Life Beyond Law: Tech Entrepreneur Greg Smith

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When entrepreneur Greg Smith quit practicing law to start a tech company, he quickly learned that following his dream was going to take more hard work and a lot more risk than anything he’d encountered before.

Many lawyers are enticed to join the business world beyond their law firms. I recently asked Greg how his legal experience has influenced his foray into the entrepreneurial realm.

Q. What spurred you to leave the comforts of a big law firm and start a tech company?

Greg Smith, Co-Founder of Thinkific

Greg Smith, Co-Founder of Thinkific

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E-learning for Lawyers, Explained

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Online courses, webinars and other digital media open up a wide range of convenient, cost-effective training options for busy professionals. But there are a lot of options. Myriad combinations of technology, platforms, content and classrooms sometimes make the selection of a course as challenging as learning new subject matter.

Holly MacDonald of Spark + Co.

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Women, Wisdom & Wall Street

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What’s it like to be the only woman in the room during corporate board meetings? Or the first woman to chair a financial regulation authority in the midst of an economic crisis? Last week, I  attended a panel discussion where three groundbreaking leaders – all lawyers by training – talk about their experiences as women affecting change in a male dominated industry.

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Bellwether Strategies Client Wins Corporate Social Responsibility Award

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On November 6, 2014, Bellwether Strategies client Leed Advisors Inc. was honoured with the inaugural Corporate Social Responsibility Recognition Award from the Surrey Board of Trade.

Leed Advisors is a chartered accounting firm based in South Surrey, British Columbia. It was honoured for “enhancing the civic environment in which it operates through participation in community programs, partnerships with community organizations, volunteering, educational and/or environmental initiatives, and for creating a positive environment for employees”. Read more →

The Trust Imperative: Part II

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Last week, I published the first half of my interview with Aneil Mishra, Ph.D.. Mishra is a respected author and business school professor who studies the link between trustworthiness, leadership and organizational performance. He discussed the four main qualities of trustworthy leaders – reliability, openness, competence and compassion – and his latest research regarding which of these qualities might matter most in the current economy. Read more →

The Trust Imperative: Part I

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Do you trust the leaders in your organization to make decisions in the best interest of the entire firm? Do you trust them to proactively deal with important issues or prevent crises? Studies such as the 2014 Edelman Trust Barometer would indicate that your answer is likely “no”.

Some of the current notions regarding trust are based on the times in which we live – a legal market that is changing as well as shrinking, record numbers of unemployed law school graduates saddled with record amounts of student debt, daily news of trust violations between business, government and society. Read more →

Back to (Business) School

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Ah, September. The leaves are falling, the air is crisp and most of us feel motivated to learn something new.

Stanford University offers several online learning options for lawyers and legal professionals* interested in sharpening their business skills, especially in the areas of entrepreneurialism and innovation. The videos and podcasts in their Entrepreneurship Corner are professionally produced, available for view at any time and presented by top faculty from several departments. I’ve especially enjoyed the interviews with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs such as Mitch Kapor who talk about lessons learned, developing “people skills” and learning to be comfortable with business risk. Read more →

Aligning Employees to Execute Strategy: Getting Started

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When firm leaders agree on strategic objectives, it’s time to align employees towards achieving them. As with anything with multiple moving parts, adjustments can help the system work at its best.

Last week, I discussed the difference between employee engagement and employee alignment. Engagement is what motivates people to arrive at work each morning. Alignment is what they do when they get there. Read more →

Keeping Clients When A Key Partner Leaves

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When a key partner in a large law firm moves to a competitor, do his or her institutional clients tend to leave too? The answer might depend on how much internal conflict there is at the firm left behind.

Michelle Rogan of INSEAD recently published ground-breaking research on the relationships between large, multi-unit advertising agencies and client firms. These relationships are very similar in structure to those between law firms and institutional clients, where services in several areas of professional expertise are provided through personal connections developed over time. Read more →

Tick Tock: How to Run a Productive Legal Project Meeting

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I am usually the first person to start fidgeting in any meeting. Most of the time, I attribute this to my short attention span or my impatience. But sometimes I attribute  it to the meeting leader’s poor facilitation skills.

Apparently, I’m not alone in my frustration. According to a May 2014 Harvard Business Review article:

  • 15% of collective organizational time is spent in meetings. This percentage has only increased since 2008.
  • Executives consider 56% of these meetings to be unproductive
  • 49% of attendees admit to doing other, unrelated work during meetings

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