Gladstone Consultants are highly esteemed experts in their respective fields, known for our insightful contributions and dynamic presentations. We are sought-after speakers at events including private law firm and practice group retreats, state and local bar associations, industry groups, conferences, and associations.
We are happy to customize our message to your specific need. Contact us to bring expertise, entertainment, and substantive dialogue to your next event.
“Several of the attorneys commented to me after the presentation that they had expected a rather dull topic, but that you made it interesting, relevant, and even entertaining. I was also impressed with your ability to think on your feet and answer tough questions thoroughly on the fly – attorneys can be a tough crowd.”
“Members of our board were very complimentary of you today. Several commented on how well prepared and professional you were. You made a great impression. Thank you for all the work you did for our retreat. You provide excellent value!”
“This was the most useful LMA program I’ve ever heard.”
Sample Topics
1. Assess Your Firm’s Readiness to Grow and Change
Many firms and practice/industry groups spend a lot of time conceiving and crafting strategic plans – and then struggle with implementation. A common reason is they don’t pay enough attention to their underlying structural, operational, and cultural conditions that can enable or impair growth and change. This working session helps leaders focus on 12 such categories, assessing strengths and weaknesses, determining the “so what” of each situation, and beginning the process to capture opportunities or overcome impediments. When the firm’s or group’s “machinery” is in good working order, it becomes much more likely that all the hard work invested in developing plans will actually pay dividends.
2. Lead your Practice/Industry Group Effectively Without Destroying Your Practice
It’s a conundrum: your top choices to lead practice and industry groups often have very busy practices that can be damaged if their leadership obligations take them away from their clients and teams. If those leaders are mid-career lawyers, the consequences of that harm are even more damaging. This session helps leaders be effective and efficient, enabling them to add value to the firm through their group leadership, maintain their thriving practices, and preserve the personal balance necessary for their success to be sustainable. This can be presented as a stand-alone session or as a kick-off to an ongoing developmental and coaching program.
3. Future Leaders: Help Your Rising Stars Grow Beyond Being Strong Individual Contributors
Education, training, incentive systems and personal drive help your most capable rising lawyers become extremely strong individual contributors. But it takes a different set of skills, perspective, and motivation to lead client teams, practice/industry groups or the firm. This session helps your rising generation assess the upcoming arc of their careers, and understand the service delivery, business and leadership skills they will need to develop in order to join the leaders who will drive your firm forward in the future. This can be presented as a stand-alone session or as a kick-off to an ongoing developmental and coaching program.
4. From Expense to Asset: Help Your Staff Help Your Firm Become the Best Place for Your Lawyers to Practice
Most law firms have about as many professional staff as lawyers. But too many firms view their staff as an expense to be minimized rather than an asset to be developed. And too often they quash the best instincts and abilities of their staff and instead allow a culture of passivity, adherence to the status quo, learned helplessness and resigned disgruntlement to develop. In so doing, they miss an opportunity to have their professional staff help create a competitive advantage by making the firm the “best, easiest place” for lawyers to practice and clients to be served. This session will help forward-thinking firms get started on engaging, empowering, and expecting their professional staff to deliver value, service and continuous improvement, as they are fully able to do if given the opportunity. This can be delivered as a stand-alone session or as the kick-off to an ongoing support and advisory engagement for one or more of your firm’s C-Suite leaders.
5. Innovation Tournament (ideal for retreats, requires a little pre-work by participants)
The distinctive opportunity available from the time and money invested in a firm or practice/industry group retreat is to engage people in person to conceive and develop new and better ways to serve their clients and build their success. One compelling way to do this is by conducting an innovation tournament that inspires your lawyers’ creative and competitive spirit in a collaborative activity that will yield tangible opportunities for improvement. Whether in quantum leaps or quotidian progress, getting better every day is a key to long-term, sustainable success, and an innovation tournament can send your teams home from the retreat with a portfolio of new initiatives.
6. Building a Strong Business Development Culture in a Law Firm: The Six Pillars
Success in a law firm goes beyond legal acumen; it depends on the ability to cultivate a culture that is intrinsically motivated, strategically sound, and well-equipped to navigate modern business development. When these elements are integrated into the firm’s culture, the results can be transformative, leading to long-term growth and prosperity. This presentation explores the six foundational components that can help foster a business development culture benefiting individual attorneys and the firm as a whole.
7. Strategic Collaboration: Moving from Cross-Selling to Cooperation
In a legal market with increasingly intricate client needs, attorneys are faced with challenges that necessitate collaboration with colleagues within the firm possessing complementary specialist expertise. This collaborative approach not only enhances a competitive edge when it comes to attracting new clients and deepening existing relationships but is also essential for addressing client concerns effectively. Nonetheless, successful internal collaboration hinges on key factors, including knowledge and expertise sharing, facilitating introductions to other attorneys, and dismantling interpersonal barriers that may hinder the ability to pitch work and serve clients seamlessly. This presentation illustrates the advantages of collaborative selling, which not only benefit the firm but also individual lawyers. Additionally, it will candidly discuss the primary obstacles that often hinder effective collaboration within law firms.
8. Getting in Doors: Using Value Propositions to get an audience
Lawyers have difficulty moving relationships from “I just met you” to a formal meeting discussing substantive challenges and needs. Well-crafted value propositions deployed appropriately make this transition easy and comfortable. In addition, good value propositions help lawyers move relationships through the sales cycle to close new business. This session provides instruction on identifying, creating, and using value propositions to build trust and broaden the dialogue to assess needs.
9. Cashing-In on the Conference: How to Turn Non-Billable Events into New Business Opportunities
Conferences and networking events take too much non-billable time. Returning from an event without making a substantive connection with a prospect is unacceptable. Whether you are extroverted, introverted, overwhelmed, or under-connected, an industry conference can be a professional and business development windfall for attorneys at all stages of practice. But obstacles like a global pandemic, procrastination, or work/life imbalance can derail our best intentions around marketing and personal branding.
This session helps lawyers maximize event networking opportunities and business development potential by using strategies that focus on relationships, organization, and prioritization.
10. Networking and Working a Room
When attending professional meetings, seminars, receptions, or parties in your community, knowing how to “work the room” can make the difference between a boring waste of time, and an exhilarating event that expands your circle. This speed session will offer 30 tips in 30 minutes, with both introverts and extroverts in mind.
11. The Mock Prospect Meeting: Uncover Hidden Prospect Needs
This session is a needs assessment meeting role-play designed to help lawyers practice communication and meeting skills. It allows participants to practice being in front of a prospect using an organized model for asking questions, building trust, and getting an advance.
12. The 7 Secrets of Simplified Rainmaking
Business development is not that hard. Lawyers just don’t have time for it. This session teaches seven key things you can do right away to find new clients without spending extra time. We often make business development too complex. A simplified approach streamlines the process, frees up time, and makes it easy to develop good habits that build new revenue.
13. Power of the Pipe: From Novice to Rainmaking Pro with One Powerful Tool
Nothing is more effective for law firm business development than building an everyday habit of referring to a well-constructed, appropriately completed list of potential clients. This session covers pipeline benefits, moving from awareness activities to relationship activities, creating an effective pipeline tool, and forming the proper pipeline habits to ensure success.
14. Overcoming your Business Development Fears
Potential rainmakers need to overcome common sales fears to become successful business developers. This session addresses the four main fears lawyers encounter (Fear of Rejection,
Fear of Failure, Fear of Interaction, Fear of Success), how to identify them, and strategies for overcoming them.
15. How Lawyers Can be Closers: Simplifying the Dirty Task of Asking for Business
Asking for business is an easy, simple task if all sales process elements are handled effectively. This session helps lawyers understand how that process leads to the natural next step of starting the engagement. The focus is on building trust, getting advances, listening for needs, and dealing with potential objections.
16. Cross-Selling
Significant revenue opportunities at law firms are squandered every year due to the inability to cross-sell services effectively. However, revenue is not the only thing on the table. Effective cross-selling also promotes firm stability, a better understanding of client challenges, better lawyering, cheaper onboarding of new matters, shorter sales cycles, and less client attrition. Roadblocks include lack of trust, financial disincentives, and siloed cultures. This session makes a case for a renewed emphasis on cross-selling. Participants will learn a process for uncovering opportunities, building partner trust, and relying on fundamental sales principles to enable cross-selling success.
17. Business Development for Litigators
The litigator has a unique challenge for bringing business to the firm. Lack of a corporate deal flow, untapped referral source networks and a desire for subject matter variety all stifle the litigator’s efforts to build clientele and bring in new cases.
This session, presented by a former litigator, presents strategies to overcome the unique challenges of litigator business developers. Using new psychological research derived from the Lawyer Behavior Profile, this session breaks down the litigator personality and applies those findings to help litigators build clientele.
Participants in the session will come away knowing how to:
- Create target markets for outreach without “specializing” the practice
- Focus on referral source networks both inside and outside the firm
- Leverage the firm to build business
- Build relationships with clients for future work even before the case ends
- Create and work business pipelines
- Stay in touch with prospective clients when they don’t have litigation needs
- Turn awareness activities into relationships building activities
- Manage business development activities during trial
18. Habit Change
You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. With inspiration from James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, this workshop will cover the science behind habit formation and why our daily habits are the foundation for business development success.
19. Authentic Self-Promotion for Women – Self-Care for Your Personal Brand
Effective self-promotion strategies are all about finding the balance between demonstrating your value and bragging about it. This presentation will cover methods and mindsets for promoting yourself both online and in person, with an emphasis on using LinkedIn effectively. Content is designed to engage female attorneys at all levels.
Learning Objectives:
- Reframe self-advocacy into holistic terms
- Embrace everyday interactions to practice your value pitch
- Discover virtual, digital, and real-world ways to “show up” for yourself and others.
20. How to Create Opportunities for Client Face-time
While it can be difficult to build personal relationships with clients, it remains essential. That said, in-person opportunities to deepen those relationships can be hard to schedule. This workshop will highlight ten ways to rethink client face-time and take your relationship-building to the next level.
21. How to Reconnect with Dormant Relationships
Reconnecting — with old friends, acquaintances you haven’t seen in years, colleagues you have lost touch with, and clients from past engagements — is one of the most effective ways to make the most of your network. This workshop walks through the science and steps to reconnecting with dormant ties. Learn why your existing network is full of untapped value.
22. How to Show Up for Clients and Colleagues Who Are Struggling
Today’s increasingly isolated, socially disconnected, and hurting world demands that we do a better job of caring for one another. The main reason we fail to show care is that we don’t feel equipped to know what to say and do around those struggling, so awkwardness takes over. This session walks through specific mindsets and behaviors that can be identified, normalized, and discussed to help cultivate the skill of social connection — leading to stronger, trusting relationships that feel seen, valued, and cared for in the workplace and beyond.
23. The Marketing Professional’s Role in Business Development
Marketing is a great profession. However, marketing without business, much like business development without marketing, isn’t sustainable long term. This workshop is designed to share a business development framework that marketing professionals can plug into to deliver maximum value to their firm.
24. Refresh & Reboot Your LinkedIn Presence
Using LinkedIn to connect, reconnect, and stay meaningfully connected to your ideal audiences. Attendees will learn why quality beats quantity and how to curate a network that aligns with professional interests and business development goals. This session includes A fast-paced review of LinkedIn’s newest features that matter most for business developers. When lawyers understand the efficient ways to connect “LinkedIn Listening” to a regular routine for pipeline management, the compound effect can drive relationships online and offline.
25. Branding the In-house Legal Team
ELEVATE YOUR INFLUENCE WITHIN THE ORGANIZATION
A tailored workshop designed specifically for the in-house legal department. This workshop aims to address the imperative need for establishing a professional brand within the broader organization. Over the course of two hours, our comprehensive session will delve into the significance of effective communication with stakeholders and explore strategies to elevate the department’s visibility internally.
Key Outcomes
- Enhanced understanding of the importance of professional branding and stakeholder communication in the legal context
- Practical strategies for effectively communicating legal concepts and decisions to internal stakeholders
- Insights into leveraging internal networks and opportunities to elevate the department’s visibility
- Actionable plans for implementing branding and communication initiatives within the legal department
By investing in the professional development of the in-house legal team you will not only strengthen the department but also contribute to the overall success and reputation of the organization.
