John R. Kormanik, Professional Certified Coach | CEO and Head Coach at John R. Kormanik Coaching.
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Your law firm is either evolving or it’s falling behind. There is no status quo anymore. Artificial intelligence (AI), shifting client expectations, the labor market: The pace of change has made treading water a losing strategy. If you’re trying to maintain, you’re already behind.
What drives evolution isn’t more effort. It’s not your team, and it’s not the market. Those are comfortable places to look, but they’re not the answer. What drives your firm’s evolution is your energy state: your attitudes, perceptions and beliefs. The physics of your law firm sit downstream of the mindset you bring to it every day.
The Three Forces Working Against You
Friction is every decision that only you can make. Every single one of them slows the entire system down. I’ll say it plainly: You must be responsible for very few decisions. Underneath that need to control everything is a win-lose energy state. I win, meaning I feel comfortable and in control. No one can do it like you. That is true. You’re one in eight billion. It’s also true that things can get done without you, and in many cases, better. Control creates friction, and friction kills velocity.
Drag is your team waiting on you. A team waiting on your input isn’t a team. It’s a queue. I recently watched Ford v Ferrari and there’s a scene where Matt Damon’s character tells Mr. Ford, “I watched that red file go through five sets of hands before it got to you.” That’s drag. What underlies it is rationalization: “I’m not that much of a bottleneck. It’s fine.” You’ve told yourself the story that everything coming through you is a burden you should bear. Then you remember: You hired the team. If you don’t trust them, that’s not on them. It’s on you, and you can change.
Mass is the accumulated weight of everything the firm has become since you built it. The structure that got you here is now working against you. Underneath mass is an identity question: “Who am I if I’m not in the middle of it all?” I’ve had clients who kept attending standups, stayed involved in client meetings, not because it was strategically sound, but because they were quietly asking, “What will my team think of me if I’m not there?” That question will keep your firm exactly where it is.
The Force Underneath The Forces
Friction, drag and mass are not operational problems. They show up operationally, in bottlenecked decisions, stalled deals, stunted team ownership, but operations are the symptom. The thing underneath all three is your energy state. It’s the lens you’re viewing the firm through.
I call it the anxiety-to-authority spectrum. On the anxiety end, you’re reactive, over-involved, operating in permanent urgency. You’re the hub of the wheel, which means nothing moves without you. Your team isn’t reading your strategy deck. They are reading your energy in the Monday meeting. If you’re in anxiety mode, they feel it, and they calibrate accordingly.
Your legal training rewards hyper-vigilance. Risk aversion is how you were trained. That may have gotten you from solo to 3 million, or 7 million. It won’t get you to 25 million. Operating from the anxiety end of the spectrum is no longer a feature. It’s the ceiling.
The authority end is something different. It’s calm. It’s visionary. It’s where you show up and set internal goals, not outcomes that depend on others, but who you intend to be in the room. For example, I had a client perpetually in coping mode, managing conversations with a plastered-on “you’re doing great” while privately knowing things were suboptimal. They started setting simple internal goals before every leadership team meeting: Be calm, be clear, feel good on the other side. They moved to win-win. Their team’s ownership increased. Their revenue followed. Not because of a new system or a new hire. Because of how they changed.
The Move That Makes It Real
You cannot see where your firm is going while you’re buried in where it already is. It’s not physically possible.
Strategic absence, deliberate and designed distance from the firm, is where the shift becomes real. Not a vacation, though vacations matter. Not checking out. Design. Bill Gates famously took “think weeks” twice a year, isolated, no meetings, no calls. Not to assess what was broken inside Microsoft. To think about what was next. Allen & Company has been renting out all of Sun Valley, Idaho for decades, and every year the people running the most consequential companies in media and tech descend on it. Not to audit their firms, but because the conversations that shape the next decade cannot happen inside their buildings. The peers who stretch them aren’t in those buildings.
When you step away, really step away, three things happen. You get clarity on your vivid vision, because you finally have the altitude to see past this quarter, past the case, past the latest fire. You get real evidence of what your firm can and can’t do without you. And underneath both of those, you get the actual transformation: the shift from the lawyer who reacts to the practice to the CEO who builds what the practice becomes.
“I’ll do it when things settle down,” is an arrival fallacy. Things are not going to settle down. The decision to lead from authority instead of anxiety is available to you right now. Not after the next trial. Now.
Final Thoughts
Which force is costing your firm the most velocity: friction, drag or mass? Don’t stop at the surface answer. Go one layer deeper. What energy state underlies that force? And what would it mean for your firm, your team and your life if you changed it?
That’s the work. It’s the only work that actually matters.
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