Consulting and Coaching

 Consulting has been around for generations. After all, it is what lawyers do when they act as a 'counselor' in the law. As the art and science of personal productivity moves forward, coaching has become a 'hot' idea for those who help you and your organization change for the better. Anybody who's anybody has a coach these days. Some consultants are also coaches, some not.

 A competent consultant and/or coach will never allow him or herself to become a distraction within your firm. They will not allow themselves to compete with firm management or administration. To the contrary, they bring to the table skills and abilities that make the firm's management and administration, as well as its practitioners more successful.

 Let's look at the similarities, the differences and whether either can improve your professional life or the life of your firm.

Consultants ...

• Are knowledge based.
• Have specific knowledge or experience beneficial to a lawyer or firm.
• Exercise discretion in applying that knowledge or experience to the specific situation of his or her individual or firm client.
• Need to understand the environmental and market circumstances of attorney or firm they are to benefit.

Coaches ...

• Are relationship based.
• Primary goal is to help you improve your habits.
•  Does not need to understand or even know the underlying personal firm practice development plan or the specific theory, purpose or benefit the coaching is to bring about.
• Need to understand the person or persons they are to assist and benefit.

 Both Coaches and Consultants...

• Benefit their clients by their perspective as well as specific skills.
  John Elway, quarterback for the Denver Broncos, is a gifted football player with great experience. He has several coaches. Specifically, in addition to the coach of the team, there is the offensive coordinator (or 'offensive game plan consultant') and the quarterback coach. This is not because John needs someone to tell him to throw the ball to the open receiver. It is because the coaches see and understand the flow of the game as well as what John is doing in a way he doesn't see. Moreover the coaches see the game and John performance in a way John himself can't see.

Facilitators

• A Facilitator is something of a 'group coach'. While coaching involves changing habits and habits are always personal to an individual, sometimes a firm needs a third person to keep a meeting on agenda or to level the playing field in terms of dominance in a meeting or planning session. Coaches are usually good at this because they have experience in dealing with the dogged tendency of people to stay with old habits regardless of cost or good intentions.

There are two types of consultants...

• Information Consultants.
  Information consultants are those that have specific expertise or experience in information gathering and analysis. Examples would include client research specialists who gather and analysis data on the effectiveness of your firm's client cross education programs or those who conduct third party market research to determine opportunities to provide legal services your competitors might be overlooking. Information consultants often have an ad hoc relationship with the firm, lasting from project creation to completion.
• Practice Development Consultants.
  Practice development consultants are those who help attorneys and law firms organize themselves and present themselves to the world of potential clients. Examples would include marketing consultants, consultants that help recruit and retain associates and lateral transfers and the perennial favorite, compensation consultants. Firms benefit most from long term relationships with their practice development consultants.

Practice and Tips

Coaches and consultants are like cab drivers. They want to take you where you want to go. If you don't know where that is, they're lost too. Some will, however, keep driving until they run out of gas or you run out of money.

 When you consider entering into either a consulting or coaching relationship, first consider...

• Your vision and mission. While a consultant may help you or your firm articulate your vision or mission, vision and mission are personal to you alone. Consulting and coaching can help achieve them, not create them.
• Your, and your firm's, prime directive. While a prime directive can be changed, it is never changed incidentally or accidentally.
• The relationships that will be effected. Your partners, your secretary, your clients will all feel the changes. Not only should you involve them where appropriate but you should solicit their cooperation and assistance as well.

More consulting and coaching relationships come to naught because the client isn't sure - or the firm can't agree - where it is going than for any other reason. An ethical consultant or coach will tell you this. But you must remember that they want to consult and coach, and they generally believe they will confer the benefit they promise.

With information consultants the benefit you will enjoy is directly related and proportional to the sharpness of your focus. Nebulous practice development plans produce nebulous research projects which produce really nebulous conclusions. You will refer to this as 'money for nothing'.

With practice development consultants, listening skills are more indicative of the benefit you will receive than their experience. Consultants, like physicians, need to analyze what is usually a complicated and complex situation very carefully before prescribing the medicine. You are better served by having your consultant carefully chose the right program from a library of a hundred options, than carelessly choose from a library of a thousand.

With coaches, listening skills are less important than experience and persistence. Coaching presumes that you have already decided on the direction you would like to go, the habits you want to develop and the habits you have to jettison. Normal human beings are phenomenally successful at developing barriers and resistance to change. Even when the change is as simple as putting aside your substantive work at 4:00 P.M. and returning your calls, the coach must be more like Vince Lombardi than Ann Landers.

Consultants benefit you and your firm early in the practice development process. If you are seeking ad hoc consulting, it will benefit you most sooner rather than later. In some instances, market and client research, for example, firms establish an ongoing long-term relationship with their consultants. Consider a retainer relationship that gives you access to the consultant's ongoing experience in the field. Quarterly or semi-annual meetings not only refresh the benefits of their assistance and updates you on their ongoing experience, but helps keep your firm tuned in to the reality that practice development is an ongoing process.

Caveat  A marketing consultant who thinks all lawyers are alike will produce marketing programs that will not effectively distinguish your firm from your competitors. A practice development consultant who has not had substantial experience in the profession will develop practice development consistent with his or her preconceived image of the profession. Remember that they are positioned as teachers, not students.

Caveat  A consultant or coach who doesn't first seek to understand your vision and mission is likely to substitute his or hers for yours.

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