’m smart and do well on standardized tests. Being smart is not a requirement for being successful. The world is full of intelligent losers. The world is full of incredibly bright people who just can’t seem to put things together. There are also people of average intelligence who do very well. Here are the three basic things that I think it takes to be successful:
- Building a Good Team – What kind of team can you put together? Unless you are small and want to stay very small, you are going to have to rely on your employees. If you have golden employees, you’re a hero. If you have mediocre or less employees, you’re a goat. If you have the ability to put together, build and keep happy a good team, then your team will make you look good. In addition to employees, the better team you can put together for your cases (private investigators, future costs experts, doctors that care about their patients and will give honest opinions, but will take the time to really look at what is wrong, lifecare planners, case managers…) the better you will be able to work your case up and the easier your life will be.
- Paying Attention to What Works and What Doesn’t – Taking the time to look at your firm and see what is working well and what is not. The things that are working well, think about what you can do to do more of them. The things that are not working well, do what you can to fix the problem or eliminate it. Are soft tissue cases not being profitable? How many cases do you have? Is there anything you can do to handle them better and make them more profitable? Or do you have too many of them and they’re not profitable and taking up a lot of time and energy of your staff that could be better put on your other cases and you would be better off wrapping up your existing soft-tissue cases and not taking them in the future. Or….a combination of still taking soft tissue cases, but being very selective about the cases you take and making certain your staff knows your criteria. If you can identify what is not working, it’s not too hard to identify what the solution is. It is important to be able to identify and articulate what the problem is.
Also pay attention to what works and doesn’t work at trial. After a trial, talk to the jurors (following the appropriate rules of course) and find out what they liked and didn’t like. You’ll be amazed and surprised at what you hear. If there is a lawyer in your area that tends to get tremendous results, take him to lunch and ask him why he thinks his verdicts are so high.
I also like to pay attention to business and what works there. Technology and the internet were supposed to be the next big thing, but Wal-Mart came out of nowhere to be by far the largest company in America. And they did it in retail sales, a vanilla field that has been around forever. Target came out of nowhere to beat K-Mart at their own game. The continued excellence of McDonalds is a story worth studying. Disney reinvented itself after the passing of Walt Disney. These are all stories worth studying and learning from. As lawyers should we copy them? No. Can we learn from them and adapt lessons from them? Absolutely. We ignore the successes at our own peril.
Of course we ignore the failures at our own peril as well. We can learn quite a lot from the decline and/or demise of the American car industry, Osborne Computers, IBM giving up the software rights to MicroSoft (and there’s a re-invention success after that), Sears, K-Mart, the tnetire airline industry (except for JetBlue and SouthWest, two more success stories) and many more. What was their fatal flaw? Where did they go wrong?
Why didn’t they fix their problems? How do we as lawyers anticipate situations and not make the same mistakes?
As lawyers, we are trained to be analytical. We apply logic to the case we’re working on. As trial lawyers, we’re trained to be ruthless in using what works and doesn’t work. I’ve had demonstrative exhibits that I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time on and absolutlely loved. People didn’t like them and reacted much more strongly to a simple picture than I thought. Out goes the fancy (expensive) exhibit and in goes the picture. If I have an argument that I love, but the target audience doesn’t, the argument gets pitched. We’re trained to do this as lawyers, but more often than not, fail to do this in our practice. We need to use what works, and fix or stop doing what doesn’t work.
- Pay Attention to the Day to Day – How many cases are coming in? How many demand packages went out the door? How many cases do you have where something needs to be resolved? How quickly are your cases moving? While it’s important to think strategically, the ‘big thoughts’ of what’s working, what’s not and what you can do to be a better lawyer, run a better law firm or get more/better cases it’s just as important to not forget the daily work and determine what needs to be done and what’s getting done.
There you have it. Build a good team, pay attention to what works (and what doesn’t) and pay attention to the day to day. That’s my recipe for success. What’s yours?
This is a good article about good general business practices, even if you don't run a law firm! Thanks!
