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SERVICES AND SEMINARS

Keynote Speeches

A dynamic and experienced speaker, Robert Cullen can deliver an informative and entertaining keynote speech to your firm or organization.  Focusing on such critical areas as advanced leadership skills, assessment of high-end client development, and entrepreneurial improvement, his speeches will help your associates and partners excel and become Leading Lawyers. 

Tailored to your needs and goals, his speeches will help your firm or organization improve client-relations, develop Leadership skill-sets, and apply important insights for building a more successful practice.  His keynote speeches will enable AmLaw 100 firms to design and implement plans for leadership talent improvement and to generate practical strategies for talent retention and development; they can also provide detailed blueprints for small and mid-size firms to obtain individual and organizational leadership improvement. Effective at firm retreats or for offsite training, Mr. Cullen's customized keynote speeches are designed to meet your precise objectives.  The author of the forthcoming book Challenging Lawyers to be Leaders, Mr. Cullen has been teaching law for over a decade and has developed the nation’s first semester-long course on Leadership for Lawyers. You will find his keynote speeches lively, engaging, substantive and informative.

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Leadership Skills Seminar

It is often hard for lawyers to accept that we have to learn new or unfamiliar skills outside the law itself.  We presume that our legal training and skills are sufficient.  But our clients want us to be great leaders and entrepreneurs as well as great lawyers.  Extraordinary lawyers use legal and leadership skills.

Research clearly shows that we can learn exceptional leadership skills as well as the basic tools of legal practice.  The Leading Lawyer always remains a zealous champion for his or her client, but is not circumscribed by the constraints of the advocacy model.  Instead, the Leading Lawyer brings to bear the vision and expertise of forward-looking, interdisciplinary insight; entrepreneurial innovation; and the ability to negotiate, mediate, collaborate, and achieve positive results for all sides.

This program is focused on the development of the insights and practical skills necessary to have an extraordinary career in law.  The Introductory Leadership Skills Seminar introduces you to the tools and methods that the most successful lawyers in the country use to distinguish and build their practices.

The Introductory Leadership Skills Seminar can be customized to meet your needs.  I have developed a variety of modules that range from 1.5 hours to a 2-day/16-hour seminar.   Introductions can be designed for the improvement of young lawyers only, or custom-configured for partners or groups of both (I have found that mixed groups of experienced and less experienced lawyers is extremely valuable).  As an experienced law professor, I have tailored the development program especially for lawyers and the unique roles that we play for our clients and constituents

Here is what the Introductory Leadership Skills Seminar will focus on: 

  • Extraordinary Lawyers “think like lawyers”; they also think and act like leaders. 

  • What makes some lawyers great?  They practice law and they practice leadership.  Successful lawyers have the qualities that distinguish them as fine lawyers; in addition, they incorporate leadership skills in their practices to create opportunities, build relationships and create positive change for their clients, organizations, and communities.  Leadership is the essential ingredient to an extraordinary career in law.  In short, extraordinary lawyers think like lawyers, and, more importantly, they act like leaders.

  • What is Leadership? 
    Leadership is an identifiable set of skills and practices that are available to us all, not just a few charismatic men and woman.  (Kouzas and Posner, The Leadership Challenge)

    Leadership draws on the process of persuasion, or example, by which an individual (or leadership team) induces an individual or group to pursue objectives held by the leader or shared by the leader and his or her followers.  (Gardner, On Leadership)

    Leadership is the process of using identifiable skills to influence and inspire others to achieve positive results.   (Cullen, Challenging Lawyers to be Leaders, 2007)
  • Leadership is for everyone.   Every lawyer can develop leadership skills by working at it, and by reevaluating outdated assumptions that unnecessarily limit one's perspective and options.  The process starts with understating the necessary skill sets and fostering a zeal for continual improvement.  Once one decides to become a leader, one can develop the skills and characteristics to create change.  Leadership is for the first-year associate and the social justice lawyer, as well as for the managing partner and corporate counsel. 
  • Leadership is learned.  Are leaders born or made?  Everyone who writes on this subject and who has analyzed the evidence agrees: leadership skills can be learned; leaders are made, not born.    

In addition, subsequent seminars--which can be mixed and matched, and tailored to your time and budget constraints--will introduce you to the following skill sets:  

  • Credibility—How Leading Lawyers Earn It

  • Vision, Entrepreneurial and Innovative Skill Sets

  • Team Work and Motivation

  • Communication and Persuasion

  • Social and Emotional IQ

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Advanced Seminars: 2-4 Hour Modules

Module 1: Credibility--How Leading Lawyers Earn It

Leading Lawyers are extremely credible and act with integrity; they are experts and they are inspiring.  Their credibility is based on honesty and vision.

Extensive research has shown that leaders are most consistently admired for the following characteristics: Leading Lawyers are

  • Honest and act with integrity.  A Leading Lawyer is honest and truthful, and consistently acts with integrity.   More than mere honesty, integrity reflects an unwavering commitment to one's values.  A Leading Lawyer is motivated by these deeply-held values to make clients, organizations and coworkers better off.  Integrity requires you to know what is important and act accordingly.  It represents the source of a Leading Lawyer's passion, persistence, and teamwork.  It is what inspires the trust, confidence and loyalty of clients.
  • Forward-looking.   Leading Lawyers have a sense empathy for their clients and organizations, which allows them to develop a dynamic vision for their future.  They are driven by a need to improve economic and social conditions.  They are always looking for a better situation, a solution for the problem at hand and any potential problems in the future. 

  • Competent and have technical expertise.  Would-be leaders must demonstrate to colleagues that they are exceptionally proficient in at least one aspect of the law.  Especially in the new economy, knowledge is the platform for future achievement. 

  • Inspiring.   Leaders are optimistic, energetic and enthusiastic about the future.  Inspiring leaders help give meaning and purpose to others.

Module 2: Vision, Entrepreneurial and Innovation Skill Sets

Leading Lawyers provide a direction and a vision for clients and their clients’ businesses, as well as for their own organizations.  Clients and constituents assume that a lawyer will analyze a legal situation appropriately.  But Leading Lawyers go much further; they analyze the law and participate in or lead the process of creatively finding a broader solution or opportunity.
  • Vision.  Leading lawyers engage people in shaping meaningful visions and help them put those visions to work.  Like Thurgood Marshall, whose skills are profiled in this module, they motivate their teams by delineating a detailed picture of the desired future and positive results.  A vision is compelling when it provides guidelines that help others make daily decisions; provides a navigable path to being great; and helps each person see how he or she can contribute.

  • Creativity.  Once you have a perspective on your goals and opportunities, it takes creativity to see and embrace fundamentally new and more effective ways to do things.  Some people are more naturally creative than others, but you can get your creative juices flowing by improving your skills.  This module will help you begin to apply your own creativity to your field of practice.

  • Multifaceted.  Successful lawyers use their legal knowledge and expertise; Leading Lawyers also have traits and abilities that go beyond traditional lawyering.  These include creative problem-solving skills (not just analytical skills); cooperative communication and consensus-building skills (not just advocacy); and the ability to create positive relationships and long-lasting change for their clients and organizations.

Module 3: Team Work and Motivation

Leading Lawyers understand that they cannot do things by themselves; they build relationships, collaborate and motivate others to act.  Leading Lawyers bring people on board.  They build teams, and inspire and empower others.  They develop and improve relationships instead of weakening them.  They are cooperative often, competitive occasionally.  They use advocacy when necessary, but also manage conflict effectively. 

  • Teamwork.  Virtually all major change involves engaging, persuading, and working with other people.  You need to have the organization's best interests at heart, and be motivated to improve conditions for those you seek to lead.  With this attitude, and a good practical plan, people will be inclined to follow you.  This module  provides detailed methods for achieving this goal.

  • Build relationships.  It is difficult for busy lawyers to find the time to develop relationships.  Yet this is the most effective step to successful leadership in every setting.  Even in highly stressful situations, such as litigation, Leading Lawyers establish a working relationship with everyone, including their clients and even opposing counsel and opposing parties.  They are collaborative in most situations, not divisive.  Leading Lawyers develop relationships before they need them.  With a network of relationships, and a history of working cooperatively to help others with their own projects and programs, Leading Lawyers receive the support they need to make their projects successful. 

  • Collaborate, develop and motivate others to action.  Leading Lawyers generate enthusiasm for the work at hand.  They help clients and team members see challenges in a positive light and develop opportunities for achievement and transformation.  They encourage all employees, at every level, to create opportunity and lead the client and company to newfound success.  High-achieving organizations are motivated to embrace change, and Leading Lawyers know how to inspire their organizations towards long-term success.   

Module 4: Communication and Persuasion

Leading Lawyers communicate in many different ways.  They persuade rather than  coerce; they use advocacy on some occasions and supportive communication on others.  Flexible and curious, they learn various ways to persuade, convince, negotiate and mediate.  Leading Lawyers develop and utilize the many facets of persuasive communication.  Leadership is not a position; it is a process of persuasion and influence.  We short-change ourselves, our clients and our society when we view our mission in unduly narrow terms, when we forget that our overriding goal is to communicate, not just advocate, and that even an argument can only be won through some form of persuasion.

Module 5: Social and Emotional IQ

Leading Lawyers are self-aware and place situations in context.  They understand that emotions and human elements are part of the equation.  Leading Lawyers know that the human element is present in all legal, business and organizational settings.  They possess empathy and emotional intelligence.  Discerning the emotional needs and reactions of their peers and adversaries, Leading Lawyers use this knowledge positively to shape business and legal outcomes.  Their job is to move, inspire, and influence.  Able to listen to and understand expressions of feeling as well as intellect, they are aware of what works with people and what doesn’t.  Monitoring their actions, they grow and mature in their experience. 
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Format of Seminars

Each seminar is a self-contained event held at a location of your choosing.  Each module can be expanded, tailored or combined with others to meet the precise needs and interests of your employees.  These seminars are particularly suited to busy attorneys who are unable to commit to a long-term course.