Is there any more powerful motivator than the belief that what you’re doing could make a difference to people you care about?
I know that many lawyers are able to work punishing hours on all sorts of matters they don’t personally connect with - whether motivated by financial gain, firm expectations, or just a sense of professional obligation. But there’s no doubt that it’s much easier when
you’re doing something meaningful, even if it’s something you don’t always enjoy.
It can just be in your mindset: You can pretty much choose to see yourself as a bricklayer, or a cathedral builder; a person who does "boring due diligence”, or someone who helps New Zealand businesses grow and succeed through acquisitions that work in practice.
However, it also comes from having a strategy based on core values, purpose and a vision, as explained by Collins & Porras in Building Your Company’s Vision. They say that organisations that enjoy enduring success have core values and a core purpose that remains fixed, while their business strategies and practices endlessly adapt to a changing world.
A core purpose is the organisation’s most fundamental reason for existing. It doesn’t describe the organisation’s products or services – it reflects people’s motivations for doing the organisation’s work. Collins & Porras compare it to the soul of the organisation, and what the world would lose if the organisation ceased to exist.
A vision is what Collins & Porras refer to as the “BHAG” (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) and vivid descriptions of what it will be like to achieve the BHAGs.
As lawyers should think of themselves as their own business, the concepts can apply to individuals and their professional careers as well as organisations.
I know that many lawyers are able to work punishing hours on all sorts of matters they don’t personally connect with - whether motivated by financial gain, firm expectations, or just a sense of professional obligation. But there’s no doubt that it’s much easier when
you’re doing something meaningful, even if it’s something you don’t always enjoy.
It can just be in your mindset: You can pretty much choose to see yourself as a bricklayer, or a cathedral builder; a person who does "boring due diligence”, or someone who helps New Zealand businesses grow and succeed through acquisitions that work in practice.
However, it also comes from having a strategy based on core values, purpose and a vision, as explained by Collins & Porras in Building Your Company’s Vision. They say that organisations that enjoy enduring success have core values and a core purpose that remains fixed, while their business strategies and practices endlessly adapt to a changing world.
A core purpose is the organisation’s most fundamental reason for existing. It doesn’t describe the organisation’s products or services – it reflects people’s motivations for doing the organisation’s work. Collins & Porras compare it to the soul of the organisation, and what the world would lose if the organisation ceased to exist.
A vision is what Collins & Porras refer to as the “BHAG” (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) and vivid descriptions of what it will be like to achieve the BHAGs.
As lawyers should think of themselves as their own business, the concepts can apply to individuals and their professional careers as well as organisations.
Not everyone buys into this framework, but there are many benefits to having clarity about what is important to you, and why, and where you want to get to. Three key benefits are:
Focus
Most lawyers are extremely busy – so busy it can be hard to think. Without clarity of purpose and vision, it’s hard to know where to focus, and so we respond to the things which are most urgent, which are often the least important. We chase and accept work we don’t want and can’t do as well as we should. Those things which are important, but not urgent, usually get pushed.
Clarity of purpose gives a criteria to work out what to do, and what to say no to.
Marketing and Business Development
One area you can particularly focus on with clarity of purpose is marketing and business development. Knowing who you are best able to help, and why, lets you target your activities on that group.
Understanding their particular needs, and how you can help them, allows you to communicate your key messages much better and for the people who are interested in your services to more easily find you, rather than you chasing any opportunity across the whole, highly competitive, market.
Motivation
Knowing that what you do can make a real difference to your chosen group is seriously motivating. Even when you’re doing something that’s pretty tedious like document automation - the end benefits of helping people work 10x faster can more than justify the means.
The benefits are reinforcing
These benefits are not isolated. They should work in a reinforcing way, so that they continue to grow stronger. Although it is very early days for my new business LawHawk, I’ll give you a personal example.
After 17 years practising as a transactional lawyer, I realised that it wasn’t what I wanted to do forever. I was pretty good at it, but I reckon others were better. I knew that I could continue to improve, but I wasn’t passionate about it. Instead I was obsessed with finding ways to make other lawyers work faster and better through developing new systems. Given the choice, I was spending more of my time on that rather than building a personal practice.
So instead of standing still, I left and decided to set up LawHawk as an extension of my original vision, but with the aim of making the system available to all lawyers, rather than just a few. It’s now my 100% focus.
The fact that I’m only focussed on helping lawyers work faster and better means it’s much easier to engage my target customers. After the recent NZ Herald story, I’ve had a number of people approach me with ideas about how they might work with LawHawk. Some of them I might have thought to be competitors and wouldn’t have approached myself. I can focus my time and efforts on the people who recognise they have problems I can help with.
The enthusiasm for what I’m doing has also been really uplifting. One email I received from a young Auckland lawyer (set out below) was particularly powerful, because I recognised my younger self and so many young lawyers I’ve worked with in the message, and the opportunity to do something to make things different and better for them. This guy, and all the other young lawyers like him, is who I want to help the most. The vision is to see him and his colleagues working as fast and as well as they want to.
In response to reading the NZ Herald piece, the young lawyer wrote:
“I was captured by your Spark promoted article via www.nzherald.co.nz. It is the most impressive innovation I have read about in the legal industry – albeit in my brief career thus far.
I found myself relating to what you had written and comparing this with my own experiences of working in the legal industry, which has been a vastly different experience to that I had imagined until I was suddenly employed as a solicitor.
Instead of drafting and creating letters and documents I have mastered the art of reverse engineering and in turn I have developed my own templates to become more proficient and cut down on the mistakes and errors that reverse engineering inevitably produces.
Your goal to maximise customisation for the client, and minimise time being wasted and charged, is something I have continued to adapt to as a junior solicitor. In particular after producing my first drafted will, constantly revisiting the wishes of our client as to how she gifted her jewellery, in all circumstances imaginable, led me to take over four times the time originally quoted to her to produce what she finally wanted. Although we did not charge her four times the amount, I feel with a more interactive experience available to her the end result could have been produced more efficiently and seamlessly.
After reading Steve Jobs’ book last year I have continued to try to adopt a “Think Different” approach to the archaic legal industry. I think Steve best summarises my current philosophy when he describes Apple’s approach to innovation by quoting Wayne Gretzky: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been”. If people don’t evolve to understand where the industry is heading then they are destined to lose business. From what I have read on your website LawHawk is looking to follow this train of thought, similar to what Xero did for the accounting industry, which is noted on your website accordingly.
If know you are based in Wellington but if you are ever in Auckland I would greatly appreciate the chance to meet and talk with you.”
Good luck with reflecting on your own purpose and vision and which group you want to help. Are you “just” a conveyancer, or someone who helps home buyers with the most important investment they may make; a Government procurement lawyer, or someone who makes a massive difference to the New Zealand economy?
- Focus
- Marketing and Business Development
- Motivation
Focus
Most lawyers are extremely busy – so busy it can be hard to think. Without clarity of purpose and vision, it’s hard to know where to focus, and so we respond to the things which are most urgent, which are often the least important. We chase and accept work we don’t want and can’t do as well as we should. Those things which are important, but not urgent, usually get pushed.
Clarity of purpose gives a criteria to work out what to do, and what to say no to.
Marketing and Business Development
One area you can particularly focus on with clarity of purpose is marketing and business development. Knowing who you are best able to help, and why, lets you target your activities on that group.
Understanding their particular needs, and how you can help them, allows you to communicate your key messages much better and for the people who are interested in your services to more easily find you, rather than you chasing any opportunity across the whole, highly competitive, market.
Motivation
Knowing that what you do can make a real difference to your chosen group is seriously motivating. Even when you’re doing something that’s pretty tedious like document automation - the end benefits of helping people work 10x faster can more than justify the means.
The benefits are reinforcing
These benefits are not isolated. They should work in a reinforcing way, so that they continue to grow stronger. Although it is very early days for my new business LawHawk, I’ll give you a personal example.
After 17 years practising as a transactional lawyer, I realised that it wasn’t what I wanted to do forever. I was pretty good at it, but I reckon others were better. I knew that I could continue to improve, but I wasn’t passionate about it. Instead I was obsessed with finding ways to make other lawyers work faster and better through developing new systems. Given the choice, I was spending more of my time on that rather than building a personal practice.
So instead of standing still, I left and decided to set up LawHawk as an extension of my original vision, but with the aim of making the system available to all lawyers, rather than just a few. It’s now my 100% focus.
The fact that I’m only focussed on helping lawyers work faster and better means it’s much easier to engage my target customers. After the recent NZ Herald story, I’ve had a number of people approach me with ideas about how they might work with LawHawk. Some of them I might have thought to be competitors and wouldn’t have approached myself. I can focus my time and efforts on the people who recognise they have problems I can help with.
The enthusiasm for what I’m doing has also been really uplifting. One email I received from a young Auckland lawyer (set out below) was particularly powerful, because I recognised my younger self and so many young lawyers I’ve worked with in the message, and the opportunity to do something to make things different and better for them. This guy, and all the other young lawyers like him, is who I want to help the most. The vision is to see him and his colleagues working as fast and as well as they want to.
In response to reading the NZ Herald piece, the young lawyer wrote:
“I was captured by your Spark promoted article via www.nzherald.co.nz. It is the most impressive innovation I have read about in the legal industry – albeit in my brief career thus far.
I found myself relating to what you had written and comparing this with my own experiences of working in the legal industry, which has been a vastly different experience to that I had imagined until I was suddenly employed as a solicitor.
Instead of drafting and creating letters and documents I have mastered the art of reverse engineering and in turn I have developed my own templates to become more proficient and cut down on the mistakes and errors that reverse engineering inevitably produces.
Your goal to maximise customisation for the client, and minimise time being wasted and charged, is something I have continued to adapt to as a junior solicitor. In particular after producing my first drafted will, constantly revisiting the wishes of our client as to how she gifted her jewellery, in all circumstances imaginable, led me to take over four times the time originally quoted to her to produce what she finally wanted. Although we did not charge her four times the amount, I feel with a more interactive experience available to her the end result could have been produced more efficiently and seamlessly.
After reading Steve Jobs’ book last year I have continued to try to adopt a “Think Different” approach to the archaic legal industry. I think Steve best summarises my current philosophy when he describes Apple’s approach to innovation by quoting Wayne Gretzky: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been”. If people don’t evolve to understand where the industry is heading then they are destined to lose business. From what I have read on your website LawHawk is looking to follow this train of thought, similar to what Xero did for the accounting industry, which is noted on your website accordingly.
If know you are based in Wellington but if you are ever in Auckland I would greatly appreciate the chance to meet and talk with you.”
Good luck with reflecting on your own purpose and vision and which group you want to help. Are you “just” a conveyancer, or someone who helps home buyers with the most important investment they may make; a Government procurement lawyer, or someone who makes a massive difference to the New Zealand economy?
021 339 527
lawhawk@lawhawk.nz
