LEGAL SECTOR

Richard is a highly experienced executive coach and mentor in law, working with hundreds of law firm leaders, senior and junior partners, partner candidates, business services directors and many others throughout his career.

His speciality is partner candidates, new partners and equity-track partners, with many many years of working intensely with these cohorts. Several of his former coachees are now in senior leadership roles and have been generous enough to give Richard some credit for helping them achieve their success.

Richard has a unique combination of skills and experience as a former lawyer, long-time L&D head, skills and leadership trainer, and workplace culture lead, as well as many years sitting on the Exec Board of a major law firm. He brings all of this into his law firm coaching, whether as background to understand the coachees' challenges more quickly, or as inputs when advice or frameworks might be helpful.

As well as more junior partners, he has worked with Managing Partners, Senior Partners, and several practice group and office heads.

Coaching goals are very much led by the client but have often included:  

• Stepping into the partner role
• Navigating the partner promotion process
• Preparing to move into the equity
• Making the transition into a leadership role
• Building up a book of business
• Managing challenging relationships
• Managing different generations in the workplace
• Workload management
• Imposter syndrome/Building Confidence
• ⁠Presenting skills

Richard is an accomplished leadership and skills trainer and "one of the best" in-person workshop facilitators in the market.

You don't come out of one of Richard's sessions bored!

He creates dynamic and high energy sessions, with a strong focus on getting to the heart of the specific challenges of those attending and how they can start to make sustainable changes. He uses models and frameworks, but only where they add real value and help to reinforce the issues that the group have identified.

It is a group coaching approach to workshops, strong on storytelling and engagement, where the agenda is formed in part by the delegates, live in the room, and which leaves them feeling motivated and ready to put ideas into action. 

In recent years, Richard has also become a creative virtual workshops facilitator, exploiting the technology to develop engaging and impactful (shorter) sessions on Zoom and Teams.

Topics for training workshops at all levels have included:  

• Leadership and Management Skills
• Business Strategy
• Values Creation and Implementation
• Workload Management
• Communication Skills
• Persuasive Presenting/Elevator Pitching
• Challenging Conversations
• Giving Feedback and Appraisal Skills
• Resilience and Stress Management

Richard is also an award-winning culture leader in law, with a deep insight into law firms and their ethos and values.

Richard's experience has shown him that what matters most is alignment between the operating model of the firm and the stated culture. Where these are out of sync, often with good intentions, dissatisfaction can grow with short and long term consequences for the business.

If you your culture is misaligned, the people you want to stay will leave and the people you might want to leave will end up staying.

Richard's approach is as follows:

• He builds trust quickly with key stakeholders and gets to the heart of the day-to-day reality in the firm. 
• With his many years experience on law firm Boards, he can then get to grips with your operating model and start to build  picture of where the gaps exist. 
• He can then offer practical and realistic solutions.

Having worked for most of his career in mid-sized firms, he understand the challenges of making lasting changes with small - and sometimes zero - resource. He recently led an hugely successful Values Refresh project for a major firm which won Internal Best Engagement Initiative and the Grand Prix (best overall) prize at the People in Law Awards 2025.