#81: Why BigLaw Lawyers Struggle with Clear Communication—and How to Fix It
Release Date: 07/16/2025
#105: Cringe-Free BigLaw Goals for Associates in the New Year
Big Law Life
As the year closes, I'm focusing in this episode on BigLaw goals for associates without resorting to platitudes, firm retreat slogans, or vague resolutions that quietly collapse by February. After years as an equity partner in BigLaw, I’ve seen that the associates who actually move forward are not the ones making dramatic promises to work less, do everything better, or reinvent themselves overnight. Instead, the associates who most often make progress are the ones who focus on taking smaller, actionable steps in specific, visible ways that compound inside a system that is in many ways beyond...
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#104: BigLaw Partnership Timing: What Actually Controls When You Make Partner
Big Law Life
If you are a senior associate staring at year seven, eight, or nine and trying to decode whether you are “behind,” I want you to hear this clearly: your timeline is not controlled by your work ethic or your reviews. In this episode, I break down why partnership timing is driven by structural economics inside your firm, not individual merit. We walk through the forces that actually move or stop the process, including practice group capacity, leverage ratios, PEP pressure, capital constraints, succession bottlenecks, client portability, and internal power dynamics. I also give...
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#103: The Mid-Career BigLaw Partner Crossroad - Should You Stay or Make a Lateral Move?
Big Law Life
Mid-career partners can begin quietly wondering whether they should stay where they are or explore a move. This isn’t driven by crisis or failure. It’s driven by subtle shifts, such as declining energy for a platform that once fit well, strategy drift inside the firm, client relationships that feel different, or internal politics that have grown wearisome. Yet most partners stall making a decision because they don’t want to make the wrong call and the ambiguity keeps them stuck. In today’s episode, I walk through the five stages I see that partners typically move through when...
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#102: The Most Dangerous Time in BigLaw - What Mid-Senior Associates Should Be Thinking About
Big Law Life
After years as a partner inside global law firms, I’ve seen one stage of a BigLaw career quietly determine everything that comes after it. It isn’t the first year, when everyone expects some struggle and a lot of learning. And it isn’t partnership, when you've reached that tier and are now working to build your book of business and establish your role in that space. The most dangerous stage is the mid to senior associate years. Years four through seven are where many lawyers stall without realizing it. They’re billing hard, getting strong reviews, and hearing they’re “doing...
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#101: The Seven Billable Hour Pitfalls That Hold BigLaw Associates Back
Big Law Life
After years as a partner in global firms, I’ve watched countless associates struggle with the billable hour for reasons that have nothing to do with their talent or work ethic. What often derails them are avoidable habits: reconstructing time at the end of the month, underbilling to appear efficient, overlawyering simple assignments, taking on too much work at once, relying on one partner for all their hours, failing to bill fully legitimate work, and assuming non-billable hours will meaningfully count toward their annual target. In this episode, I walk through the seven most common pitfalls...
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#100: What 100 Episodes Reveal About BigLaw: Career Realities, Recurring Challenges, and Industry Shifts
Big Law Life
After over two decades in BigLaw, I’ve seen just how rare it is to find candid, practical conversations about what life in a large firm is really like. That’s why reaching the 100-episode milestone of Big Law Life feels so significant. In this special episode, I step out from behind my usual role behind the microphone and reflect on the real stories, hidden challenges, and universal themes that have surfaced over the past hundred conversations. I share why I started this podcast, what continues to surprise me, which episodes unexpectedly struck a chord with lawyers across firms, and...
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#99: When Partnership Doesn’t Mean Control: How BigLaw’s Structure Can Limit Your Autonomy and What You Can Do About It
Big Law Life
In this episode, I tackle one of the most persistent myths inside BigLaw: that partnership guarantees freedom. After years of billing, grinding through deal cycles, and fighting for promotion, most lawyers expect partnership to mean finally having more control over clients, staffing, and schedules. But as I explain, the modern BigLaw firm operates much more like a global corporation than the old-school partnership many lawyers imagined as they were working their way towards becoming a partner in their firm. Centralized management, committees, client teams, centralized staffing, and internal...
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#98: Inside Your BigLaw Firm’s Different Measures of Profitability - And How They Affect You
Big Law Life
In this episode, I take a closer look at a topic that many BigLaw lawyers misunderstand: profitability. Most partners focus on the firm’s overall “profits per equity partner” (PEP), but that number tells only part of the story. There are other profitability numbers - internal, often unseen analyses that many attorneys don't focus on but in fact shape how practices and partners are viewed, rewarded, and resourced. I explain how these shadow numbers differ from the publicly announced firm metrics, how factors like leverage, write-offs, and politics distort perceptions of profitability, and...
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#97: The Biggest Mistakes BigLaw Attorneys Make in Business Development
Big Law Life
In this episode, I tackle one of the most common frustrations I hear from partners and senior associates: why business development efforts so often fail to produce consistent, meaningful client work. From my own years as a BigLaw partner and now as a coach, I’ve seen too many capable lawyers equate effort with results, attending conferences, posting on LinkedIn, and taking endless coffee meetings only to find their pipeline still flat a year later. In this episode, I break down the five most common reasons business development efforts stall: lack of focus, inconsistent systems,...
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#96: When Your BigLaw Firm Stops Valuing You: Signs Partners Often Miss
Big Law Life
In this episode, I tackle a critical question for many partners - how to tell when your firm no longer values you and what steps you should take next. I’ve seen too many strong, capable partners blindsided by subtle shifts that signal declining influence, reduced credit, and a fading role in firm strategy. Drawing from my own experience as a BigLaw partner mentoring and managing other partners, as well as serving on executive and other firm leadership committees, I walk through six clear warning signs, from being left out of key decisions to watching your client relationships being...
info_outlineIf you’ve ever found yourself rewriting an email ten times, hedging every sentence in a memo, or avoiding a hard conversation with a colleague or client—you’re not alone. In this episode, I dive into why communication is one of the most underestimated challenges in Big Law, and how it can make or break your success.
Lawyers are trained for precision and risk mitigation—not for clarity or connection. And firm culture only reinforces that. But when your writing is dense, your feedback is vague, or your tone is overly formal, it’s not just style—it’s a barrier to effective leadership, client trust, and team performance. In this episode, I break down the most common communication traps in Big Law, why even the top attorneys fall into them, and how to shift toward language that is actually helpful, direct, and practical. From speaking up without a fully formed answer to giving (and receiving) better feedback, this episode is packed with specific strategies you can apply right away.
At a Glance:
00:00 Why communication challenges are so common in Big Law
01:20 How legal training encourages hedged, dense, and formal language
02:09 The difference between being technically correct and being useful
03:00 Real examples of communication breakdowns with clients and teams
04:13 The cultural factors that cause lawyers to avoid directness
05:03 Why fear of being wrong leads to silence or delay
05:33 How conflict avoidance undermines feedback and clarity
06:32 Expertise isn’t communication—why tone, context, and structure matter
07:27 What better communication actually looks like
07:51 How to write clearly: start with what the reader needs to know
08:18 The role of senior lawyers in modeling direct, contextual feedback
08:41 What to say (and ask) when vague comments like “fix this” come up
09:06 Why it’s okay not to have all the answers—and what to say instead
09:29 Spotting and replacing gobbledygook language in firm conversations
09:53 How firm hierarchy silences real dialogue
10:15 The importance of regular, real-time, two-way feedback
10:55 How to ask clarifying questions without apologizing
11:44 Why lawyers sound overly formal—and how to sound human again
12:10 Read the room: adjust your tone and delivery to your audience
12:33 Final thoughts: break bad habits, aim for clarity over complexity
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Interested in doing 1-2-1 coaching with Laura Terrell? Or learning more about her work coaching and consulting?
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laura@lauraterrell.com
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Show notes: https://www.lauraterrell.com/podcast