Built for the Storm: How to Lead a Law Firm Through Uncertainty

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Are you a law firm owner who needs advice on leading a team in a crisis? In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, attorney and law firm owner Tiffany Webber shares the profound personal and professional impact of her law partner’s sudden passing. She recounts the immediate aftermath, the challenges of leading her firm through crisis, and the lessons learned about resilience, leadership, and preparation. 

Tiffany shares her insights on leading a firm amidst losing a loved one. One thing is having the skill to be calm under pressure. You can’t control when someone close to you passes, but you can control yourself and your reaction to something. As a lawyer, people come to you with answers, so it is important to know when to remain calm and collected. Another thing to have is a bias for action. Many people will sit back and analyze. They will wait to make a decision when they have received all the answers. But, in this field, you will never always have every piece of information. Sometimes, you need to make decisions in the moment with what you have.

Having a good leadership team is crucial, especially when you as the owner have a lot of things on their plate. Other leaders in the firm can not only support you by taking on the additional load, but you can lean on them for support. Also, if you don't know something about a topic, having others as subject matter experts can be such an advantage. This also helps with succession planning, so someone can take over while you focus on other things.

Listen in to learn more!

2:06 Survival Guide for a Crisis
4:12 Bias for Action
12:03 Facing Discomfort
18:00 Creating a Good Leadership Team
20:46 Letting the Right People In

Connect with Tiffany:

• Website 

Tune in to today’s episode and checkout the full show notes here. 

Creators and Guests

Host

Tyson Mutrux

Tyson is the founder of Mutrux Firm Injury Lawyers and the co-founder of Maximum Lawyer.

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Maximum Lawyer is the podcast for law firm owners who want to scale with intention and build a business that works for their life.

Hosted by Tyson Mutrux, each weekly episode features candid conversations with law firm owners, business experts, and industry leaders sharing real strategies and lessons learned in the trenches.

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Tiffany Webber 00:00:00 I was wearing a white button up and jeans standing in my closet, wondering if I should change when the phone rang. It was my law partner's wife. 90 minutes earlier, they had invited us out to dinner and they were running late, per usual. Very much like them. But her next ten words changed everything she said. I have found Ben unresponsive and he has passed away. You see, in the last 90 minutes I thought all that had happened was I put gas in my car, bought some groceries, I changed out of leggings. But just a couple of miles away, those 90 minutes were filled with CPR, AEDs and paramedics. I spent the next 36 hours awake, desperately making plans and desperately questioning whether I had what it took to carry on and what I didn't know about myself then, but I do now, is that I was built for the storm. And you probably are too. Even if you don't realize it. So let's talk about it. This has been, by the way.

Tiffany Webber 00:01:07 He was the life of every party. And if you want to know anything about what Ben was like, I was going to mention this even before he got called on stage with Doctor Silk. But he's just like Brooke Steric, so you can imagine practicing law was pretty fun with him. an LSU guy through and through. He was my mentor. I always told him that July 1989 was a really good month for him, because he got licensed to practice law and his future law partner was born, and he really didn't like that. He didn't like being reminded that, you know, he had 30 years on me. now, this next person is not been. This is Forrest Griffin, and he's better known as an MMA fighter. But once, for some reason, he wrote this survival guide to the apocalypse. and I just love the title of it. That's what I wanted to name the presentation, but I wasn't sure if it would go well with a group of, you know, usually pretty conservative people.

Tiffany Webber 00:02:06 But consider this your survival guide for a crisis. So there are three main areas I want to focus on. First one is skills. the next one is mindset and then preparation. And of course we're going to talk about the mistakes that I made that I hope you can learn from, because we will all at some point face a crisis. And I know there's no true way to be ready. You know, things are going to happen, but there are skills that you can develop. There are mindsets that you can have that will help carry you through when you have hard times. So the first one cool under pressure. I'm talking to a group of attorneys, and this is really something we get to practice every single day. And once my husband, who is also here, said, you know what to you really remind me of someone, oh, I know who it is. It's it's Marty from Ozark. And I said, I don't think that's a compliment. but what he really meant by that was that he felt that I had the ability to stay calm in a crisis, that really, no matter what happened, I was going to be collected.

Tiffany Webber 00:03:13 You really couldn't get me too riled up. You couldn't. I didn't have super high highs, but not super low lows either. but as attorneys, we have to be the calm voice in the chaos. We have to be the clear thinkers when there is a crisis, because people look to us to know the answers. But the thing that really helps me the most in being this cool under pressure person was that I had no control over the fact that my law partner died unexpectedly. There's nothing you can control in that situation except yourself and your own reaction. So being able to to be calm, even though all of these things were happening around me, felt like the one thing that I did have a little bit of control over. So not only did it help me get through things, but it gave me that sense of control that I was so desperately seeking. Now the next thing is a bias for action. And this is something that my leadership coach, John Eades, talks about a lot. And this refers to your natural preference to move, to make a decision.

Tiffany Webber 00:04:12 It's an instinct to rather than sit back and analyze, to just take that step forward, to learn from experience and not be paralyzed by a decision. And while I think that now I have a bias for action, it certainly was not always that way. And I know with so many attorneys in the room that you can relate, we want all the facts. We want to know everything that's going on. I would analyze every opportunity from all the different angles. I would wait to gather facts. And as you all know, we never get all the facts. It's impossible to know everything that you need to know. and I got sick of opportunities passing me by because of my own shortcomings. So what I decided was that, okay, if I can't have all the facts, what I can do is identify the very next step that I can take right now. And then I started doing those things, and by the time Ben had passed away, I developed that skill enough that it was like an auto pilot.

Tiffany Webber 00:05:10 you know, when when your law partner passes away, there's a lot of things you have to figure out pretty quickly. so being able to just pick the very next thing that you needed to do. And if you're stuck in a loop, if you're anything like I was, you would get stuck in a loop wanting to know everything possible that you needed to know. it can be really helpful to recognize that you don't have to have the whole solution right now. It's really tempting to get stuck in that trap that when you have to solve a problem, the whole thing's got to get done. But that's not always the case, especially in a time of crisis. You maybe won't be able to solve the problem at all, but you can figure out the next step to take. So I would encourage you to start exercising that skill so that when you are inevitably faced with a crisis, it becomes natural to you. Next, paint the windows black, and I'm sure a lot of you have heard the story about Sylvester Stallone when he was writing the screenplay for Rocky.

Tiffany Webber 00:06:08 He painted the windows in his apartment black. He took the phone out of the apartment. Now, why would he do that? Because he didn't like screenwriting. And it was hard. And he knew that if the phone was in his apartment and it rang, he was going to answer it and he was going to stop writing. He knew that if he looked out the window and it was a nice day, he was going to go outside and he was going to stop writing. He knew that if he even if he wasn't feeling tired, if he looked outside and it was dark, he'd think I should go to bed. I'll get back to this tomorrow. And he'd stop writing. But he wanted more than anything to write, so he painted his windows black. And when things get hard, it's so tempting to introduce the distractions because we don't want to feel the hurt. We don't want to feel the discomfort. We don't want to feel the pain. But that's the time when you need to recognize.

Tiffany Webber 00:06:55 You need to know when and how to paint the windows black. Next is scrappy. I already know there's a lot of scrappy people in the room. We're law firm owners. we just figure out how to get things done. It's what we have to do. So even if we don't want to, it's got to get done. So who else is going to do it? Sometimes. And when I was, when I first became partners with Ben, I was fairly young. and I didn't have too many years practicing under my belt and revealing an insecurity of mine. I felt like I didn't have a lot of credibility, so I was desperate to figure out ways to give myself some credibility. And one of those things was that I decided pretty early on I needed to know how to do everything in the firm. Now, when you start your own firm from scratch, that's a little bit more natural because you're often the one doing everything. But I became partners with someone who had developed a process and systems over many years, so I came into a fully functioning firm that I needed to learn how to do everything, and I felt it was important.

Tiffany Webber 00:08:00 There should be no program that I couldn't operate, no process that I didn't know. And because of that, I felt empowered to be able to solve problems without waiting on anyone. And then also, I didn't immediately jump to throwing money that I didn't have at problems. And speaking of money that we didn't have, we didn't have money for billboards. We didn't have money for ads. We didn't have all these big sponsorships, but we did have a camera in the internet. So we started making videos and a lot of them, like 600 of them, and we started doing them differently from everyone else. And that's mostly because in 2018, none of the law firms around us were cared about. Video in fact, they kind of looked down on us for doing video and thought it was like kind of elementary and not worthy of the profession, all those things. But we didn't care. We didn't care then, and we do not care now. We had a marketing problem and we needed to fix it.

Tiffany Webber 00:08:55 And we had a camera in the internet. So we made our own inhouse recording studio so that we could record whenever we wanted. And the reason was because we felt like if we got a problem, we got to get our hands dirty and solve it. And that's scrappy. That's, that's something that I think probably most of the people in this room already have inherent in them from starting a law firm. Next is communication. And this is, this was the number one skill that helped me when my law partner passed away unexpectedly. And there's one thing that you need to be good at as a lawyer. It's communicating because we're trying to persuade judges, juries, opposing counsel, clients, and we have to be able to talk to each one of those audiences in a different way so that they can understand what we're trying to convey. I didn't know, though, how important communication would be until I had to sit down on my bed on a Saturday night and call 15 different people to tell them that their leader had just passed away.

Tiffany Webber 00:09:58 that was a really tough night, but I was thankful that I knew how to communicate. Not a Saturday night. On Monday morning, we got the team together before we started our day, and I knew that it was going to be really, really important for them to hear a plan didn't mean I had everything figured out, but I did have a plan. And what I have decided is that an communicated plan in a crisis might as well not exist. So it didn't matter if I had spent 36 hours a week making a plan. If they didn't know about it and know what it was, they didn't think I had one. And they felt a ton of uncertainty. And I also knew that if I explained the plan poorly, then they would maybe feel worse after than they did going in. They needed to know did did they have a business that they were going to keep getting employed and getting paychecks from? They needed to know, was I in this or was I too grief stricken to be able to, you know, go in and do my job? But they needed also a clear message that we had, the skills, we had the team.

Tiffany Webber 00:11:00 We had every resource that we needed to keep going and keep fighting. And that's exactly what we did, starting with the 18 closings we had scheduled that day. speaking of going back to scrapping us a little bit, when you're used to having two attorneys in a, in each conference room doing closings all day long, and then you suddenly go to having one, you quickly figure out how to make adjustments so that your clients aren't impacted. But we figured it out. Wasn't fun, but we got to it. Now, next I'll talk a little bit about mindset. Now, I'm no mindset expert. I'm certainly no doctor Jason Silk, but these are the few things that helped me when I really needed it. And the first is a killer mentality. I think about this photo a lot when I think of killer mentality. I also think of Jalen Hurts lock screen after he lost the Super Bowl where he's just leaving the stadium while the confetti is falling around him. And that seems kind of somber. But to me, I think of it's an element of being Relentless of never being satisfied.

Tiffany Webber 00:12:03 And I don't mean that you, you know, you don't think you're good enough. You can absolutely have selfworth while still thinking that you have more to learn, more to do, more to give. And if you're a person that perpetually has that sense of I've got more in me, that is probably not just going to disappear when you hit a hard time. That's exactly what you need to rise to the surface so that you can take the next steps that you need to take to guide your team and your firm through the desire for results, especially if that result is to become better for yourself, really helps you carry on. Next, and this is my least favorite one. I'll just. This was the hardest one for me is to face the discomfort, and unfortunately the only way through it is through it. That's it. when things are uncomfortable, when the situation hurts, there's not a magic wand. There is nobody coming to save you. To get through it, you have to go through it, and you could spend all of your mental energy trying to figure out ways to avoid the hurt, to avoid the pain.

Tiffany Webber 00:13:07 Whatever situation it is that you do not want to confront. But I decided that I only had so much mental energy, and I would rather spend it on solutions and figuring out what to do next, rather than trying to just pretend none of this was happening. And I would encourage you that if you're ever confronted with the crisis to do the same thing of focus on the solutions rather than avoiding the pain, the pain is going to be there anyway, and the only way you get through it is through it. Next, be the thermostat, not the thermometer. I'm a person that doesn't like to take the temperature. I would rather set it. And I think that was especially important when my law partner died, because they were looking to me as the leader that was left to know how should what's the tone, how should they act? What are we going to do here? And that's not to say I didn't grieve or didn't break down or have my fair share of sob sessions in the bathroom between closings.

Tiffany Webber 00:14:04 But instead of dwelling in all of that grief, I felt like I needed to set the tone, and it ended up being really important for the team that we did that because they they saw that, okay, we can we can be extremely sad, but we also can keep moving forward and serving these clients that we care about so much. And I think this is a skill that applies in a lot of different areas of life. If you are surrounded by people who like to tear others down, if you are surrounded by people who are constantly thinking of the negative and never talking about anything good that's happening in their life. if you have a staff or a team that they're very change resistant, and any time you try to bring up a solution to a problem, you're like, yeah, maybe I won't match it because they're going to hate it. then you're being the thermometer. Stop that. Be the thermostat, set the tone, and not everyone's going to follow suit. But then you won't be a follower.

Tiffany Webber 00:14:59 so think about being the thermostat instead. Next, examine your insecurities. Another moment of vulnerability. One thing that I've always struggled with a little bit is having a chip on my shoulder and feeling underestimated. And I loved this tweet. Being underestimated is one of the most monstrous competitive advantages you can have. When I was younger, I used to let this insecurity keep me from trying because I thought that if I failed, because all these people underestimated me and they didn't think I could do it, then I surely I couldn't. So I wouldn't even try because I didn't want to be seen failing. But now being underestimated, I kind of love it. If people stop doing that, I'll maybe it'll be a little bit pissed off because I'm like, oh, I like that. It's a fire for me. I like being underestimated because it means nobody can see me coming. And I only tell you this so that you can examine your own insecurities and see if there are any that maybe have been holding you back, that can actually, you can turn into a positive thing and realize that you don't have to be afraid of that thing.

Tiffany Webber 00:16:05 Next, I'm going to talk about some things that you can do to prepare for a crisis. And again, you can never be truly 100% ready for any situation that you didn't see coming. But these things will help. I promise. And the first one is financial readiness. I am so grateful that we had at the time my law partner passed a financially healthy business. We had profit, we had good cash flow, we had access to capital if we needed it. And what that bought me was time, space. I wasn't making decisions because I was worried about paying the staff. I wasn't making decisions because I was worried what could I afford? Having the financials in order, let me think about things basically in their own buckets. Nothing was being driven by the finances because that was in order. So I would encourage you that if you if your financial house is not in order, this is a really good time to start working on that. Next is having an inner circle. And I'm not saying be a social butterfly.

Tiffany Webber 00:17:04 I don't consider myself to.

Tiffany Webber 00:17:06 Be one, but.

Tiffany Webber 00:17:07 It is very important that you have people that you can trust. It doesn't have to be a lot, but the people that can give you wise counsel that if you do need to break down, they're not going to judge you for that. But they also know what you are capable of and they hold you to it. They believe in you. And maybe you don't have that selfbelief and the next being operationally sound. So make your business work even without you. And I think that's part of why a lot of us are here, is we're continually striving to have a business that will leave a legacy beyond us, and to be able to be here, away from our team while they continue working. We're all taking steps to that. But having your business to a point where you can not be there and it will continue to run, will help a lot in a crisis. Next, having a real leadership team, this is not something that we had when Ben passed away, but I'm including it on this list not because I did it, but because I wish I did.

Tiffany Webber 00:18:00 and this would have helped us so tremendously, because at that time, once Ben passed away, it was just me. I was the leadership team and that was not fun. there was, you know, and I certainly was not an expert in everything that I needed to know. So it would have been good to have others on my team that I could lean on because they were the subject matter expert in this thing, or I knew these people had all of our staff covered. so if you don't have a leadership team. I would also encourage you to do that. And then what would I do differently? Oh, so many things. So, so many things. first, for the love. Update your operating agreement. what's that saying about the cobbler's children? They have no shoes. my law partner and I, when he passed away, we were partners for less than a year, and he was only 63, so he was still fairly young. We thought we had a lot more time. And that was the phrase that I kept repeating as I thought we had so much more time, but we didn't.

Tiffany Webber 00:18:59 And if we had had the things done that we needed to right up front, it would have saved a lot of heartache when we were trying to figure out, like buying out the estates interests and all of these other things. So this one was a big shame on me for not having done that ahead of time. Please don't be me. I'm telling you this so that you will not be me. Also succession planning. We did not really have a succession plan in place then that was painful to go through. It led to some relationships that have now been repaired, but it was really tough for a while trying to navigate those things and the next intentional hiring. Oh man. I made some desperate hires. Especially when shortly after, shortly after Ben passed away, I found out that I was pregnant, and that should have been a really exciting time. But, you know, insecurities and all, I kind of kept it under wraps because I didn't want people to think that, like, oh, she's going to shut the firm down.

Tiffany Webber 00:19:57 He's dead. She's having a baby. They're done. so I kept it under wraps, but I knew I needed to hire somebody if I was going to be on maternity leave. Somebody's got to do closing, somebody's got to help the clients. And I made a desperation hire. Not one desperation hire has ever worked out for me. Maybe you guys have gotten lucky, and if so, please tell me your secrets, but never has worked for me. And then finally letting the right people in. Almost finally letting the right people in. I isolated a lot, and I wish that I had opened myself up more and let people know really how how much it sucked and how hard it was. I tried to put on the brave face, and I think I could have saved myself, you know, months worth of heartache, of being open to more people than just my husband. He really had to. He was really going through it with me.

Tiffany Webber 00:20:46 And then I'll.

Tiffany Webber 00:20:47 Close with this. I was telling a story last night about a client that I met with on Friday.

Tiffany Webber 00:20:55 Who he was there with, his business partner, whom I'd never met, and he said, oh, I've never told you the story about how I met Tiffany. I was actually the first closing she did that morning after her law partner had passed away that weekend. I didn't remember this. that was a days. I, you know, we just did what we had to do to keep going. And I had worked with him a couple of times since, and he told us his business partner sitting right there in my conference room, he said the the reason why I keep coming back is because all of this stuff was going on. It was chaos. They were sad. It was this catastrophic thing for them. But she didn't let it affect me. we were still able to do what we needed to do on time, and it went off without a hitch. And that spoke to me. And I say this because I was not giving myself any credit. And you will be tempted in a crisis to not give yourself credit.

Tiffany Webber 00:21:46 And when you're really going through it, it's easy.

Tiffany Webber 00:21:49 To question yourself and think that you are failing. But every single day that you make it through is another day that you've won. And you just need to trust in yourself.

Tiffany Webber 00:21:58 And.

Tiffany Webber 00:21:58 Your skills and know that you are built for the storm. Thank you.