Improving lawyer performance through personality science
LawyerBrain LLC is a consulting firm that specializes in helping AmLaw 100 law firms and law departments of Fortune 500 companies succeed by applying scientific principles to help improve the performance of your people. We study scientific advances in neuroscience, social psychology, positive psychology, leadership science, and a variety of other social science disciplines and then translate them into practical, useable insights that actually work in a legal environment.
Solving issues
LawyerBrain helps firms with a variety of issues such as
Serving as a trusted advisor to the senior leaders of top legal departments
Serving as a trusted advisor to the senior leaders of top law firms
Helping firms to train and develop leaders (including a special program for your senior leadership team)
Helping firms to cope with change, uncertainty, and its consequences
Helping law firm leaders to get their lawyers to do what they’re supposed to do
Repairing dysfunctional behavior, improving morale, and resolving conflict
Building employee engagement, and motivating your lawyers
Helping your lawyers to increase their mental toughness and psychological resilience
Helping your firm do a better job of attracting, selecting, hiring and retaining lawyers, especially those in the Millennial generation
Giving keynote addresses that are meaningful, motivating, memorable
Facilitating difficult conversations
Working with practice groups and client or industry teams to teach teamwork skills
Designing and implementing multi-rater feedback systems (upward evaluations, peer reviews, 360-degree feedback)
Administering and interpreting a wide variety of psychological assessments to help your lawyers improve their awareness and their performance (including measures of personality, values, strengths, styles, emotional intelligence, and other dimensions)
Helping firm leaders to gain psychological buy-in for change initiatives such as strategy implementation, new compensation systems, or post-merger situations
Providing confidential coaching to managing partners and other senior law firm leaders to improve psychological sophistication and overall leadership effectiveness
Helping law firms transition from “lockstep to levels”
Designing competency models so that you have a scientific basis for recruiting talent (Can also be used to develop your leaders)
Helping law firm General Counsels or Directors of Risk Management by applying the latest psychology research in the service of loss prevention
Clients often ask what we do
Providing our clients with the tools they need to grow
Providing regular confidential advice to the managing partner, general counsel, or other members of the senior leadership team
Designing and helping you to execute a program that will improve lawyer performance (leadership, managing change, working in teams, doing a better job at selecting/hiring talent, etc.)
Giving a presentation or a keynote at a retreat or offsite
Conducting workshops in your firm or department
Working with your professionals over a 2- to 4-month period to repair dysfunctional behavior
Working with star lawyers one-on-one to improve their performance
Law firms that hire LawyerBrain have a variety of interests and challenges
A few of our recent assignments
Help a firm that recently merged to design a new associate talent model, while building significant buy-in among the lawyers for the changes proposed
Use psychological testing to identify the key characteristics of the top performing lawyers at a mid-size firm, and develop a hiring protocol in order to find top talent who fit this unique firm’s culture
Coach the managing partner of an AmLaw 30 US firm. Coach the managing partner of a top 10 Lexpert firm in Canada
Help 2 different law firms to repair dysfunctional behavior — in one, the litigation department has some internal dysfunction; in the other, one practice group is not getting along well with other groups
Design an upward evaluation multi-rater tool to provide feedback to partners, along with tailored coaching
Design and conduct a 6-month Action Learning leadership program for a mid-size firm to create a group of lawyers who can actually demonstrate superior leadership skills that can be measured
Design an interactive retreat presentation for a 200-partner firm retreat that is both educational and entertaining, and keeps the partners highly engaged for 4 hours
Provide advice to the leadership of an AmLaw 50 US firm on how to increase employee engagement
Develop a program using the latest “cognitive behavioral” strategies to teach lawyers how to be more Resilient in the face of stress, setbacks and uncertainty
Introducing
Dr. Larry Richard
Dr. Larry Richard is recognized as the leading expert on the psychology of lawyer behavior. In addition, Dr. Richard is one of the leading experts in helping law firms and legal departments to improve organizational performance, capitalize on strengths, and bring out the best in your people, using principles of behavioral science.
A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, he was a litigator for ten years before earning his PhD in psychology from Temple University. Since then, he has gathered and analyzed personality data on thousands of lawyers, and consulted with several hundred premier legal providers on a wide range of complex behavioral issues such as building resilience, change management, leadership development, talent issues, and improving lawyer well-being.
Prior to founding LawyerBrain, Dr. Richard chaired the Leadership & Organization Improvement practice at Hildebrandt International, the legal specialty consultancy for 7 years. Previous to that, he was a partner at Altman Weil, another prominent legal consultancy.
Known for his ability to distill cutting edge scientific principles into actionable recommendations for improving lawyer performance, Dr Richard is a frequent presenter at professional conferences, and a sought-after keynote speaker, as well as a highly sought after consultant and trusted advisor for senior leaders of law firms and corporate legal departments.
Our approach
Everything we do is based on our thorough study of the scientific principles of human behavior. We monitor the literature in the fields of cognitive neuroscience, psychology, administrative science, leadership science, and related fields, and then test and translate the findings in order to glean the most practical advice for our law firm and law department clients.
Using the findings from our 20+ years of research and study of the lawyer personality, we tailor our advice and interventions so that they are optimized specifically for large, multi-jurisdiction law firms and large law departments.
Our mission
“My mission is to use personality science to help your firm thrive, to perform at a superior level, to make the most of what you’ve got, to help you maximize the talent you have, and get more like them.”