Hardly anyone has positive feelings about an audit, but Thomas A. Brophy looks back on an audit at Marshall, Dennehey, Warner,
Coleman & Goggin with pride. The president and CEO of the law firm says the employees didn’t see the audit as a threat and didn’t
use it as a way to dump on their co-workers, and the auditors were struck by the employees’ pride and commitment on the first day
they were there. That candor, trust and loyalty from the more than 900 employees result from the respect given to them by the firm’s
leaders, Brophy says. Smart Business spoke with Brophy about how he educates his employees about the big picture and how he
makes sure the firm doesn’t grow too fast.
Don’t get ahead of yourself. We’ve turned
down some growth opportunities because
the opportunities weren’t the right fit for us
culturally or geographically, and we did not
want to grow too quickly.
It may sound trite, but I always think back
to that movie ‘A Bridge Too Far,’ where the
Allied troops went into Germany, but they
were so far out in front that they couldn’t
supply their own troops. There’s a danger to
getting ahead of ourselves. So we’ve grown
carefully, and in a large part, regionally.
Our growth has been logical because we
work with similar clients, just in newer venues. We’re able to support those new clients
from existing operations.
We want to make sure growth we have is
consistent with culture, the quality of work
that we do and the competency of our
lawyers, and that growth will be profitable
to the firm. If you grow too quickly, you can
lose your culture, dilute the quality of what
you do, and you may not have the competency to do the work you want. So we want
to limit our growth so that it’s strategic and
preserves those qualities.
Hire people who fit. Ultimately, you’ve got to
hire good people, and you’ve got to
empower them, and you’ve got to trust
them. And if you’ve got the wrong people in
positions, you’ve got to move them out as
quickly as possible. Leaders who don’t do
those things are going to fail.
And then once they’re hired, assimilate
them into the core culture as quickly as
possible. We’ve had regional managers
who have been here a long time, who are
excellent ambassadors for the firm.
They travel from office to office helping
to maintain that culture. Before I became
CEO, one of my jobs was to oversee regional offices opening up. You are looking to
add people who want to be part of the
team. You’re looking to avoid prima donnas
and people who will conflict with the culture or people who will resent or resist centralized management.
Remember your humble beginnings. Leaders
who are successful don’t lose sight of who they are and how they got to be where they
are. Leaders who are successful are honest
and direct in communicating with superiors
at a younger age, with their peers as they
move up the ranks of an organization and
with their subordinates.
As a leader, because you say something
should get done doesn’t mean that it has
been done. So you need to follow up.
Leaders need to be honest and consistent
and follow up so people with whom they’re
working know that things will be completed.
Listen up. One of the skills that’s often overlooked among leaders is the ability to listen. Sometimes lawyers think their job is to
talk, when, in fact, it is to listen. There are
lots of ways to see when something is not
going well. You may see it financially with
reduced revenues, you may see it in
turnover, or you may see it in a greater frequency of client complaints.
Impose a team-first mentality. The difficulty of
managing lawyers is that they are trained to
be autonomous, so they tend not to
respond well to management.
We’ve been able to impose a general business discipline on the practice. We’re consistent about it. We have a number of tools
we utilize internally to make sure our
lawyers are practicing accordingly. At the
same time, we do provide them with a good amount of autonomy to make the
kind of decisions they need to make on
behalf of legal matters they are handling
for our clients.
Show employees the big picture. Lawyers are,
by design, trained to work as individuals or
work in small teams and not to see themselves as part of a team or bigger process. I
spend a lot of my time educating and persuading our lawyers that our best fortune
lies in working together as a large team.
Our lawyers believe that, but they need to
be reminded because the practice of law
constantly pulls them back into adversarial
teams on restricted projects for which confidentiality and secrecy are very important.
Trial lawyers who are great are great
because they’re able to block out other
kinds of distractions. Businesspeople are
great not because they can block out distractions but because they can see the big
picture. So I’m looking to make our lawyers
more business-oriented but, at the same
time, not to lose the skills that make them
effective as trial attorneys and as litigators.
I started my career as a high school
teacher, and I still see a lot of my job as education, like persuading our lawyers to go out
of their comfort zone and to see what we do
as a bigger piece of the business marketplace than lawyers traditionally have done.
Stay on top of changes. I’m constantly studying the marketplace looking at what law
firms are doing, looking at what our competitors are doing. We need to educate
lawyers about rapidity by which the market is changing. As lawyers better understand the marketplace, they’re better able
to service their clients.
(The marketplace) is changing quickly
because of the courts, because of technology, because of what the legislature is doing.
You have to be aware of what’s happening
in your market. At the same time, we have
a vision of what we want to be; I’m trying to
make sure we stay true to that vision.
HOW TO REACH: Marshall, Dennehey, Warner, Coleman &
Goggin, (215) 575-2600 or www.marshalldennehey.com