Editors'Letter

Don Hutcheson

Dori Stiles

How Lawyers Succeed

Welcome to the inaugural issue of The Complete Lawyer - the online magazine that offers tools and insights from foremost professionals on the best practices in personal and professional development, leadership and management that impact every lawyer's success and satisfaction.

Its focus is exclusively on you the individual - you as a whole person - not merely you as a lawyer. Every article and interview is designed to give you a new perspective on how to become a more complete lawyer - better at deploying your technical skills absolutely, but also better at achieving balance in your life and getting more satisfaction from your work and workplace.

To give you some perspective, here is how this collaboration between YellowWoods Consultants and the Atlanta Bar Association came about. It began with a conversation between the former president of the American Bar Association, Bill Ide and Don Hutcheson, president of YellowWoods Consultants and co-editor of TCL with Dr. Dori Stiles.

Bill Ide and I met in the spring of 2003. I had been coaching and consulting at McKenna Long & Aldridge for a couple of years by that time. Bill shared his concern with me that law schools do little to arm lawyers with the non-technical skills they need to thrive in their practices.

"Our law schools teach us to be gladiators, to win above all else. In my experience that ethos completely misses the point of what being a lawyer is all about. Being a successful lawyer is about getting inside the heads and hearts of our clients. It's about understanding their needs and aligning with their interests. It's about them, not about us. So much of our effectiveness in that role hinges on our skills and abilities as managers, leaders and team players."

Bill asked me to noodle on a curriculum that would address some of these issues. I did and then got together with my partner, Dr. Dori Stiles. Dori and I had worked together for nine years at The Highlands Program (www.highlandsco.com) the performance improvement company I founded in 1990 to train managers and executives. In 2001 we had gone on to create YellowWoods Consultants (www.yellowwoods.com) a consulting firm specializing in developmental training for professionals in leadership and management.

To my 30 years experience as a CEO in the fields of publishing, advertising and career development, Dori added 20 years of experience as a human resources executive and consultant working with such firms as IBM, Chase Bank, Charles Schwab and Cisco Systems.

We counseled with the heads of major law firms in Atlanta and elsewhere and devoured books, articles and studies by such well-regarded lawyers, consultants and authors as David Maister (True Professionalism, Touchstone, 1997), Diane Vogt and Lori-Ann Rickard (Keeping Good Lawyers, American Bar Association, 2000) and Ida Abbott (The Lawyer's Guide To Mentoring, National Association For Law Placement, 2000).

These authors, experts and practitioners corroborated Bill's concerns and added some of their own:

• In the overwhelming majority of firms, little or no attention is given to the non-technical training that has become increasingly essential for a lawyer's success, and equally important for her satisfaction in the practice.
• Most lawyers are resigned to working in environments that are not especially enjoyable or collaborative. They doubt change is possible and they certainly don't know how to make it happen.
• The constant attrition of associates and lateral hires, particularly women and minorities, has become a significant problem. Yet law firm management seems uncertain how to move ahead on the issues.
• There is little understanding of how the widening generational gap impacts the recruiting, retaining, managing and motivating of a firm's greatest asset-its people.

The curriculum that Dori and I created was very different from what lawyers were used to. For starters it focused on disciplines and methodologies to which most lawyers until recently had not assigned much value: leadership, management, teamwork, coaching, emotional intelligence and natural abilities.

Last fall we partnered with the Atlanta Bar to run a series of pilot programs of the new content. A handful of Atlanta law firms were involved. There were some skeptics in the courses, but many others were open and receptive to new thinking. The latter could see that the principles that were shared could impact how effectively the lawyer did his job. They found this especially true regarding relationships with peers and clients, improved efficiency in communication throughout the team and reduced stress.

After the success of the pilot programs we began talking with Mary Lynne Johnson and members of the Atlanta Bar CLE Board about how some of this new thinking might be spread to the membership through your CLE program. In addition to my background in traditional magazines, I had published an online magazine for my last company, so the foundation of experience was firmly in place. We also knew that the scope and depth of the topics we planned to cover in each issue were far greater than a typical newsletter could accomodate. The Complete Lawyer™ online magazine was born.

The rationale for non-technical training for lawyers and for the content of this e-zine is supported by decades of research on human performance in organizations throughout the world. Research now clearly establishes a direct relationship between satisfied people working in supportive environments with significantly higher productivity and profitability for the organization. Law firms are no exception.(See The Service Profit Chain, Free Press, 1997 and First Break All the Rules, Simon & Schuster, 1999).

Articles will be written by experts and practitioners alike; by published authors like Diane Vogt (Keeping Good Lawyers, ABA, 2000) and new writers like Anne Whitaker. If you have some topic of interest you'd like to write about we'd love to hear from you. The format of the e-zine will be highly interactive. Every issue after this one will feature a survey on some topic of note. The results will be published in the subsequent issue. Every issue will have a featured topic on subjects as diverse as managing generational differences to emotional intelligence in the workplace. We expect areas to emerge in which you will want more focus and content from us and we intend to deliver it. We want to know what you are thinking and why.

The positioning line of this new publication, The Complete Lawyer™ is How Lawyers Succeed™. The driving force of this partnership between Atlanta Bar CLE and YellowWoods is to provide you with every possible tool to enable you to do just that.

Don Hutcheson Editor & Publisher

Dori Stiles, Ph.D. Managing Editor