ABOUT KAREN
How I Came to See It This Way
I have always felt passionate about helping people achieve what is most important to them, my children included.
For me, that passion is rooted in really seeing the person or organization fully. Who is this person? What is important to them? Where does this organization want to go next? And what is happening around them that matters?
What will enable them to get where they most want to go?
I think that question has been in my bones from the beginning, and it burst to the surface when, as a freshman in college, a professor I respected enormously told me, quite firmly, that I should become a psychologist. She saw something in me I had never considered. I immediately said, “Okay.”
I entered a psychology program at the University of Virginia. My work went on to include gender, race, adult development, and work with individuals, organizations, and
athletics.
At that “halfway point” in life, I wanted a shift. Coaching was just finding its footing and fit me like a glove.
And then came the practical business question: Who needed what I knew?
I researched industries. Lots of them.
Law firms popped up.
My background in gender fit what firms were confronting, and my entrepreneurial experience fit their growing emphasis on lawyers building books of business.
I studied law firms a lot at the beginning and continue that learning every day.
Twenty-five years later, the rigor of being a lawyer impresses me, and the brilliance you all carry astounds me. I’m also struck by how much lawyers and law firms give to clients, communities, and society.
Yet somewhere in all that giving, I often see a giant hole:
YOU.
That’s my spot.
That’s where I enter conversations, whether with an individual lawyer or a firm:
“What is your vision of what you most want to have happen?”
Vision tells me what matters and where we are trying to go. Sometimes reality requires us to shift it a little. But I am a little nutty about getting as close as possible to what each individual or firm really wants to achieve.
I bring all of that with me: experience with individuals, organizations, athletics, businesses large and small, and law firms. And I never look at a goal in isolation. I look at what is happening around it, what creates value, what grows revenue, and what today’s rapidly changing legal marketplace means for where you want to go.
That’s how I came to see it this way.
What is most important to you?
