by Ken Lopez
Founder/CEO
A2L Consulting

Anyone who puts together a team to represent a client in a high-stakes piece of litigation is engaging in an act of leadership. To be successful, such a litigation team needs to blend the skills of an outside set of trial lawyers from a law firm, large or small; in-house corporate counsel; the leadership of the client company, which will want to keep close tabs on high-stakes litigation; a wide variety of paralegals, assistants and other key nonlawyer personnel; and, in all probability, a trial consulting company such as A2L.

Today we are releasing the fourth edition of a new and free eBook on leadership for lawyers that can be downloaded here. I hope that it will be useful to legal industry leaders, whether running a trial team, a practice group, or an entire law firm.

Law firms and corporations both struggle to provide better leadership within their organizations. Comparatively, however, law firms are at a disadvantage because they don’t have a long and strong tradition of training their leaders. In law firms, leadership development is mostly trial and error. Most business schools don’t teach students how to run a law firm, whereas the science and art of being a corporate CEO have been studied endlessly.

For years, it seemed that law firms were lagging behind in business fundamentals. More often than not, their structure was loosely defined. Management was more of a suggestion than a dictate. And accountability was a new term for many. Conceptions of “power” within a firm, based on rainmaking or litigation successes, seemed to play the dominant role in who takes the lead in management responsibilities.

But now law firms are becoming more management-oriented as the economic landscape has changed.

Our leadership eBook is largely focused on litigation, as this is the focus of our own firm. The eBook includes interesting and timely articles such as “The CEO in Litigation: Problems, Solutions and Witness Preparation”; “When a Good Trial Team Goes Bad: The Psychology of Team Anxiety”; “In-House Counsel’s Hiring Methods for Litigation Counsel Are Surprising”; “How Valuable Is Your Time vs. Litigation Support’s Time?”; and “Nine Things That Outside Litigation Counsel Say About In-House Counsel.”

We, as a litigation consulting firm, struggle with issues quite similar to those of a law firm. Most of our leadership team, me included, are player-coaches. That is, none of us are full-time leaders. Instead, we must, like many in a law firm, balance our leadership responsibilities with the time we spend delivering for our clients. We hope that this eBook permits you to achieve a similar balance.

I hope this book is helpful to you. I would enjoy hearing from you and encourage you to leave a comment below (contact information is not published).