Taken from VozPopuli 2025
Law firm rankings, profitability reports, comparative productivity studies, and economic analyses of the legal sector are published with increasing frequency. These efforts – useful and necessary to understand the competitive context – tend to generate constant comparative pressure on firms and their partners: margins, fees, average turnover per professional, profitability per partner…. However, in this measurement race, it is easy to forget that efficiency is not achieved by imitation or competitive race, but by internal construction. As always, the key to organizational improvement and profit is usually found by looking inside and not just outside. And this is where an essential and often overlooked dimension comes into play: the personal effectiveness of the lawyer as the starting point for any profitable and sustainable transformation in law firms.
If we add to this pressure the accelerated incorporation of technology in law firms: automation tools, databases, document management systems or collaborative platforms, all with more or less AI, firms and lawyers can lose the natural focus of the practice. While these solutions amplify the organization’s potential efficiency, their real impact depends – ultimately – on how lawyers use them. Technology is an accelerator, but it is no substitute for accountability, focus, self-management or clarity of execution. And these, as we shall see, are highly personal factors.
Although in common parlance they are used as synonyms, in management a distinction is made between effectiveness-achieving the result-and efficiency-achieving it with the least use of resources. Efficiency is desirable, but it can only be built on a solid foundation of personal effectiveness. Without it, any operating model becomes unstable.
A law firm is an organization of knowledge professionals. Its performance does not depend on machinery or physical assets, but on the intellectual, attitudinal and technical performance of its lawyers. The basic productive unit is the professional. Therefore, individual effectiveness is the strategic input that determines global efficiency. Precisely for this reason, each firm is intrinsically different from any other: its main asset – the specific talent of its lawyers – is unrepeatable. Imitating third-party practices may serve as a reference or inspiration, but it does not replace the need to design one’s own strategy, consistent with the uniqueness of that asset.
The organizational management literature and experience in consulting firms has identified six variables that have a direct impact on a lawyer’s personal effectiveness. These dimensions (Pablo Maella, IESE, 2010) are not only individual attributes, but also levers that can be managed by the firm’s management.
They are briefly developed below, with reference also to the key behaviors that activate each of them.
- Individual Responsibility. Responsibility is the driving force of personal effectiveness. It cannot be delegated or transferred: either it is assumed or one is not effective. It presupposes an attitude of ownership of the assignment, clarity of objectives and commitment to results, beyond circumstance or external supervision. A firm with unaccountable lawyers will be slow, costly and vulnerable. On the contrary, when each professional acts as the author of his or her performance, a virtuous circle is activated: greater autonomy, greater confidence, greater productivity. Among the associated behaviors are: defining realistic and challenging goals, acting proactively in the face of difficulties, not falling into victimhood, and assuming the limits of what can be controlled. Avoiding excessive responsibility: accepting more tasks than can be managed or blaming oneself for the uncontrollable also undermines effectiveness.
- Technical capacity and self-development. Capacity is not limited to accumulated technical knowledge. It is the alignment between available skills and job requirements. An effective professional is one whose strengths match the type of problems he/she faces. But in addition to possessing talent, it is necessary to develop it: it is not a matter of being “taught”, but of “you learning”. The firm must foster environments in which each lawyer identifies his or her strengths, specializes, and sets specific goals for improvement. Learning from mistakes, accepting one’s own limits and seeking tasks in line with one’s profile are key steps.
- Self-management and effective delegation. Self-management is the ability to manage one’s own work within an organizational framework. It goes beyond operational efficiency: it connects with professional self-fulfillment. A lawyer who self-manages not only accomplishes his or her tasks, but decides how to approach them, when and with what resources. For self-management to emerge, the firm must offer three conditions: clarity of objectives, provision of means, and operational autonomy. Without these three levers, no personal management is possible. A hyper-hierarchical environment, with no decision-making space or clear feedback, negates this variable. When a law firm allows its lawyers to participate in decision-making about their own work, it promotes a more humane and productive culture, which favors not only profit, but also the growth of individuals. From a behavioral point of view, self-management is expressed in: knowing what is expected of one, negotiating resources, asking for reasonable autonomy, and -if the organization does not allow it- even considering a change of professional environment.
- Attitude towards luck. Luck exists. The unexpected, the external, the uncontrollable affect any process. But the attitude towards it defines professional maturity. The effective lawyer acts as if luck did not exist, but evaluates recognizing its influence. This avoids two major mistakes: taking credit for undeserved successes or blaming oneself for inevitable failures. In terms of management, this realism makes it possible to separate causalities, maintain correct learning and sustain the effort even when the environment does not respond. It also avoids falling into sterile lamentation. The best strategy in the face of chance is to act with serenity, to always learn, and not to settle into complaining.
- Conscious simplification. Simplifying is not trivializing. It is the deliberate process of eliminating the unnecessary and focusing efforts on the essential. In complex professional environments such as legal, this ability is key: matters are full of information, variables and actors. Complexity is inevitable, but entanglement is not. Simplifying involves prioritizing tasks, eliminating friction, questioning routines, drafting with clarity, designing more agile processes and constantly looking for cleaner ways to deliver value.
- Self-motivation and sustained effort. Self-motivation is the will to act with intensity, even when we do not feel like it. It is not an emotion, but a commitment: to do what you have to do, even if there is no immediate impulse. In the legal profession, where many tasks are demanding and routine, this attitude is what separates the good professional from the reactive performer. Self-motivation manifests itself in maintaining the effort, having professional ambition, looking for meaning in what one does, and acting with constancy. It is not waiting to feel good, but doing what is necessary to feel good afterwards. The firm cannot motivate its lawyers, but it can avoid demotivating them: through recognition, transparency, consistent compensation and a clear career path.
These variables not only affect individual development: they are directly connected to the main economic indicators of profitability in a law firm. The profit drivers -margin, fee, leverage and utilization- are highly sensitive to the level of personal efficiency of the professionals. Margin improves when errors, downtime and rework, all symptoms of inefficiency, are reduced. The fee can only be sustained when the value perceived by the client justifies the price, and that value depends on the quality of the legal work and the way it is delivered. Utilization increases when the lawyer is self-managing, prioritizes well and reduces operational friction. And leverage is only viable if the partner can delegate to efficient, autonomous and well-trained lawyers. Therefore, efficiency is not just a professional virtue: it is a critical economic variable for any law firm’s business model.
Each of these variables can be managed and integrated into talent strategy, career design, selection processes, leadership systems and evaluation dynamics. Firms that ignore individual effectiveness may end up trapped in a forced, artificial and fragile efficiency.
Improving the firm starts with improving the effectiveness of each lawyer. The rest-technology, marketing, processes, structure-may come later, but perhaps not necessarily before. Personal effectiveness is not a soft skill: it is a strategic capability. And without it, no organizational efficiency is possible.
As David Maister pointed out in True Professionalism, the competitive firm is not the one with the most billable hours, but the one that gets its lawyers to work with clarity, autonomy and purpose.
Jose Luis Pérez Benítez
Partner of BlackSwan Consultoria