Episode 440 — AMMA — The 7 Most Common Questions Scaling Law Firm Owners Ask
The decisions that felt simple at six figures become exponentially harder at nine.
In this rapid-fire AMMA episode of The Game Changing Attorney Podcast, Michael and Jessica Mogill tackle seven of the most common questions from eight and nine-figure law firm owners navigating complexity at scale. From leadership misalignment to founder bottlenecks, this AMMA explores what actually breaks inside growing firms and how to recognize it before it costs you momentum. If you think bigger revenue will just solve all of your firm’s problems, this conversation will change your mind.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
- Why leadership decisions have more impact as your firm scales, and how to evaluate when to replace a leader
- The framework for determining if a challenge is a systems issue, a leadership issue, or both
- How to evaluate high-reward opportunities when the personal cost feels too high
If your firm is growing, this episode will show you where the real risks are hiding.
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Show Notes:
How fast you make decisions reveals how aligned you actually are. “If a team is aligned, chances are a lot of decisions are being made. Whether they’re right, whether they’re wrong, there’s a lot of progress happening. If a team is misaligned, then the time it takes to even make the simplest decisions is meeting after meeting after meeting.”
Replacing leaders takes longer than you think. “You can’t just slot somebody in immediately. They’ve got to learn the playbook, they’ve got to learn a lot of institutional knowledge, they’ve got to learn a lot of systems and processes. It’s harder to turn a cruise ship around than it is to turn around a kayak.”
Clinging to your founder identity creates the constraint. “The simplest way to put it is this desire some of us have as founders or owners to maintain our identities as I am the rainmaker. The bottleneck is really at the top of the bottle. That’s where you are as the leader. And if you maintain that identity as the firm scales, you actually do become the bottleneck.”
Outworking everyone signals poor optimization, not strength. “When a firm owner tells me how hard they work, I don’t look at it as a badge of honor. I look at it as a very poorly optimized framework. It’s basically saying that you equate your hard work with the output of your firm. I prefer you say, I don’t do anything at all and my firm scales every single year.”
The best teams don’t need unanimous agreement to move forward. “You don’t always have to agree. Most aligned teams can disagree and commit. There might be some people in the room that don’t agree with that decision but still can commit to it. At what point did we decide that everybody in the room has to agree to do something?”
Being right matters more to some leaders than making progress. “The ones that look good on paper, a lot of times they come in and it’s very much a selfish mentality. It’s important for them to be right. Versus the ones that can scale, their number one goal is winning and the firm growing, so it’s less about I want to be right and more about I want to make progress.”
Connect with Michael
- Text directly at 404-531-7691
