Amy Gardner: Law Firm Partner Turned Law Practice Development Expert

Strickland Bonner: So you're a lawyer, and your clients are squeezing you for lower fees. How do you put more cash in your pocket? We want to expose you to new ways of practicing law. Endless hours with no home life and a lease on an expensive office are so $1999. It's time to make a change for the better. Here to help you with that are your hosts Ron Bockstahler and Kirsten Mayfield. Welcome to the 1958 Lawyer Podcast. Hey, welcome to the show, the 1958 Lawyer. I am Ron Bockstahler, your co-host,

Kirsten Mayfield: and I am Kirsten Mayfield, and we have with us today Amy Gardner. Now, Amy starts off where a lot of our guests do. She's had a very varied work life in the past 20 years. However, she practiced law for just under a decade, worked as an associate, moved into partner at a mid-sized Chicago firm, and then she moved into the legal education sphere. And until March 2016 she was actually the dean of students at the University of Chicago Law School, where she focused on prepping students for a thing we talk about a lot on this billable hours based podcast, which is not being prepared for the real life of practicing law outside of the classroom. She focused on creating programs and initiatives to prep students for that actual reality. And in 2016 she moved out of that education role into a bit of a different one for, let's say, grown-up attorneys-people who have had their law school graduation and they're they're now running firms or working as partners at Apochromatik, where she's a consultant. And I hope I said that correctly. Thank you for joining us, Amy.

Amy Gardner: You did. You actually did say it correctly. And for those who are wondering, Apochromatik is actually a type of lens used in cameras or in telescopes. And the idea is that it eliminates distortions so that you can focus. And that's really what we do at Apochromatik. Is we help people get rid of the noise that can drown out what they're thinking and give them space to think through what they actually want from their career, and then we help them develop the tools to get there.

Kirsten Mayfield: That's something a lot of people need. Now you've got this is only 20 years, and I felt like when I was reading this, like you should be like 80 years old with all of the things you've done. It's so fun to see. I love when people have varied work lives. So why did you make the transitions you did? What what made you think? Hey, I don't want to be a partner anymore. I want to teach people about practicing law.

Amy Gardner: Sure. So I spent just about six years at Skadden in Chicago as a litigation associate, and I have to say I genuinely loved most things about being an associate at Skadden in Chicago. But I decided ultimately that wasn't where I wanted to continue my legal career because I wanted to be a partner at a law firm, and I didn't see myself being a partner at Skadden and being happy with that. So I I was smart in that I left Skadden while I still had lots of great experiences and feelings, and still lots of good friends from those days. Moved into a mid-sized firm, and I say a mid-sized firm, not to be you know secretive about it, but it was Ungaretti & Harris, which is now part of Nixon Peabody. So it, alas, no longer exists in its form where that it was in when I worked there. But when I after I made partner, a few months later, I did this a fellowship in Europe through the German Marshall Foundation, and what they do is every year in normal times they take a group of what they call emerging young leaders from the U.S. and you get to travel around Europe for four weeks, and you go to different cities and you you meet people who are in your field and then in other fields as well, and so I came back from this amazing transformational experience, and having met all these lawyers who were working at NATO, or they were war crimes tribunal judges in Sarajevo, just doing all of these really important things, and I came back to taking depositions and preparing for trial things that I had loved, and frankly, I thought I was pretty good at, and it just it wasn't enough anymore, and very coincidentally, about a week, actually maybe even less than a week after I got back from my fellowship, there was a new dean at my law school, and they were having a reception to go and meet him. And I mean, I was still jet lagged. I went to this reception and met him, and he was talking about how he wanted to transform the University of Chicago Law School and and make it keep the academic standards and the rigor that it's known for, but also help better prepare law students. And shortly thereafter, the dean of students announced that she was leaving, and some people encouraged me to apply for the job. And I kept saying, "You're crazy! I'm a law firm partner. Why would I want to go back to law school, and ultimately was persuaded that it was really a chance to better prepare law students for the things that I was seeing. Because when I graduated from law school, I felt like I could write a brief and I could do those things, but I didn't know what a certificate of service was. I didn't really understand how to talk to a client. All of those types of things that really determine whether you're going to succeed or not. There's a partner at Riley Safer, actually Bob Riley, who was really supportive of my efforts at the law school, and he often says that being smart is necessary but not sufficient to being a good lawyer, and that you have to have all these other skills, and so becoming the dean of students, I thought, was really a way to help students develop these skills. And I was able to do that because the the dean who hired me, who's now no longer at the law school, he's now the president of the University of Oregon. Mike really allowed me to have the space to try to better prepare students in a way I thought that they should be prepared based on what I had seen in the practice.

Ron Bockstahler: All right, let's take that and jump into our first topic of engagement. Why does it matter, and how do you do it today?

Amy Gardner: Sure. So I think about engagement in terms of how you get your team members engaged, and that's something that we're seeing now is even more difficult because it used to be that if you weren't feeling super engaged at work, you might have a really motivating conversation with somebody over the water cooler, and you'd remember why you liked where you worked. Now that we've lost all those informal interactions, or at least most of them, we're seeing more and more that employees are much less engaged at work, and that the research backs that up. But that's also what we're seeing in our work at Appohromatic. So we often work with teams of lawyers and all the other people who help make a law firm work. And what we're finding is that people are less and less engaged because they're working more now that there's no commute. I saw one study the other day that the average American worker is working more than three hours more than they were a year ago, and so you know people are working more. They are having less informal interaction with the people that they work with, and the reason that they probably picked that law firm or that organization. And the farther people get from feeling engaged with the mission and the point of what they're doing, the more likely they are to leave, and beyond that, we we see that unengaged employees have higher levels of absenteeism. They are less productive. I saw a number that one consulting firm did a study that said that one unengaged worker can cost an employer $3,400 a year for every $10,000 of their salary.

Kirsten Mayfield: Wow!

Amy Gardner: So you're looking at it that employers are basically losing a third of the salary that they're paying in terms of time that's lost. So we're seeing more and more of that, and so that's part of why we're we're doing a lot more work with law firms and other organizations to help teams get reengaged with each other and why they're there.

Kirsten Mayfield: So, what are some of the initiatives you're you're putting in place for that? Because I'm seeing a lot of people do like videos and Zooms and and that kind of thing, but it's not the same as a normal real life conversation. And like Ron and I will like talk over each other, and in real life that can be like really fun banter and it can be enjoyable, but on a Zoom, it's like he's cut, and I can't actually hear him. Usually, I can hear him talking while I talk over him. You're losing that like element of of reality, and it just feels like you can't even do like those normal quirky things you might do. So, what are you guys? What are some examples I might use them?

Amy Gardner: Yeah, sure. So, you know, one thing I think a lot of people a few months ago thought it would be really helpful to have Zoom happy hours and informal things, and that those can be helpful. I want to be clear that it's not that those are a bad idea necessarily, but you know, we had one law firm partner told us not too long ago, my team needs more than just another happy hour, right? And so it really is about making sure that teams have the time to spend together, and that it's building relationships rather than just getting things done. I mean, one of the things that we saw at the beginning of all this was people said, "Okay, now that we have so many employees who are trying to help their kids with e-learning during the day, we are going to streamline. So we're going to get rid of one-on-ones. We're going to shorten team meetings, those sorts of things. And it came from a really good place most of the time, I think. But the reality is, is that getting rid of those those check-ins and things like that, those kind of temperature checks we used to have with team members, does not help people feel more engaged and doesn't help people work better together. They might appreciate saving the 15 minutes, but it's going to hurt the team in the long run and hurt the dynamic. So doing things like making sure that you have your team together, just doing a quick check-in. Maybe it's every morning. Maybe it's the end of the day. I mean, 15 minutes can be great for a team to just say, "What are what was one thing that went well today? What's one challenge you're having that you need help with for tomorrow? Just something like that. And I was on a discussion not too long ago with Patrick Lencioni, who wrote the book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, and he has a team, and they've been struggling with the same issues. And his recommendation was that every team needs at least 10 minutes a day together, because. Because otherwise, you you grow apart and you lose that engagement, and and it shows itself in in more inefficiencies because you no longer know who to call on and things like that. Don't have the relationships to to move on when people talk over you on a Zoom because you don't understand. Oh, you know it's just the way that the Zoom is working, right? We start to fill in the blanks and assume the worst about our coworkers if we don't have more time with them. So one piece is making sure that everybody's together every day for a few minutes. Another piece is checking in with people as individuals and giving people grace and understanding that this is difficult. I talked with somebody who's in house not too long ago. We were working with this in house team at a Fortune 250 company, and she said, "I feel like we're giving grace to all the people with kids, but those of us who just want to have a life outside work and don't have small kids are not getting that extended to us. Interesting. And so, I think it's really important for employers and team leaders to be checking in and how is this going for you, and not just assuming that oh well they don't have small kids so it must be great for them to not have a commute right because this is a different different difficult time for everybody in some way

Kirsten Mayfield: yeah I think a lot of people assume that everyone like wants to work from home too and like so if you're working from home and you don't have kids like oh you're just happy but like I hated working from home I have to walk through the kitchen, and it reminds me of work every day. Like if I want to just get a cup of tea after work, but I could feel like you know other people in like the world were like, "Oh, I wish I was able to work from home. I'm like, "It's not that great, guys. It really isn't. Like, please don't think it's so fantastic, especially in a small apartment.

Amy Gardner: Right? Yeah, I think I I talked to someone the other day who said if they were out in a house, they're they're an associate at a law firm in New York City. They said if they were at a big house in the Hamptons, they might love this time. But instead, they're in a Brooklyn apartment with a roommate.

Kirsten Mayfield: Yeah,

Amy Gardner: and it is, you know, he's also working from

Kirsten Mayfield: home.

Amy Gardner: Right. Right. Right. So they're not having a great experience with you know more time outdoors and things like that the way that some people might have. So I think checking in with people and understanding you know okay I have an impression of what it might be like for you, but tell me what is it really like for you and how is your family doing and things like that. And again, that's something that we would have done more naturally. How was your weekend? Right, you have that conversation in the kitchen, and now you've got to make sure that you're having those sorts of conversations. We also do more substantive workshops, right? It's not about just hey, let's talk about how everybody's weekend was week circles, right? Right, right. So we we work with teams on exercises to help them get realigned. I mean, we as just one example, Leslie Cohen of Hershman Cohen here in Chicago. She recently wrote an article for the Coalition of Women's Initiatives in Law describing how Apochromatik helped her firm go from a group of individuals to a team, and we're doing that with lots of other teams of lawyers. It's about getting people refocused on the mission and the point of what they're doing, and rebuilding trust. Because in a lot of cases, it's not that people distrust each other; it's just there's no trust there right now. And so, how do you build that trust? How do you improve communication? You're working on all of those things together, and I think it's in some ways it's a time that's ripe for people to work on it because if you wait until everybody's back in the office, there's going to be I think a lot of pressure to then get back to in-person coffees and get back to all the clients that you haven't seen in person and that kind of stuff and and so in some ways this is a really important time to do that and then the flip side is if you wait, you may have lost some of your star people.

Ron Bockstahler: Well, you also got to talk about how many people are going to come back to the office,

Amy Gardner: right?

Ron Bockstahler: I just don't see it coming back to going back to what it was before. You know, it might sound great when you're talking about we got to have teams, but at the end of the day, I think there's got to be ways to measure, have engagement, and measure productivity without physically being there, and in many ways, people talk about how they used to measure productivity, and it really wasn't scientific. But today, you know, if we start laying out goals, which I really want to talk about next, let's talk about goals because if you want to measure productivity and hold people accountable and have teams have goals, understand where you want to go, and then measure those things. So, give us some ideas of what you're teaching or what you're reviewing with lawyers about setting goals. What smart goals are, you know, how should they be doing that to actually enhance their team engagement?

Amy Gardner: Sure, I think one thing that I see a lot with lawyers is we we set goals based on you know number of hours billed or amount of revenue brought in, and those can be reasonable things to set goals around. But if you want a career that's about more than just how many hours you could keep your rear end in the chair so you could build them, then you need to have goals around other things. So, I often advise people to focus on what they can control. So you can control if you. Reach out to five potential clients a week. You can control whether you have two networking coffees every week, and so keeping, especially now when so much feels like it's out of our control, keeping your eye on goals that you actually have control over can help you feel much more in control of your career. I think another thing that's really important is to use smarter goals. So you want to make sure that your goals are specific and measurable, achievable. Those pieces and time key. Those pieces of smart goals make perfect sense. But Michael Hyatt suggests, and I agree with him, that you should have smarter goals. So the r1, of those Rs should be for risky. That a goal should be challenging, right? Because, like for example, I set a goal to do two coffees a week for the fourth quarter, and that which would be 26 coffees, and I did 44 So I I didn't have the same goal again this quarter of doing two coffees a week because I know that that I can do that, and that's not challenging at this point. You also want to have the E of smarter for exciting. It should be something that's appealing to you. So, if the thought of cold calling clients, for example, is torture, or potential clients is torture to you, don't set that as a goal. Instead, think about how you can do something that is exciting to you. And then the last piece is that it has to be relevant for the season of your life that you're in. So if you have a bunch of small kids that you're trying to do e-learning with and don't have childcare support during the day, maybe coffees are not the way to go because it would just be one more 30 minutes when you had to be on Zoom and hope that the din in the background was under control. Versus you know maybe then it becomes you're going to do an informal happy hour for clients and potential clients once a month on Zoom because you can manage for that two hour period. So think through how your goals really fit in with your life and and I see lawyers all the time will say things like I want to bring in more business. Well, that's a great aspiration, but that's not really a goal, right? You got to have measurements so that you know whether or not you've achieved your goal.

Kirsten Mayfield: So, do you guys have any kind of systems that you use? Because this is reminding me a lot of what we use at Amata, and it's the OKR system, where it's like objective key result, and you can take something like you just spoke of, that's very abstract, and you can make it smaller. Like you were talking about earlier, you take okay, I want to, I want to bring in more business, and then underneath that is I want to my revenue to hit this number, and then underneath that, it's I want to talk to two clients so we get coffee, and so you can trace yourself, and you can say, hey, is that are those two coffees a week actually doing anything, or am I, you know, just shooting the shit and not really getting much done? Like you can really evaluate those micro steps and how they build into the larger, more abstract concepts. So, do you guys implement any sort of system, or do you guys just do like a general coaching, or do you have like options?

Amy Gardner: So when we're working people on goal achievement, so maybe I should back up a little. So we work with teams, and then we'll work with individual lawyers. Personally, I work just with lawyers. My partner works with lawyers and other professionals. But when we are working with a lawyer on career development or career transition, sometimes the goal is to change careers, but other times, base almost always there are other goals as well that we end up working with on them. It's not just about getting to to the next job or the next career. And then with career development clients, we're always working on goals with them for where they want their career to go. We do also have some standalone offerings. So, for example, at the beginning of the year, we had Achievement 21 Gola Palooza, and that will be coming back throughout the year. Actually, where we help people write their goals for the quarter, because what we found is you're better off focusing on the quarter rather than the year, because otherwise the year can just you tell yourself you're going to do it later. But we advise people to check in with their goals, reminding themselves of what their goals are daily, and then every week re-evaluating: Did I do anything on my goal? How am I coming on it? And then monthly, and then quarterly again to really dig into whether or not you're making progress. And as part of that quarterly review, we advise people to review: Did did I do it? Did it work? You know, was it possible? Did it actually get me where I want to go? And you know, if I achieved it, you need to celebrate that you've achieved that goal, and then you consider again, reflect: is is that something that you want to continue doing the next quarter? Do you want to change it? Is it going to be replaced with a different goal? What do you want to do? Because it's not just enough to write down goals and work towards them. You have to stop and think. Okay, how's this working out for me?

Kirsten Mayfield: So it sounds like you could kind of hit two two birds with one stone here. You're talking about engagement, checking in with people, having that weekly meeting could also be, hey, how are your goals doing? Did you do anything?

Amy Gardner: Yeah, I think you can really establish yourself as a leader who cares about your team if you get the team talking about their goals, not just at work but in their personal lives. So if people tell you, "Oh, I have a goal to exercise more, for example, if they're willing to share that with you, then you can. It gives you the chance to encourage them and support them in that, and it just brings can bring the team closer together. I think a lot of times we get so focused on work. I think especially for lawyers, because it's for many of us going to law is not something that we going into law was not something that we just decided to do. It's something that we wanted for for a long time. I mean, I remember in second grade I decided I wanted to be a lawyer, and so when you have something like that, I think many of us can become so wrapped up in our work that we don't always remember that there's a should be more than just our jobs, and so by encouraging people to talk about that, I think it can be helpful.

Ron Bockstahler: So you know, a lot of lawyers listening are going to talk about, gee, I have goals and they cause stress. I mean, we're talking about high levels of substance abuse that are going on in the legal community, and I would imagine it's probably elevated during this pandemic. As I said on a lot of calls, and people talk about how much they've been drinking, and so let's talk about goals. Can't just be focused around billable hours or a financial target. Can we kind of talk to the other things that we need to be setting goals on.

Amy Gardner: Sure. So we often, when we're starting off with clients, we have them go through and rank different areas of their life. So things like, how often are you having fun, on a scale of one to 10? Do you have a faith community? Is that something that's important to you or that you want to have? How are your relationships with your family of origin? How are your relationships with your friends, you know, going through and looking at these other aspects. How do you feel like your health and fitness are? And decide. Sometimes people feel like all that's good and they don't want to focus on it. But I have a client, for example, who felt like, especially recently, she's been drifting away from friends because it's so much harder to to have those sort of interactions. You can't just text somebody and say, "Hey, headed to Starbucks. You want to meet up? And so, what she's doing is every week she is intentionally scheduling a Zoom catch-up with at least one friend, and that's one of her goals for this quarter. And you know, she's a partner at a law firm who, in many ways, on paper has it all together and everything is going great, but to her that was something that was really lacking was those sorts of that time with her friends. So we always encourage clients to look beyond the career piece, even though they come to us to work on the career piece, to make sure that they're building a life that is actually worth working for.

Ron Bockstahler: So what I'm hearing is to be a great lawyer, you need to have a balanced life.

Amy Gardner: Absolutely, absolutely. You know, I one of my mentors at Sken, she used to say that lawyers should read People magazine because then that way you could relate to juries and you could relate to clients and everybody that you'd interact with. And I mean, I worked with plenty of lawyers my time who would spend lunchtime reading Seventh Circuit opinions because it can improve your writing to read Seventh Circuit opinions, but and I not to knock it because I do think that that's probably great advice if you're a litigator, but you also probably should be reading People magazine or something that is fun for you to make sure that you're not just so wrapped up in law all the time that that's all that's left of you at the end of the day.

Kirsten Mayfield: Yeah, so if you don't know who like Timothy Chalamet is, like you should open Daily Mail,

Amy Gardner: right? Right, but make that a goal to to read some of those sorts of things.

Ron Bockstahler: So let's let's kind of change directions a little bit and let's talk about gender and ethnicity, I guess race in the legal legal industry, and generally the pay gap, and and why do we have such a pay gap, and it doesn't seem to be moving much, and what can be done to change that?

Amy Gardner: This is a topic that I could probably talk about for hours, and I I think one thing that I just want to make super clear is I think that there's different pieces of this, right? There's the constructs and the you know the people who are putting together the the salary bands who might be focusing more on education than experience in fields where women are less likely to have the education. You know there are there are systemic things that we may or may not be able to do anything about in this podcast, but one thing that we can do, I think that women have the power to to address is to attempt to negotiate their salary. There's a number that as many as 20% of women openly say they don't even attempt to negotiate their salary, and so we we can do here is say try to negotiate your salary, and studies actually show that if women are told oh no you're expected to negotiate your salary they will. So for any women who are listening, attempt to negotiate your salary. Another piece of that is that for people who are making offers, who particularly for men who are listening, if. If you have a range, offer candidates the top number you're allowed to offer, and be done. So knowing that women are less likely to negotiate, you know then that if you offer men and women the same number, men are going to more likely to negotiate, and you're probably going to go to the top of the band. So just say, I don't have any authority to negotiate salary. Here's the top number, and call it a day, and then that way it can help address some of that gender gap. But and two for men, encourage women to negotiate the number that I always think of. It says that if you do not negotiate the starting salary of your first full time job, you'll lose about $7,000 the first year of your career, and what that translates to over 40-five career year career is between 650,000 and $1 million So this really, it's not a matter of that $7,000 right? It's the the fact that your cost of living increase is going to be lower because you didn't get that $7,000 and your 401k contribution is going to be lower. Your bonus is going to be lower, and then every year after that, it's just going to build on yourself. So if you have a 23 year old who is considering their first job offer and says, "Oh no, I think it's a fair offer. I'll just take it. Tell your kid or tell your mentee, whoever it is, no, you're expected to negotiate and negotiate because otherwise they'll come out so much farther behind.

Ron Bockstahler: So a rule of thumb: How many times should they go back? I mean, minimum one, but maybe twice. I mean, you can kind of push the envelope, right?

Amy Gardner: I think it's really tricky because situations vary. You you definitely don't want to be offensive. You don't want to express anything other than that you are appreciative of receiving the offer, and you want to proceed as though it's a conversation between two parties that want to come to the same outcome. Right? You both want to end up with you working at that law firm or you working at that organization, and so you have to read the room and see how things are going, but in general, if you put out a counter and they immediately accept it, then you probably know that you you may have had a little bit more leeway. But the goal is really to make sure that you have a salary and compensation package that you feel comfortable with, and it's going to be fair to everybody. So sometimes that means it's one discussion. Sometimes it means it's a couple of discussions. You don't want the outcome to be that you start it feeling put upon or feeling like they didn't, they don't appreciate you and don't really want you. And certainly the employer doesn't want you starting having negative feelings towards them, and you don't want to start a new job being the one who is difficult. So you want to make sure that as you're negotiating compensation, any conversations in the course of your job search or negotiation, that you're always professional and positive and behave in a way that you can be proud of and will make them want to work with you.

Kirsten Mayfield: So you coach people through their entirety of their career. So the negotiation is the first start. Where are you seeing people approaching you for the career change, like you were speaking of earlier, especially with minority and women? What is causing them to leave, and what are you doing, or what are they hoping for that could stem that kind of tide?

Amy Gardner: One thing that I think it is really important for employers to know is how much that the people who work for them really want feedback and they want mentoring, and I see this a lot, particularly with people who are early in their careers. They feel like the maybe the firm will teach them how to write a brief, but that doesn't mean that they feel like they're always getting as much guidance as they want in terms of how to present arguments and things like that. And we often are hired by law firms where partners say these more junior associates want more mentoring and guidance than I could possibly give them, and so they'll bring us in to work with them. I think that knowing and understanding that, particularly women, I think tend to want more guidance and mentoring and feedback, is really important for employers to know. And I think too, another thing that we often see with our clients who are diverse in whatever way is that it's not enough to have a formal program and say, "All right, the LGBT group is going to meet once a month. It's not enough to say, "All right, the you know the attorneys of color meeting is going to be on this day. People have to know that they are valued, and they have to be valued. It's not enough to give everybody a mug for the affinity group and expect people to take on more burden of being on every panel advertising for your firm or organization. You have to give people opportunities. I mean, one one resource that I think is tremendous is the book Authentic Diversity by Michelle Silverthorne, who's a Chicago lawyer, and that book walks through very. Clearly, the things that employers can be doing, and some of them are so basic. I think we think, "Oh, well, you know, I I know this stuff, right? But you have to make sure that that all of your attorneys know that they're valued, and all of your attorneys are getting equal opportunities. And that I think is something that, especially now when everybody's just trying to keep their heads above water is something that can really be missed.

Ron Bockstahler: So let's kind of let's go. A lot of people getting laid off these time this time of year last this past year, I suppose, in the legal industry. Can and you guys have a program? And Kirsten just said something very important: having a coach for your career for your whole career, like from it's kind of like having a sports agent, right? You come out of college, you get a professional gig as a football player. You got a sports agent up and through your whole career, and I think the same thing should happen with a coach. You are going to have a coach from beginning of your career to the time you are ready to retire to help you walk through that career. And I think we forget that, or we don't think about it in the in the right manner. And one of the things you talk about is you break down a career plan versus a career map. Can you kind of talk to the benefits of having a career map?

Amy Gardner: Sure. I think a lot of lawyers graduate from law school thinking I'm going to go to this firm and I'm going to make partner and I'm going to do this thing, and then all of a sudden they discover you know their fourth year or their third year. Oh wait, maybe that isn't what I want to do. Or they learn more about all the wonderful things you can do with a law degree, and all of a sudden it can be really overwhelming. And so I think that having a career plan to me, and I think most people means I'm going to do this for four years, and I'm going to do this thing, and I'm going to do this thing, and I'm going to do that thing. And the reality is, so much of it is out of your control that you're just setting yourself up, I think, for failure and and missing other opportunities that could be great for you. So I think of it as having a career map in terms of understanding the type of work that you want to be doing and that you can do that work in different settings. I mean, clients often tell me I love solving problems. Well, you can solve people's problems in lots of different settings, right? And focusing on a toolbox of skills and things that you need to learn to do in order to be able to get to where you you want to go to me is more empowering and more helpful than focusing on oh by my seventh year I better have made partner because if you end up getting laid off your second year, that may or may not happen, and if you end up deciding, oh wow, being a corporate restructuring partner is not where I want my career to go. I actually want to go into public interest. You have to completely recalibrate. But by focusing on a career map, those changes in direction end up just being part of a part of a larger journey rather than feeling like oh my gosh I have to start over.

Ron Bockstahler: That's a great point. Where do we want to end up in our life, and what's going to make us happy? That's got to be the top questions students before they go into law school got to be asking themselves and continually ask themselves. You know, I look at my careers in 20 year segments. Actually, my whole life in 20-year segments because every 20 years, I'm thinking different. I want to do something different. My goals are different, and I think that's important to keep in mind.

Amy Gardner: Yeah, you know, I I used to meet with every law student who decided they wanted to take a leave of absence or drop out of law school, and I did that not to try to talk them into staying, but just to have a better understanding of, you know, what was going on, and so often I would ask them, "Why did you decide to come to law school? And the people who were taking leave of absence were more likely to be the people who they came to law school because they didn't know what else to do, or they came to law school because mom or dad told them what to do, and that doesn't mean that people who went to law school without any particular desire can't have great careers in law, but I think it's important to think through what is it you really want and and how can you use that law degree to help you get there rather than just doing what somebody else may think is the right thing for you to do.

Kirsten Mayfield: It's funny to talk about because in law, particularly, there's such a generational thing. And you know, my parents both went to government work, and while I love the stability of government work, I'm working at a corporation. So, you know, most people are not doing what their parents did. But when it comes to lawyers, a lot of them aren't doing what their parents did, and their parents were lawyers, and their grandparents are lawyers. So, how does that all kind of reckon together? If if generational attorneys is a thing, but also achieving your coming up with your own dreams and goals is a thing. Like, why does it end up so?

Amy Gardner: I think this also gets into the question of diversity, right? If you look at who the lawyers were 20 years ago, who the lawyers are today, if you assume that a certain percentage of kids who have parents who are lawyers are going to follow in their parents' footsteps, I think it's important to keep in mind in terms of what we want the legal profession to look like. Going down the road, and I think part of it is because we view law as a calling, and I don't mean that to knock other professions, but I do think there's something about law that, you know, it's in TV shows, and you go to school an extra three years, and we let kids basically practice being lawyers in mock trial competitions in high school, and I think there's just something different about law, and sometimes the people who are drawn to it.

Ron Bockstahler: So let's kind of we'll kind of finish up with our final question: Is that what? What's one thing you would like to see change in the business of law going forward?

Amy Gardner: So in terms of what I'd like to see change in the business of law, I think one thing is that lawyers have to get past the idea that we have to go it alone. Just like as you said, Ron, you know, like working out with a trainer to help you get stronger faster. If you're working with a coach, whether that's one-on-one or whether that's through our small group attorney masterminds, or whether it's you bring in a coach to work with your team, you will go faster, farther, and law can be a difficult profession with a lot of pressure and a lot of stress. And having someone who is helping you with whether it's your your career or your team can take some of that away. And I think we have to remember too that our time is incredibly valuable as lawyers, and so sure you could sit around and read a bunch of books on how to get your team to work together better. You could start reading the Harvard Business Review every morning before breakfast. Right there, there are ways that you can address these issues on your own. You could start reading lots of career books, but when you can work with somebody who, personally, I spent hundreds of hours getting my certification in team and leadership coaching. I spent hundreds of other hours getting a different certification in coaching. You can bring in somebody who already knows how to do it, and I think if we could demystify that and make it more known that that is an option, it would help the legal profession. I have a lot of clients who tell me that they were client just told me the other day a managing partner at his firm said you know maybe we should bring in your coach to work with all the junior associates and he said she's my secret weapon I don't want to do that so I think if we could help lawyers understand that many of the the corporate clients for sure are working with coaches and many of their colleagues are working with coaches, and it's something that could really help them. I think that that would help the legal profession as a whole, and we'd spend lawyers would spend less time spinning their wheels.

Ron Bockstahler: Oh, so true. You spend so much money to get a law degree to get to where you're at, and then you don't continue that education through a coach throughout your career. It just seems it's kind of crazy. So, Amy, thanks for being with us today. It's been great getting some insight from you. We enjoyed that. Best way people can reach you?

Amy Gardner: Sure. So you can connect with me on LinkedIn, and I do want to note too. I'm happy to do a complimentary legal career clarity call with anybody who listens to this podcast. I'm happy to hop on Zoom with you for 30 minutes, talk through where your legal career is, and what resources I can recommend that might be able to help you. So, if people are interested in that, they can just go to aposignup.com/lc3. So, it's aposignup.com/lc3 to schedule a complimentary 30-minute call with me and talk about their legal career.

Ron Bockstahler: So, we've been with Amy Gardner, Apochromatik. That's A P O C H R O M A T I k.com Apochromatik.com You can reach your [email protected] That's email address. Amy, it's been great talking to you. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for joining the 1958 Lawyer today. It's been great listening to you, and we'll talk to everyone next week.

Strickland Bonner: Thanks for listening to the 1958 Lawyer Podcast. If you like the show, tell a friend, and please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you'd like to hear more about Ron, Kirsten, or Amata, go to amataoffices.com All the links are also available in show notes.