This post could be titled “It pays to get out of the office.” It is about relationships and learning from really high quality people. And in the legal industry, we has more than our share of these folks.
Back in 2008, some large firm lawyers in Chicago got together and decided they were going to practice law in a way that aligned their interests with their clients. So they created Valorem Law, which paired experienced trial lawyers with alternative fee arrangement that shared risk with clients. Back in 2008, which seems like a distance memory now, Paul Lippe’s Legal OnRamp was a portal that connected together all of the fringe thinkers. That is how I met Valorem Founder Pat Lamb. I still remember him telling me about the day when he signed the lease for their Chicago offices — an amount that put his entire net worth fully at risk.
In April 2009, Indiana Law hosted FutureFirm 1.0, which was a two-day “collaborative competition” where teams composed of law firm partners, in-house lawyers, and junior associates competed for $15,000 of prize money (put up by Hildebrandt). 70 lawyers showed up, including Paul Lippe, Pat Lamb, and Pat’s Valorem partner, Nicole Auerbach — all close friends to this day. Pat Lamb’s team won, but prompted donated all the money to the student participants — $1000 per student was an a bad weekend take!
The alumni network of people who participated in that event is pretty staggering. I have stayed in touch with most of them. Many of the students who participated are senior in-house lawyers. Five months after the event, Alex Hamilton left Latham & Watkins to start Radiant Law, authoring a Jerry McGuire-type memo that will someday be viewed as one of the seminal documents of the new order. (I have seen the original letterhead version — 17 pages single-spaced on A4 paper with graphics and detailed footnotes. It is nothing short of a masterpiece. A few months ago, I showed this 2009 memo to a managing partner of an AmLaw 25 firm who commented, shaking his head, “This could have been written yesterday and still been exactly right.” It may be right, but acting on it requires acceptance by the troops. And that’s not easy.)
The following year, I met Valorem’s best client, FMC’s General Counsel Jeff Carr, at the annual Georgetown Law Firms conference. Late one afternoon, as the crowd was thinning out, Jeff gave a demo of this “hot wash” methodology for improving team performance. A few months later, Anthony Kearns (another FutureFirmer) and I used it in my my Legal Project Management class to critique student presentation. Frankly, it has such a huge effect on students that we thought Jeff had given us plutonium and taught us how to split atoms. In reality, we just discovered the power of real time feedback among motivated professionals. And yes, law students are motivated legal professionals, just like Jeff’s in-house legal staff.
Here is Jeff’s hot wash format. It is bone simple. First cover the good stuff, eliciting the perceptions of the room. Then do the same for things for things to look at (i.e., make better). I cannot emphasize how effectively this simple public exercise reduces repeated mistakes and pounds in good group habits.
That is a long prologue