In this episode of On Record PR, Gina Rubel goes on record with Dena Lefkowitz, CEO of Achievement by Design, LLC. Dena is a professional coach and the author of Winning in Your Own Court: 10 Laws for a Successful Career Without Burning Out or Selling Out published by the American Bar Association. Her company is a leading executive coaching firm focused on helping lawyers find career direction and partnering with law firms to help their underperformers develop into rainmakers. She helps lawyers develop business, curate their careers, navigate a tough profession that doesn’t come with a roadmap, and define success on their own terms.
Gina: It is so great to have you here and to catch up. We’ve known each other a long time, and in our pre-recording you reminded me that it was Cole Silver, who had us both come in and speak at the law firm where he was working. So a good big giant shout out to him now that he’s retired.
In your book, Winning in Your Own Court, your first bit of advice to lawyers is for them to “assess the situation” and “take stock.” Why is this so important?
Well, a lot of us go to law school without having any idea of what the practice of law is about. In fact, we get encouraged to go to law school because we exhibit certain traits, like being articulate and intelligent, that actually have very little to do with the day-to-day practice of law.
You have all these earnest, intelligent, articulate young people signing up for law school, then we enter the profession, and it’s not about being smart and articulate. It’s about making money. If you go into private practice, it’s about making money, billing time, and getting clients.
That could be a shock to the system for people who thought that they were going to graduate and have a more academic approach to their career where they are going to be writing, arguing, and presenting. Instead, they’re grinding at their desk every single day.
Probably none of them ever spent a day in a law firm, ever had an informational interview with a lawyer, and probably never collected any data about what being a lawyer is like.
We throw a dart at what we think is a prestigious and high-paying profession, and we sign up for it without knowing anything about it.
That’s why at about five years out, I was entirely miserable because I didn’t know myself. I didn’t pick something that my skills, talents, and inherent interests would lead me to. I became a litigator.
I don’t even like sending food back in restaurants. Why did I think I would be a good litigator? I actually was good at it, but I was miserable because every day I was basically outside of my values, what’s important to me, and what I care about and like doing.
“Assess the situation” is about figuring out who you are, what’s important, what matters to you, what lights you up, and what puts you in flow where you lose track of time.
If I had known some of those things about myself, I may not have gone to law school, or I might have entered a different kind of law, understanding more about my personality.
Assessing the situation has to do with figuring out who you are and then comparing it to where you are. Do those values align with the place where you’re working, with being a lawyer, and with practicing? A lot of times there’s a complete misalignment there.
I remember talking to a labor and employment lawyer at one of the big firms. He was very unhappy in his work, and I did the Hogan Personality Inventory assessment on him. He came out 100% altruistic, which means more than anything, he cares about making the world a better place, helping the less fortunate, and doing things that matter. Here he is, working as a labor and employment lawyer at a big firm, pretty much not helping the little guy. Doing the opposite.
Every day he’s in misalignment with the things that he really cares about, and it gets harder to do year after year when you’re in an area of law that just doesn’t resonate with you.
Assess the situation yourself, the situation you’re in, and what work environment might be a better fit for somebody with your personality type and with your values.
Gina Rubel: I think one of the things that have always drawn me to your story is that I too was one of those people who were miserable in the practice of law, but I loved the law and I love the industry. I believe that neither of us has regrets about going to law school because it brought us to where we are today.
One of the things I like to tell our listeners is there’s so much more you can do with a law degree. I too was practicing law and litigating. While my family might disagree with you, I do not like to argue, even though I’m Italian, and I’m from South Philly. Everybody says that I have that trait, but I don’t. In fact, I found the dance between the two parties incredibly frustrating.
Over the last 20 years, there are so many more career paths one can take. I love that idea about assessing the situation. I certainly did many years ago and was lucky enough to be pushed into becoming an entrepreneur. The reason is I was essentially put on probation at work because I missed four days when my daughter was in an oxygen tent because she had RSV. That set mama bear over the edge, as you can imagine.
In Chapter 4, you tell readers to curate their careers. What do you mean by that, and how can public relations play a role?
Public relations plays a big role because we should always be informing our network of the things that we’re doing in our career. A lot of times people don’t even bother building a network until they’re looking for a new job. I can’t tell you how many calls I get from practicing lawyers who want to leave their current job or leave the law altogether. I look at their LinkedIn profile before the call and I just think, “Oh my God,” because they haven’t done anything to have any demonstrable network.
What I mean by curate your career is when I was three years out of law school and miserable doing litigation, I started sending out job applications because I had no idea why I was unhappy. I thought it might be the firm, or I thought it might be litigation. I thought it might be a combination of things, but I was still stumbling along, not knowing myself well.
I just started applying for jobs that looked good to me. Of course, I didn’t get any interviews for those jobs because I didn’t understand how to position myself for a career pivot or how to speak the language of recruiters and job applications.
I had this flight tendency where if I didn’t like a job, I just flew to the next one, usually doing the same thing, and I thought it would be better somehow.
When I say curate your career, I mean thinking of it as an art collection. The next job that you take might not be a linear move to the next opportunity that you’re looking for. It might even be a step back.
When I realized how miserable I was doing litigation, I decided to take a job at the School District of Philadelphia. It was a pay cut for me, and I worried that it represented a dip in status, but it ended up being the beginning of a fantastic career in public service where I found the things that I liked.
I was more about recognition than money, for example, so the chance to argue before the Commonwealth Court, the Supreme Court, to be quoted in the paper, to testify before Senate – those things were exciting to me. The fact that I wasn’t making millions of dollars didn’t matter at all.
Curating a career means thinking not just about the next step, an immediate solution to your current misery. It means thinking further down the line about what you might ultimately like to do, and then we figure out a path to get there.
It might mean taking a step back, a step sideways, taking a course, or increasing your knowledge base, but curating your career means thinking about it in the big picture, not just the next job or the current job that you’re so unhappy in or that isn’t doing it for you in some way.
Maybe you’re not making as much money as you’d like to, maybe you haven’t been promoted to partner. All of these things can be figured out.
Gina Rubel: I listened to a previous podcast that you were interviewed on, and I found it interesting because you talked about how you have to write your resume or your LinkedIn profile in a way that speaks to the skills that others are looking for, and with integrity, of course. I say that to lawyers all the time, even in their content, their “About” profile on a PR piece, an article about the author, or their LinkedIn bio. It needs to speak to why it matters, not just, “Oh, look at me, I went to this law school and I did this and I did that,” and the skills in particular.
Dena Lefkowitz: Every year in my business, I try to add some piece that will benefit my clients, benefit myself, benefit my business, and do something to up-level. One year I took the Hogan Personality Inventory course and got certified in that. One year I did a mindfulness-based stress reduction course, and that helped me and my clients.
Curation also has to do with constantly evolving yourself, your skills, and your interests.
There’s a book called Range that compares the career of Tiger Woods and Roger Federer, and how Tiger Woods from an early age focused on tennis, and Roger Federer did a lot of other things. We have this mindset in our country that unless you start doing something at age four, you’re never going to be successful at it. This book talks about how people who have wide-ranging knowledge base experience have done more things, and are actually better prepared for the modern world.
Recently, we saw a lawyer lose his job because he texted an associate, saying, and I quote, “What you did, collecting a salary from the firm while sitting on your ass except to find time to interview for a new job, says everything one needs to know about your character.” What are your thoughts about this public relations debacle, and does it play a role in why so many women are leaving the law?
Well, there’s no doubt in my mind that this factors into why women leave the law.
First of all, I want to look at some of the teachable lessons that there are in the text that this guy sent. He was suspicious that she was interviewing for another job. Interviewing for other jobs is part of life in the business world. I’ve been a supervisor of lawyers. I’ve suspected that lawyers who were working for me were looking for other jobs. That is just not something that is appropriate to take personally or to take any kind of action against because people are allowed to move about the cabin, and it’s not grounds for dismissal if somebody interviews for another job.
Right there, the tenor of the text was off to me and might suggest something about the culture of the firm.
Then he says that the other lawyer was too nice to take action against this person for looking for another job, which is what he thought should happen. He thought she should be fired for the very fact she was looking for another job, but the lawyer in charge was too nice and didn’t do that.
That again gives us a glimpse into the culture, an organization that pats itself on the back for not firing a pregnant woman.
Then the use of the word “collecting” a salary. Collecting is a word that people use when they talk about welfare, social security, and other entitlements that people get. Salaries aren’t collected, they’re earned. Her maternity leave was apparently some benefit that she earned as a result of being employed as a lawyer at that firm.
The rest of it is just too personally attacking to comment on, but the attitude about maternity leave that’s expressed in this email, that it constitutes sitting around and not being actively involved with the bonding, nurturing, feeding, caring for, and attending to a brand new human being, is shocking in its indifference to what the actual experience of childbirth is like.
That text has led to a slew of posts on LinkedIn with the hashtag #BreakMomBias or alternately, the hashtag #SittingOnMy, where women are posting pictures of themselves while on maternity leave, along with detailed explanations of what they were actually doing while on maternity leave, how hard it was. Women told stories of terrible complications, but most agreed that even in the most simple, straightforward childbirth, there is a recovery and bonding time that mothers need with their babies that this text ignored.
Actually, Gina, you did an interview with Gretchen Carlson on December 8th, the day the Speak Out Act was enacted, and she said something that meant so much to me. She said, “The more disenfranchised you are in society to begin with, the higher the likelihood you’ll be silenced at work.”
Listen to Episode 113: Speak Out Act Signed Into Law – Hear How Gretchen Carlson Helps Women Lift Their Voices
We’re lawyers. We’re not disenfranchised, certainly, but in the world of law firms, we are.
I worked at a law firm years ago that decided to do a new policy because someone joined our firm that was in the military reserves, so suddenly we had a military reserve leave policy in our firm. We had no maternity leave policy in our firm. I asked one of the partners about it, and his response was, “Maternity leave – you get pregnant, you leave.”
Now, if that isn’t a reason for a woman to leave the legal profession, I don’t know what is. Not much has changed between the attitude in this text and the attitude of that partner from 30 years ago. The prevailing attitude toward maternity leave is still highly negative and highly suspect. Women are asked to work while they’re on maternity leave, and we live in a country where there’s no guaranteed leave. All we have is FMLA, where you have to work in a company with 50 or more employees, and it’s unpaid. We are at the mercy of the firms we work for to have a decent policy in place.
When you ask about what can we do to make things better, one thing is to look for a firm that at least espouses policies and values that are consistent with your own. If you’re thinking about assessing a situation and you figure out what’s important to you, then you go look for a place that espouses those values publicly and where you can find evidence of those policies.
Some of the things that firms can do to make it more palatable and easier for women to stay are things like having flexible work available, not requiring that every single person fit the same exact mold, bill the same number of hours, and follow the same exact trajectory.
Offering alternatives is one great way that firms can start that doesn’t cost a huge amount of money either.
Gina Rubel: Deborah Willig was a Chancellor of the Philadelphia Bar Association. I interviewed her as well, and she was one of the first firms perhaps in the state, if not in the country, that offered parental leave.
She also always offered flexibility to everyone and said, “I’d rather have great lawyers part-time than not have great lawyers.” I just share that because there’s so much that we can do, and her law firm is more than 45 years old. It’s very successful, it’s 50% women partners, and it has a great amount of retention of female lawyers because of the environment.
For those listening who say, “Oh, it’s never going to happen,” well, it does. I wanted to use that as an example.
Dena Lefkowitz: That’s a great example of how you can’t change the environment, but you can find a better one.
Listen to Episode 110: Today’s Fight for the Rights of Union Workers with Deborah Willig
What should law firms be doing so that returning to the office stops causing so much conflict among lawyers?
This has been such a topic in the news, with my clients, everywhere. It’s all people want to talk about in some ways, this return to work and the conflict between employers and employees. We’re mostly talking about lawyers. I coach lawyers, and those are the stories that I hear.
The objection to returning to the office full-time usually has to do with a variety of things, including work-life conflict. People realize how much time they spent commuting, getting dressed, picking out outfits, doing their hair, and all the grooming stuff. All those things take time. Even in my self-employed world, I used to go to the gym four times a week. When the pandemic hit and the gym closed down, I got a Peloton, and I can now work out in the amount of time it took me to get to the gym.
Lawyers are very logical people, and so they’re looking at their day and thinking, “Well, why should I throw in two hours of commuting when I have a large billable hour requirement that I have to fill, and I have many other things that I have to do? I’m going to do it from home because the work is portable. I don’t need to be there. Nobody’s expecting to meet with me today, so I’m going to stay home.”
Face time has always been a huge thing in law firms. It was when I was practicing, and it still is. There’s a myth that if you can see someone, then you know what they’re doing. You don’t. You could walk into my office and I could look up and look all attentive, but I could have been surfing two minutes ago or looking for another job when you walked in.
There’s a myth that we’re actually doing what people think we’re doing, and there’s a resistance to considering a new way of being.
Law firms like to talk about culture. “It’s part of our culture that you’re here in person,” but they’re not able to explain what would be lost if people could work when they want to.
My suggestion for law firms is to offer flexible work, permit remote work, consider alternatives to billable hours, consider things like job sharing, and think about what the future could be like rather than returning to the past, which is over. We know we can be effective and productive without schlepping into the office every day. Law firms have to respect the autonomy of lawyers. We don’t like being told what to do, especially if it doesn’t make any sense.
Gina Rubel: I’ll just share that from a personal perspective, I had a hard time prior to 2020 with the idea of everybody working from home. I didn’t understand it. Now, granted, I graduated from law school in the early ’90s. I am so thankful for the experience of the pandemic in that we are fully virtual. We are more diverse than we’ve ever been.
I’ve got an employee in Wisconsin, and one in North Carolina. We’re all over the country now. We meet all the time. We communicate, and we collaborate. There are tools to do that. We use technology. We had our best year ever last year being virtual.
Even I was so stuck in my ways, and I always think I’m progressive. There are times when you can take an opportunity, run with it, and make it something special. It’s allowed our company to thrive. I’ve seen law firms thrive as well.
Just give in. Let the lawyers practice law. Stop worrying about whether they’re at their desk answering phones. I had an employee who came in, and the individual was at their desk. That individual decided, “Well, I really want to watch the NCAAs,” and that’s what that individual did in the office in front of other people. Individual didn’t last long here, by the way.
What tips do you have for law firms to lessen lawyer burnout?
They have to prioritize well-being. For example, take a look at billable hour targets, knowing that most people try to exceed them. Don’t give bonuses to people for killing themselves. If your billable hour target is 1900, but there’s an unwritten rule that it’s actually 2200, make it the written rule. Don’t surprise people with surprise requirements.
It would help to have a well-being committee where it’s part of the everyday, month-in-month-out work of the firm. Adopting policies that support well-being is certainly needed. Many suggestions can be found in the 2017 ABA report on lawyer well-being that took an incredible survey of lawyers and thought about what it would take in the different domains – the judiciary, government, law firms, private employers, and legal education providers. They thought about what it would take to improve the practice of law and focus on well-being.
Create a culture of respecting lawyers’ personal time. This is the thing that made me run from the profession the hardest – always being available. If you have a baby and your doctor’s on vacation, guess what? Someone else is delivering your baby. If you have a psychological problem in July and your psychologist is on vacation, guess what? You’re going to have to see somebody else.
We don’t have that in the law. Lawyers take calls on vacations. They’re expected to work while they’re on vacations. They don’t get downtime. They buy theater tickets and can’t go to the show. They plan vacations and then they can’t go on them. One of the things I would suggest is prioritizing downtime for lawyers, recognizing that we can’t live on a 24-hour cycle. We have to have downtime.
Gina Rubel: We actually work in teams for that reason, because I prioritize downtime. Yet I still have clients say they have an expectation of me to respond when I’m on vacation. We have a system for that. That’s called internal communications and delegation, and it’s so important.
Dena Lefkowitz: One other thing I would suggest is adopting a zero-tolerance policy toward bullying and harassment. I hear about so many lawyers who are being bullied by rainmakers in their law firms who will never be disciplined because they bring so much money in. That would be my last suggestion.
It is also important to offer training for the people in managerial and supervisory roles. I supervise lawyers, and I never had any training in how to manage people. That’s how most lawyers who supervise other lawyers wind up doing it. Management is not an inherent skill that we’re born with, so investing in those things would really help in law firms.
Gina Rubel: You and I have another saying in common. It’s that we teach our clients everything they never learned in law school. I’ve been saying that for years because we don’t learn about public relations, marketing, and business development in law school. We don’t learn about internal communications or crisis comms in law school. We certainly don’t learn about self-care, management, and all of the coaching topics that you work with your clients on.
I, an entrepreneur and CEO 20 years in, am constantly learning, and constantly trying to better myself as a manager because no one ever taught me either.
I read the Harvard Business Review faithfully, for example, and I like it because it’s not about the law or the legal industry. You’re getting anecdotes from other industries as well.
Over the last several years, there has been much talk about the prevalence of substance and alcohol abuse among attorneys. In Season 2, I interviewed Brian Cuban about his book, The Addicted Lawyer, and the addiction crisis in the industry. Why do you believe the industry continues to struggle with these issues, and what can we do to change it?
I’ve seen a big change in the law since I was a lawyer in terms of staffing. When I was a young lawyer, I had my own secretary. I shared that person with another lawyer, but I had half of a fully dedicated professional helping me. I also had access to a paralegal. Many of the lawyers I work with now don’t have those very basic things that I grew up in the law just expecting would always be there. Lean staffing is a huge issue, which makes lawyers work longer hours, do work beneath their pay scale, and sometimes take drugs and alcohol in order to keep up with the demands, billable hour pressure, valuing profits over people, work-life conflict, job dissatisfaction, overwhelm or work addiction, and sleep deprivation. They’re just trying to survive initially and then it becomes a habit.
Gina Rubel: I think there’s another big reason. It’s endemic in law school. You’re up late, and you need a break, so you go to the bar. I’m not a big drinker. I’ve never done drugs, but I can tell you in law school, I probably drank more than I ever did.
We went to the bar three or four nights a week to unwind because of the pressures, and then when you came out of law school after work, you went to the bars to network. We didn’t have LinkedIn and we didn’t have all of these other tools. People still do that.
I’m watching this next generation of young professionals coming out of college, and they’re in bars every single night. It’s because they were locked up during COVID. They didn’t get the college experience. It’s frightening to me.
It’s not just the pressures, it’s the way we value rainmaking and relationship development. I have built Furia Rubel with an incredible team behind me, but in the first 10 years I was the only person to bring in business, and I did not do it at the bars. I did not do it on the golf course. I did not do it drinking. I was able to do it through predominantly social media and by showing up when I needed to during business hours because I raised two children with my husband. We have to stop putting the onus on people that they have to show up.
My other big thing is that we have to stop having events like cocktail parties. We don’t have to have alcohol. I’m hosting a wine and cheese event in California next week with some other partners, but it’s wine, cheese, and alternative beverages like mocktails. We forget that not everybody drinks, and we don’t need to put pressure on the world to do it. I think there’s a lot more we can be doing.
Dena Lefkowitz: You make a really good point about law school, and I’ve been talking for years about how law school needs to change because they demand more than a human being can possibly do. Then we all feel bad when we can’t do it, and we go to the bar.
Gina Rubel: The response is always, “Well, so many other people have done it,” just as many people today practicing law say, “Well, I had to do it that way,” but that doesn’t make it right.
Rapid fire:
What’s your all-time favorite movie?
The Shawshank Redemption.
What is your superpower?
Listening.
If you could have dinner with any living person, who would it be?
My husband.
What are you currently reading?
The Only Woman in the Room.
Is there an essential book, blog, or podcast not your own or mine, that people should be reading or listening to?
It is so hard to choose from all the great things out there. I love WTF with Marc Maron. I love This American Life with Ira Glass, and I love Fresh Air with Terry Gross.
Gina Rubel: You should also invest in Dena’s book, which hits home. She reflects on the elements of unhealthy law firm cultures like micromanagement, misogyny, and misery, and how to overcome them. She helps readers to discover their real purpose, feel valued, have more confidence, and simply enjoy their careers more. She provides readers with the strategies and tools to make their lives in law more rewarding, inspiring, and meaningful.
Dena Lefkowitz
E-mail: dena@achievementbydesign.com
Twitter: @coachdena
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/denalefkowitz
Instagram: coachdena.esq
