On the Law Firm Retreat Blog, you’ll find insights, ideas and practical tools that help groups of lawyers meet together better.
If you’d like to talk about how to use these techniques in your next conference, retreat or meeting, drop me a line. I’d love to help!
Rapid-Fire Idea Sharing
Want an easy-to-facilitate session that will deliver a ton of useful information at your next retreat or conference? Try a round of Rapid-Fire Idea Sharing.
I just introduced the format at ACLEA‘s Annual Meeting in Boston, which I co-chaired. Here’s how it worked:
- I asked 20 CLE pros to share something cool or interesting they’d done or learned in the last year.
- Each presenter got 2 minutes in front of a packed house for their “presentation,” though many took less time to share their idea or tip.
- At the end of each presentation, I told the audience what table each speaker would be sitting at once the initial presentations were over.
- After all 20 presenters finished (in about 30 minutes), the audience was able to spend the next hour talking to the speakers they wanted to learn more from. Some tables had 30-50 people crowding around to hear more about the speaker’s idea.
The presentations were fast-paced and fun. Several attendees even stayed around after the session “officially” ended to keep learning from our experts.
If you’re looking for an activity that gets lots of people involved while requiring very little from them, I’d highly recommend you give it a try!
Ten Rules of Law Firm Retreats
Whether your next law firm retreat takes place at a tropical location or in the firm’s conference room, there are several things to keep in mind to make it productive, useful and fun.
Here are Ten “Rules” that you should keep in mind when planning your next firm retreat that can make it great:
1. When planning a retreat, the most important voice at the table should belong to your best clients. Ask them what you need to improve upon in the coming year, and invite them if you dare.
2. At a good retreat, firm management spends as much time listening to the lawyers as they do talking to them. At a great retreat, that ratio is closer to 3:1.
3. It is far more important for attorneys to think together at your next firm retreat than it is for them to golf together.
4. If you don’t make time for lawyers to improve your firm during the retreat, they’re less likely to take time to improve your firm when the retreat is done.
5. In big firms, the first thing you should teach lawyers is one another’s names. Familiarity builds collegiality. Lawyers won’t care what their colleagues do until they know who they are.
6. “Networking” cocktail parties don’t encourage firm-wide collaboration as much as they encourage firm-wide inebriation.
7. If the firm retreat is the only time lawyers talk about marketing, it will be the only time they think about marketing. Same goes for client service.
8. Your staff knows more about how to serve your clients well than your associates do. Bring them along, value their opinions and act on their suggestions. You’ll find that the cost of their attendance is far lower than the cost of their absence.
9. The three questions every lawyer should be able to answer after a retreat are: “What can I do better?” “Who should I know better?” and “Why should I be better?”
10. The two costliest items at any firm retreat are the time and attention of the attendees. Use them wisely.
Build a Promise Wall
In law firm retreats and practice group meetings, it isn’t uncommon for attendees to commit to doing something specific to improve their practice, increase their business, etc., only to forget about it as soon as they exit the room.
There’s a simple way to get law firm retreat attendees to keep their promises: make them write those promises down and post them on a “Promise Wall” where they’ll be seen. Make certain the promises are specific, actionable and measurable (“I will write one article for the firm newsletter each quarter in 2012″ is far better than “I will write more in 2012.”), and are signed by the promisor. At the end of the year, the practice group or office with the most “kept” promises wins.
Here’s an 11″ x 17″ poster that I’ll be using at my next retreat to get participants to share their promises to one another and to the firm for 2012.
* An Apology: I know I’ve seen a similar poster somewhere before, but I can’t find the source for proper attribution. If you know where it comes from, please let me know.
A Visual Guide to Open Space
Stine Arensbach has written a great introduction to Open Space, and includes some tremendous examples of how she incorporates visuals to explain the simple rules of Open Space to participants.
In an Open Space session, the facilitator asks participants what they want to talk about, trusts them to lead sessions on their chosen topics, and then gets out of their way. As someone who’s facilitated several Open Space sessions with lawyers, I’ve found it is a great way to get groups of smart people engaged and thinking together quickly and productively.
I’ll have a post up soon on some specific tips for using Open Space with lawyers, but until then, check out Stine’s entire post (and fun images like the one above).
Share Ideas in a Snowball Fight
All too often, people won’t share their own ideas because they’re embarrassed they’ll be ridiculed. Here’s a quick facilitation trick that will loosen up a room and get people sharing their ideas without the fear attribution can cause: Have a “snowball” fight.
Here’s how it works
Group members write ideas on pieces of scrap paper and crumble them up into a ball. When it come time to share the ideas, the group has a big paper fight. When finished, people pick up the paper balls, uncrumble, and read the ideas on the paper out loud.
(via Cathy Sork on the WACA Online site)
Graphic Gameplan Your Next Retreat
There’s a fantastic technique over at the Gamestorming Blog called Graphic Gameplan that is great for taking a large, multi-dimensional project (like a law firm retreat or practice group meeting) and breaking it down into manageable chunks that can be done in a planning meeting with all the stakeholders present.
Here’s how it works (go read the Gamestorming post for the full instructions):
3. Display the graphic (above) on the meeting room wall and tell the players that the goal ofthe meeting is to get consensus around specific tasks required to complete a project.
4. Write the name of the first project to be discussed at the top left of the first column. As the group leader, you can write all associated projects downward in that same column or you can ask the players to add projects that they agree need attention. Either way, you should end up with the relevant projects listed in the leftmost column.
5. Based on the projects listed, either tell the group the time frame and write the milestones in days, weeks, or months along the top row, or ask what they think it should be and write that time frame along the top. (Note: you can also establish a timeline after step 8.)
6. Sticky notes in hand, ask the players to choose a project and agree aloud on the first step required to accomplish it. Write their contribution on the sticky note and post it in the first box next to that project.
7. Ask the players for the second, third, and fourth steps, and so on. Keep writing their comments on sticky notes until they’re satisfied that they’ve adequately outlined each step to complete the project.
8. Repeat steps 6 and 7 for every project on your display, until the game plan is filled out.
After the grid is complete with the project’s steps, make certain there’s an assigned person to do (or at least be responsible for) the task represented on each sticky note.
Using this technique with almost any big project will help kick it off and keep everyone informed on what needs to be done and who’s going to do it!
Collaborate Better with Marshmallows
If you’re looking for a simple exercise that gets people collaborating in a short amount of time, you may want to try The Marshmallow Challenge, a design exercise that fosters collaboration, innovation and creativity.
What is the group task?
In eighteen minutes, teams must build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow. The marshmallow needs to be on top.
I’ve done this exercise several times, and highly recommend it. To learn more, watch this TED talk by Tom Wujec:
Rethink the Firm Retreat Nametag
One of the most overlooked opportunities for building collaboration and networking opportunities at most big meetings, retreats and conferences is using name tags for more than just names.
Instead of the traditional pin-on badge, rethink the name tag and make it the size of a concert credential.
Use your larger tag real estate to identify the wearer’s practice group, geographic location and even years in the firm, using easy-to-read-at-a-distance icons and colors.
Add a seven-word bio that lawyers create before the event in a firm-wide competition. If each attendee already has their agenda set, add their room/table assignments so they’ll always know where they’re going.
Here’s one I created for a 300 partner retreat last year:
If you’re willing to rethink the name tags at your next event, please send an image my way. I’d love to see what you’ve come up with!
Create an Answer Gallery at Your Next Retreat
Creating an “Answer Gallery” is one of the easiest and most effective law firm retreat exercises I use — and as a bonus, it fits perfectly between sessions or at the beginning of the day as the attendees arrive.
The goal of the exercise is simple: to engage attendees and get them thinking about the topics of the day as they answer “big” questions anonymously.
Here’s how you do it:
- Post dozens of large, easel-sized post-it notes around the room.
- Write a single, open-ended question on the top of each one.
- Give each participant a Sharpie fine-point marker (regular pens make it hard for others to read the notes) and a 3×3 pad of colored post-it notes.
- Ask everyone to walk around the room and answer the questions on the small post-it notes and then stick their answers on the big question page.
- Photograph or transcribe all of the answers and share them with the group once the event is over.
And here’s what the final result can look like:
Worksheet: How to Create an Answer Gallery
Ignite Your Firm Retreat With Shorter Presentations
“It is with words as with sunbeams. The more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.” - Robert Southey
For the last two years, I’ve been co-producer and host of Ignite Law — an evening of short six-minute presentations about the future of law practice. In the Ignite format, speakers are limited to six minutes and twenty slides (which advance automatically behind them).
While it is terribly difficult to give an Ignite presentation, it is incredibly fun to watch one. Ignite presenters who, in a normal presentation may ramble to stretch twenty minutes of content to fill an hour, must instead identify their key ideas and distill them to their essence — and even when a speaker is less than engaging, their presentation is almost over the moment it begins.
If you’re interested in using the Ignite format in your next law firm retreat to replace some of the ”mandatory” presentations like practice-group reports, legal updates and “state of the firm” speeches, following these rules will help this format succeed:
- Do not make the allotted time optional. If you settle on six-minute speeches, enforce the time limit mercilessly. This is easier if you’ve got a strong emcee who will get the long-winded presenter off the stage.
- Schedule the presentations back-to-back. Using the six-minute format, you can easily accomodate between seven and nine speakers in an hour-long session. Keeping several presentations together will drive the competitive impulses of the speakers and raise the energy of the room.
- Follow the One Presenter/One Topic rule. If anyone asks to tag-team a presentation, don’t let them. If they’ve got too much info for just one to share, give each speaker take his or her own six-minute slot.
- Don’t let the presenters control their slides. The presentations will be more fun to watch and it will be easier to stay on time when the slides are on auto-pilot (in a six-minute/twenty slide presentation, each slide is on the screen for 18 seconds).
- Add all the presentations to one master slide deck. In order to keep the presentations moving, don’t let technology changes slow down the transitions. Put everything in one deck and set the transitions from there.
- Eliminate the Q & A, but build in discussion time. Don’t allow the audience to ask questions, but instead schedule 30-60 minutes after the presentations are done and give each speaker their own table. When you introduce each speaker, announce that they’ll be at Table X after the session to answer any questions.
For more on hosting your own Ignite-style event, take a look at the Speaker’s Guide (pdf) we prepared for our Ignite Law speakers before our 2011 event. It has some resources and rules you may want to adopt for your own use.
I’m happy to help you if you’re considering a similar format for your next firm retreat. Let me know if you have any questions.
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