Each year, our law firm goes out of town and spends a couple of days together in a big AirBnB planning the year, iterating and optimizing our systems, identifying pain points and ways to improve our client service delivery, and developing our legal skills.
As a fully virtual law firm, since we started SpringLaw in 2017, these in-person annual retreats are a critical part of our infrastructure. It’s where we all really get to know each other on both a professional and personal level, where real conversations happen about what works and doesn’t work in our firm, and where a ton of problem-solving gets done. Those late-night games of Taboo and Cranium we played, the delicious Indian meal we shared, and all the in-between moments of laughter and good conversations pull us together in a warm and human way. When we return to our desks on Monday, we continue the many connected conversations through our Chat channels, video calls and our weekly all-team video call meeting. Our full team participates. Our operational people are as critical as our lawyers and one cannot exist without the other. All voices matter at the table, and many of the best ideas on client service improvements, knowledge management systems and overall firm workflow come from our exceptional ops team.Lawyers are People Too Practicing law is a gruelling profession. It’s not for everyone, and for every lawyer, we all face a life-long challenge to manage the emotional toll our distraught clients can have on us (we really are an empathetic caring lot!), the pressure to hit revenue targets, and that delicate balance of efficient practical legal solutions with the usual complexity of legal analysis and risk. It takes years of ongoing skill development to strike the right balance on most (but never all) days. Helping people through their workplace legal issues is a privilege we do not take lightly. Our Annual Retreat is part of our year-round commitment to the training and career support critical to developing our lawyers to serve our clients, while equally focused on supporting our firm’s culture of peer mentoring and open-door helping each other.
SpringLaw’s 2024 We have a lot on the go for 2024. We’re hiring another lawyer, updating some of our internal knowledge management systems, continuing to dig deep into our legal project management system, having some exciting marketing projects on the go, plus all ongoing operational stuff behind the scenes that keeps our firm running smoothly. Here’s to another year of collaboration and learning together!
