The Lawyer as People Manager

The relational skills every lawyer needs to delegate, give and receive feedback, and interact effectively with others

Ultimately, lawyers deal with people: clients, partners, associates, colleagues. Technical excellence is not enough: if your relations with others don’t work, sooner or later, neither will you. This course gives lawyers the practical, human skills that combine into effective, productive and positive interpersonal interactions. 

Why It Matters

Law firms, legal departments, and partnerships are, first and foremost, human systems. To a large extent, their ability to operate collectively in a healthy and productive way depends on their degree of relational intelligence.

How a firm treats its people is also becoming a strategic issue. In today's legal market, talented young lawyers who feel they are not treated well, or not given room to progress, do not hesitate to leave. More than a nice-to-have, becoming genuinely good at managing people is a strategic asset for attracting and retaining the best talent.

And in the age of AI, as legal expertise itself becomes increasingly automated, so-called “soft” skills are becoming critical for individuals and organisations to thrive.

Content

The training is very practical, focusing on real-life situations that participants frequently experience in the course of their work. It provides them with actionable, concrete methods for managing these situations. It also takes participants on a journey of self-discovery, helping them become more aware of their own biases, unexamined assumptions, and automatic behaviours — and to develop real self-awareness. People management, after all, is just manipulation if it focuses entirely on the other person and not on oneself: one’s own beliefs, emotions, and behaviours.

The training combines short explanations with interactive discussions, and exercises (including role plays). The content always depends on the specific purpose defined for each session, from a generic overview to an in-depth exploration of one of the topics below:

• Delegation. Delegation is critical for senior associates and partners. It is the key to effective leverage. Butlawyers are routinely told to delegate without being taught how. In practice, many prefer to do the work themselves: it’s faster, and the result is better. The course will teach participants a five-step method to delegate.

• Feedback. Feedback is uncomfortable on both sides, but there is no progress without it. It may be hard to give and receive, but it is essential. In the course, participants will explore the various types of feedback, discover and practise the ‘Feedback Pyramid Model’ to make the most of it, learn how self-confidence interacts with feedback, and how to protect onself against toxic feedback. Ultimately, feedback can become more than isolated moments: it can become a new dimension of the organisational culture, where feedback becomes an everyday practice and the foundation of a true learning organisation.

• Interpersonal effectiveness. People differ, culturally and individually, in how they think and communicate. Without reducing that complexity to a handful of “personality types,” participants will learnto recognise different cognitive and communication preferences and adjust to them — a skill that is critical to effective communication with clients and colleagues.

• Difficult conversations. There are conversations you’d rather avoid: responding to a client complaint,addressing a delicate personal issue, or leading a complicated annual performance review. Through role plays, participants will learn how to prepare for and lead these conversations.

Who Should Attend

There are two possible audiences for this course:

• Lawyers who manage, delegate to, or lead others: senior associates and counsel taking on their first direct reports and supervisory responsibilities, partners responsible for delegating work, developing associates, and giving feedback across a team, and legal department leaders, keen on building a healthy, high-performing team culture.

• Junior associates and associates, whose challenge is to learn how to receive feedback well, adjust to different partners’ personalities and expectations, meet clients’ expectations and deliver excellent client care, and start building professional relationships with colleagues and peers.

Format and Options

Generic
A half-day session giving an overview of all four areas: delegation, feedback, interpersonal effectiveness, and difficult conversations.

Custom
We start with a conversation to identify the specific needs of the intended participants, and we design the course accordingly. A custom session can run half a day or longer, depending on the depth required.

Available in English, French, and Dutch.

Fees are quoted individually following a conversation with Antoine.

Antoine Henry de Frahan

The course is delivered by Antoine or trainers he has personally trained in his methodology.

Antoine is a certified Master Practitioner in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), which provides the methodological foundation for this course. For more than 25 years, he has trained and coached lawyers, and other professionals, on soft skills, including delegation, feedback, communication, and leadership.

More about Antoine →