Developing a Tailored Coaching Toolkit for Law

“Executive coaching is often employed as a reaction to a problem after it has already occurred (e.g., concerns around performance or well-being of a staff member), but coaching tools can, and should, be applied pro-actively to address the highlighted challenges in the legal industry.”

I think it’s fair to say that I have always been curious about the legal profession and its sub-cultures. As a kid, I would spend a lot of my time reading John Grisham novels, which inspired to further investigate the law and the justice system. Funny enough, Grisham had left law practice to pursue a writing career.

It was my curious nature that got me reflecting about legal practice and how we, as lawyers, choose to conduct our business, and also about why, in the age of technology and wealth we live in, access to justice is still not readily available to the broader population.

My ideas led me to the study of subjects that question the status-quo in the legal sector, such as Preventive and Pro-active law, which borrows ideas from preventive medicine, bringing these into in the legal world (the basic idea is that lawyers can build a protective system that makes their clients “immune” from legal risks).

I also studied Legal Design (which involves the application of design thinking in the legal world), and later Coaching, an area that essentially involves partnering with your clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential (see ICF definition).

Studying these topics further, I could see how areas like Positive Psychology and Emotional Intelligence, giving two outstanding examples here, can help provide a valuable toolkit to address many challenges in the legal sector.

Understanding Culture in our Legal Systems

Having worked as a lawyer in countries with differing legal systems and cultures, I could see that there is a unique sub-culture in legal practice, which is adversarial and perfectionist in nature, traits that transcend borders and specific legal practice areas.

As lawyers our obsession with perfectionism starts the moment we set foot in law school. I believe that due to its unique character and origins, the law is is unlike any other industry in terms of the way we micro-critique the work of others. Such approach, which I label the “red-pen approach“ also speaks to an inherent negativity bias in legal practice, since we as lawyers have been inherently drilled to question and critique through our education

In legal practice, we also seem to focus incessantly on problems rather than on finding solutions. In fact, studies suggest that If we go looking for problems, we are more likely to find them. We have seen that such obsession with perfectionism too often leads to impossible work standards that cannot realistically be adhered to by human beings, without becoming stretched and over-burdened. The numbers on stress and burnout in our industry are staggering. 

These common trends in our legal cultures my be explained with reference to established and age-old customs. But, looking ahead, it is also clear that there is big change on the horizon due to legal practice becoming increasingly entangled with technology, as well as more modern and creative business methods. The famous billable hour model, giving just an example, is now often seen at odds with client demands.

The thing is that the traditional excessive focus firms on hierarchy and profitability are not always easily reconcilable with an agenda for personal and professional development of a fast-changing workforce.

The fact is that today most lawyers are time poor, managing difficult routines, processing of large volumes of information, managing interruptions by other employees or clients, tight deadlines, dealing with complex tasks etc.). So, what tools can be applied to legal world? I believe the answer lies in building more self-awareness.  

Developing a New Coaching Toolkit tailored for the Law

While completing my professional diploma in Coaching, Mentoring and Leadership (leading to professional coaching accreditation with the ICF), I started thinking about the unique cultures and sub-cultures in law and what approaches and tools can be applied for work with legal clients in this unique sector.

What I found was that the law can be quite isolated as an industry, and could gain a lot from leadership training experiences in other business sectors. 

Executive coaching in the legal sector is not a new concept. In fact, many law firms today already turn to coaching for recruiting and keeping industry talent. But I believe that coaching and leadership development can help bring added self-awareness to an industry still too often in reaction mode.

Such awareness, together with tailored training on verbal and non- communication skills, or what we can term “human skills”, can make an impact on the relationships we develop and maintain in throughout our work.

Today executive coaching is often still employed as a reaction to a problem after it has already occurred (e.g., concerns around performance or well-being of a staff member), but my argument here is that coaching tools can and should be applied pro-actively to address the challenges in the legal sector.

Through observing and mirroring powerful and proven coaching and leadership techniques (e.g., communication soft skills, active listening, using a reflective and non-judgmental approach), and through critical discussion about our work environments, we can create new opportunities for growth and achieving positive change.

In my opinion, we are just at the tip of the iceberg in terms of the opportunities that coaching can bring in developing a stronger culture for law.

Positive psychology, for example, is a strong example of a research topic used in coaching that focuses on the scientific study of factors enabling people and organisations to flourish. The question here again becomes, rather than focusing on problems, how can we build upon existing strengths to become more proactive, resilient and future ready?

Final remarks

For me, Coaching and Mentoring, Leadership, and EI, which I will be exploring further in the coming months, can essentially help us create a toolkit that we can tailor to address the challenges faced in the legal sector and to positively impact the profession in a meaningful way, together with all its stakeholders.

If we can find a way to do this, I believe that we will be on the right track!

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