I was having a discussion with a private consulting client the other day.  He is a very competent lawyer, but his law practice is not what he would like it to be.  He had paid me for a consulting day for us to discuss some marketing and practice management strategies for his practice.

As we started talking about his law firm and the challenges that he was having, I could not help but notice how frequently he took on a sort of “victim mentality.”  Everything was someone else’s fault.  He talked about how some other lawyer in his town was lucky because thus and so had happened in his practice, or how the staff would not implement his ideas (who works for whom anyway), or his clients just wouldn’t pay premium fees, etc.

This was a very accomplished and experienced lawyer.  But, he was not taking responsibility for his own law practice.  We had to spend a couple of hours just getting him to move beyond being the owner of his solo practice, to taking ownership (i.e. ultimate responsibility) for it.

Here are some of the questions that he and I worked through:

• How have you been responsible for your firm’s lack of performance in the past year?
• How committed are you to creating your perfect law practice?
• What must you change in order to create your perfect law practice?
• What in your law practice have you been pretending not to notice?
• What about your work habits do you know you need to change?

As you can imagine, this was not easy work for him.  But, it was both necessary and worthwhile.  I find that too frequently solo and small firm lawyers do not take any time to undergo this type of introspective process (it alone is a good reason to talk periodically with an outside consultant, mentor, or accountability partner about your firm).

As solo and small firm lawyers, I suggest we could all benefit form asking these types of questions of ourselves on a recurring basis.