The crucial skills law school doesn’t teach firm owners

In the same episode, she unpacked how she defied convention and launched her own firm from scratch in just six weeks, despite never intending to step into firm ownership.

While many lawyers assume that owning a firm simply requires legal expertise, Redman emphasised that the reality is very different, with most lawyers effectively starting from square one when it comes to learning how to run a business.

“The lawyer hat is a really different hat from a business owner hat, and it’s important to know that and to acknowledge that you’re going to be starting from square one when it comes to learning about the business person hat,” she said.

Redman highlighted the confronting reality many professionals face when moving from employee to entrepreneur, noting that law schools rarely equip students with the practical business management skills required to successfully run a law firm.

“We don’t learn about that at law school, fortunately. As I said, we’re in the age of so many resources available. But it is completely different being on the tools, doing the client work,” she said.

“That’s completely different from managing staff, looking at cash flow, making sure that all the bills are being paid, looking at where you need to be pushing more with marketing and all of that sort of thing.”

VIEW ALL

One of the most challenging lessons she had to overcome – an experience shared by many first-time firm owners – was learning how to recruit and build a team from scratch without any prior experience or framework to rely on.

“The difficulty that I had was that I’d never recruited before. I’d never built a team before. So the biggest hurdle that I had to overcome was just doing sort of vibe space recruiting,” she said.

Redman admitted that her early hiring decisions were difficult and imperfect, but instead of seeing them as setbacks, she treated them as valuable lessons that have shaped her approach to recruitment ever since.

“The first two lawyers that I hired, I wouldn’t have hired them if I’d been doing a more structured recruitment process, which is what we’ve done this time around,” she said.

With law school leaving clear gaps in her business knowledge, Redman shared that she now treats becoming a firm owner as an ongoing process of learning rather than a qualification that can ever truly be completed.

“I identified that there was a gap in my leadership knowledge, in being able to identify and recruit really good fits for the firm,” she said.

“So I just read a whole bunch of organisational psychology books and leadership books. Everything that I want to learn is out there. We’re so fortunate. There are a million-to-one books that you can read.

“Whenever I see a gap in my knowledge, it’s OK. Where’s the book? Who do I need to read or listen to the audio?”