Let's talk about where your organization is, what frictions you're seeing, and how you're hoping to shift things--in terms of both performance and your team's experience. You'll leave with a framework for diagnosing the source of those frictions and designing a path to a more aligned organization. If working together makes sense, this is where we'll begin that conversation.
A prospective client (Nicky Parsons) is coming to the office for an interview. The client spoke very briefly with a legal assistant, and now you are doing the client interview. All you know right now is that the client’s employer, Rosco Drugs, fired the client.
Be sure to use the interviewing techniques from our readings.
Your firm handles some employment cases on a contingent fee basis, and handles others on an hourly basis. Partners are billed at $250 per hour; associates (like you) are billed at $200 per hour. The standard contingent fee is one-third of any settlement or collected judgment, plus the client pays all litigation costs as they are incurred. At this point, you’re not in a position to say how many hours would be required or how much the litigation costs would be.
Ben Grimes spent 20 years in the U.S. Army as a UH-60 Blackhawk pilot and decorated military attorney, where he learned that the difference between a team that holds together under pressure and one that doesn't is rarely technical. After retiring from the Army, he built on that foundation through legal practice, teaching at Columbia Law School and UMass Law, and training as an ICF-certified executive coach, developing a body of work centered on the human side of leadership in high-stakes professional environments. His work is grounded in a straightforward diagnosis:
Most organizations don't have a strategy problem or a culture problem, they have an alignment problem, and the leaders who solve it are the ones who combine intellectual rigor with genuine care for the people they lead.
Through Alturos Edge, Ben works with executives, leadership teams, and organizations that are serious about building that kind of alignment, not as an aspiration, but as a competitive advantage. His book, Empathy-Driven Leadership, is forthcoming.