Law Firms, want to know how you leaving money on the table?

It’s been pretty busy the last month or so. In between my usual run of clinic work, there has been a flurry of activity on the My Freedom To Thrive website design to represent the company’s future trajectory.

Over the last year, as many of you know, I have been presenting to Lawyers, Law Firms and local Law Societies the length and breadth of the UK, helping the attendees get to grips with some of the basic psychology of difficult divorces. This whole process was a bit of a wake up call for me professionally.

On starting out, I had quite naively believed that the need for my clinical expertise would be solely client facing, but it quickly became apparent to my clinical eye, that I was greatly underestimating the support needs of the legal professionals themselves. And so, this began a different set of conversations with Law Firms – ‘what are you doing to support your Lawyers’ mental health?’

I was quite shocked by the general response – well-being services are not seen as an essential operational expenditure. It appeared that company performance was not being linked to even the most basic questions of human resource functionality.

I began looking at the numbers myself, asking the simple question ‘how much potential money is being left on the table?’ Even with a very basic model, the numbers were eye-watering. The cap being unnecessary placed on potential annual growth was staggering.

Over the last month then I have been pulling together the innovative business case for My Freedom To Thrive’s specialist psychological services being contracted by firms. I have been making sure my website is unambiguous about my unique expertise in this field – 30 years of research, clinical practice, academic teaching and involvement with NHS Service design is pretty hard to deny.

And, now I am ready to start my first round of presentations to those Law Firms who have shown an interest in having financial growth conversations based on a well-established organisational and operational model (having a PhD from one of the top 200 World’s ranked Universities, School of Management appears to have came in handy after all).

However, I am also aware that this is a conversation that needs to be had over a wider audience so in my next few articles, I am going to begin to outline some of the theory that underpins the business model. Stay tuned.