EP 254 – Shireen Hilal – Communication Leads to Transformation
Shireen Hilal, CEO and founder of Maior, discusses the importance of authenticity and trust in building client relationships. She emphasizes the need for law firms to be themselves and showcase their strengths in order to stand out and succeed. Hilal also shares her background and experience in helping law firms overcome challenges and achieve growth. She highlights the importance of clear expectations, listening to clients, and leveraging technology and innovation to improve efficiency and client service. Hilal advises law firms to focus on content-driven marketing, personalized client interactions, and playing to individual strengths within the firm.
The following interview has been transcribed for our readers from rev.com. Please excuse any discrepancies in the transcription.
Shireen Hilal:
Let yourself shine in a way that’s authentic because clients buy on trust. And so if you’re not being yourself and putting forward your strength, it’s going to fall flat.
Speaker 2:
You’re listening to The Legal Mastermind Podcast presented by Market My Market with your host, Eric Bersano, Ryan Klein and Chase Williams, the go-to podcast for learning from the experts in the legal community about effective ways to grow and manage your law firm.
Eric:
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Legal Mastermind Podcast. Today I have with me Shireen Hilal and she is the CEO and founder of Maior. Shireen, welcome to the podcast.
Shireen Hilal:
Thank you. So great to be here. Really appreciate you bringing me on.
Eric:
Absolutely. I think you are a perfect guest for the Legal Mastermind podcast just because of the wisdom I think you can impart on our audience. And I think that will become apparent just by maybe giving everybody a brief history of you, what you’ve done in the past and what you’re doing now.
Shireen Hilal:
Sure. Thank you for having me on. I started Maior to help law firm leaders that are frustrated by flat revenues and falling margins, stuck putting out fires instead of fueling growth, or who are using outdated strategies. What I’ve found is most firms are not in a position to hire, nor do they need a full-time enterprise level executive. And so I created my consultancy for firms in need of a consultant who isn’t going to give suggestions from afar, but is willing to dive in and create solutions that work with their unique culture and their teams. And for them, the firm’s a game changer.
I have a holistic background that goes across functions and departments. And so I started as a litigator at AmLaw100 firms, did that for 10 years and then pivoted to strategy and operations. So I’ve served as the COO of a national law firm where during my tenure we achieved a 30% increase in profits for partner and got on the best places to work in our key markets, which were Los Angeles and New York. I built the growth division of an early stage consulting firm. I managed operations and strategy for a 5,000 person division of KPMG, and I spearheaded change management programs for BDO. Point being, I’ve built, revamped and run pretty much any department you can think of in a professional services organization, and I leverage that background to capture the entirety of a firm’s nuance, craft unique strategies for success, and drive impactful change
Eric:
That, I think, resume alone speaks for itself. The difference of experience that you got, meaning it’s not just all at a law firm, which would be impressive enough, but the fact that you’ve gone through different businesses and you can see the way, say a Fortune 100 company like KPMG does something, and then to be able to take all this experience and then impart it on let’s just say a two partner law firm, that type of experience isn’t something that I think they’d be able to hire in-house that just wouldn’t be an employee that you could get. So taking the strategy that you’ve put forward or this company that you’ve built to help out law firms, where would you say you see some of the biggest opportunities when you start to work with a law firm?
Shireen Hilal:
Great question. I mean, it’s always going to depend on the firm itself. And so for example, what practices are they in? What markets do they serve? What sort of the unique, again, culture and ethos as I had mentioned before. I think that’s incredibly important just because there’s no cookie cutter firm and there’s no cookie cutter solution. And so everything, for example, that I do is very bespoke. But there’s a few things I think right now that are incredibly relevant given where we are in the economy and seeing in terms of where firms are with flatter revenues and declining margins.
And so especially as a firm is growing, one thing that always sticks out to me, I’ve noticed that most firms lack defined expectations along their entire revenue spectrum. And so that means from the top, which is managing client relationships all the way down to what you do when there’s write-offs or nonpayment. And leaving those things to chance means that of course you’re going to have inefficiencies and profitability leaks. And so instead, putting some clear guidance and standards there for consistent profitability is pretty important. And it also means your people are happier because all of these firms, everybody’s stretched thin, everybody’s often playing more than one role or turning around and doing multiple tasks, and so having a proven efficient way to do things and sort of that guidepost is really helpful.
Another thing that I see that’s more helpful for firms is just, it sounds simple, but listen more to your clients. And so really look at your industry trends and trust your clients to tell you what their challenges are and where they’re going and what they’re investing in so that you can be innovating your services to be more relevant and make sure your firm is investing in the right areas that your clients are actually going to come to. It also helps you in your marketing because then you speak to the market in a way that you’re sure is resonant.
This theory that we’ll just build it and they will come, it doesn’t work, and it’s again leaving things up to chance. It’s far easier to meet demand always than to try to create it. And so a mistake I see often is firms will often follow their competitors. So for example, “Oh, they’re building a Houston office, we need a Houston office.” Are your clients going to go to the Houston office? That’s the real question. And so you need to be having better conversations with them.
Eric:
Yeah. I liken this to, I have a friend who was in the medical device industry and he had left a really major company, had a partner who was also in medical device. And to get their company started, they used to consult for smaller businesses, not always in the medical device, but what he told me that was so eye-opening for me which I would relate to what you do, is they would come into this production facility. And the production facility was broken up to, let’s just say to five parts. There was producing this widget over here that got combined with this widget over here. These five different sections didn’t talk to anybody. They had their own little, “We’ve got to produce a thousand of these widgets a day. We’ve got to do this per day.” And he said for them when they came in and when they were hired, they got carte blanche over the entire production facility, and they would say, “Why don’t we move section two over here? Why don’t we move section three over here? Why don’t we put these?”
It wasn’t rocket science, but because they got to stand back and look at the entire operation, they could come in within a few weeks and turn that production facility around and make it 20, 30% more efficient, which I believe is really what you provide, is if you’ve got a law firm that they’re doing their marketing here and maybe you’ve got a couple attorneys that work in this practice area and a couple that work in this practice area, you can come in, step back and look at it from a holistic standpoint and then say, “Hey, let’s move these pieces around this way to make you that much more efficient.” Does that line up with how you see yourself?
Shireen Hilal:
Definitely. So I think you bring up a couple good points. One is people often get stuck in their own role. And as they should, right? They’re focused and so they’re in the weeds of their own area of the firm. And so you have to break through the silos. That’s a hard thing to do internally. It’s easier with fresh eyes. I think it’s also, to your point earlier, if you have the experience of having done this for multiple firms and even outside of law and in other professional services, and so meaning accounting firms and consulting firms and marketing agencies and advertising, you’re really able to bring the best of all of that with you because it’s also when you’re in your business, you have blinders on of course. And it’s hard to understand how somebody else might do it or what’s an innovative thing that’s going on over there that I can maybe borrow and pivot and use here.
I think the other thing that’s key, and you touched on this a bit too, you got to talk to your employees. And so it’s not just talking to your clients more, which is absolutely critical. I’m always surprised how little leadership leaves the boardroom and goes and speaks to frontline employees. And so I’ll give an easy example. I was talking to a firm the other week and they were saying how their payment cycles have gotten longer with their clients, and they were worried. Obviously this affects their cash position. And so they wanted me to dig into it. So I said, “Have you talked to the folks in billing and what have they told you?”
“Oh, we haven’t asked them.” I mean, this is the frontline. They are anecdotally hearing directly from the clients. “Is there a barrier to payment? Do they just need a longer payment cycle, but they’re going to pay? Is it there’s an easier way to pay? We wish you took credit cards.” Who knows what it is? But point is get down and talk to people. This is also how you keep your business dynamic and current with market trends, is actually allowing your employees at all levels to bring feedback up because those small iterative improvements all the time are often more impactful than some huge initiative that comes out from the executive suite.
Eric:
Yeah. The communication up and down the chain is so important. And I think if you’re listening to this and you’re a partner at a law firm, you want to empower every link in the chain, everybody from the person who answers the phone to the person who pays the bills or sends out the invoices. And if you’re not listening to those people, you’re missing out on inefficiencies. And I’ll give you an example that someone who helps law firms market that drives me crazy is I’ve worked with really, really successful law firms who don’t have practice management software. They keep everything on an Excel spreadsheet. They know they get 20 signed clients a month. They couldn’t tell you how many referrals. They couldn’t tell you how many of them came from their marketing or which marketing it came from.
Now you might have somebody who says, “Hey, we need to implement this practice management software.” Let’s just say it’s a junior attorney and they came to law school and they’re really up on all this technology. And they bring it and the owner says, “Yeah, let’s do it.” Well, if the owner, if the partners don’t participate in that software, it’s worthless. It’s garbage, because garbage in, garbage out. And I’ve seen this happen where say there’s five attorneys, three of them use it, two of them don’t. Well, you’re getting so many inefficiencies out of this practice management software.
So replace practice management software with accounting, replace it with marketing. If you’re not listening to your people and you as the managing partner or one of the partners aren’t listening and then employing them, making everybody adopt this, which I’d love to hear your take on this since you were part of change management. Changing a culture or changing a practice, there’s so much resistance to it, but once you get through the woods, you’re going to be a lot better off.
Shireen Hilal:
Yeah, there’s so much I could say about this. Let’s see. I guess I would boil it down really to, it’s usually not the technology that’s the problem, to your point, it’s the people. And so getting people on board is the key aspect, right? There’s no strategy that in isolation is any better than any other. It’s about what’s the strategy that works for this group of people that they will build momentum around and adopt.
And so you absolutely, to your point, have to talk to your people, understand their pain points, understand if this new solution is taking account of that, understand what it’s going to take for them to fold this into their day to day, whether it’s a new software or a new way of doing their work or a new initiative you have at your firm. And then importantly, you got to keep that feedback loop open because equally important is knowing no battle plan survives contact, right? And so it’s on the ground, “Now that we’re here, what do we continue tweaking and iterating to make sure this continues to meet our needs and it’s the right way of doing things?” And be ready to peel it back if needed.
I would say another issue I’ve seen come up a lot with new initiatives at firms, it’s usually an all or nothing approach, right? “And so we have a new timekeeping system and it starts tomorrow.” Well, maybe instead pilot it with one practice group, try it, and now you can also use those findings to convince everybody else at the firm, “The litigation department did it and the world didn’t blow up. It’s going to be okay if you would adopt it too.” And so that helps. And you get more buy-in when people say, “Okay, my colleagues tried this. And I trust my colleagues so there’s a bigger chance it’s going to work.”
The alternative to building buy-in is what I like to call the cram down method. And it doesn’t work even if you are in a strict command and control operation, because even if you can force an initiative on your people, you’re now stuck policing something that nobody wants to do. And so you’re back at being super inefficient again.
Eric:
Yeah. And I think the more buy-in you get from everybody, the more of their opinions you take and honestly review and incorporate, you will have a champion at that level. So let’s just say that somebody who is a junior attorney comes to you with an idea and you incorporate their idea, that person is going to make sure that succeeds. They have buy-in as if on the opposite end, if you say, “Hey,” if you’re the managing partner, “Oh, my friend who’s a managing partner over here use this software. Boom, this is what we’re going to use. Everybody’s going to use it.” If you don’t at least incorporate people into that process, now they feel like they’ve been forced to do something and their opinion doesn’t matter.
I want to step back on one thing that you mentioned that, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, I would say most attorneys, the ones that we work with, and again that’s say two to four partners, I don’t believe they’ve ever worked for a business that’s more than maybe 15 or 20 people. And as someone personally, I’ve worked at a couple very large companies, Fortune 500 companies, and I learned a lot from them. I’m referring maybe to your experience at KPMG or somewhere else where thousands and thousands of employees and they got to be that way because they were efficient in certain parts. I’ve also worked for companies that had seven or eight employees. And I feel like there’s really good things to pull out of both of those extremes.
So I’m wondering if you can talk as how having those experiences at these big law firms as a major company, how you’re able to incorporate that stuff into a firm that maybe has never had that big business experience where there’s sometimes crippling so many policies put in place to make you more efficient and which ones to pick and choose to help these law firms?
Shireen Hilal:
Yeah, that’s a great question. Something I see often, and it’s a lot of my clients, they come to me because they’re trying to figure out how do we scale with soul, right? And so meaning, that secret sauce, that special something that made us so attractive and enabled us to grow, which is usually excellent client service, high touch, personalized, how do we maintain that now that we’re getting bigger? And to your point, how do we take the best of what industry leaders are doing without sort of suffocating or over-engineering our own process? And so I always think, for example, if you’re looking at policies and procedures, you want to take sort of a 10,000-foot view and instead of just layering on process because it’s a compliance exercise and we need these 10 things here and then most of the other rules get glommed on when something goes wrong, something goes wrong, and so in response we create a policy and then we create another one, all of a sudden you turn around and where did the creativity and innovation and room go in the firm?
And so it’s figuring out how you create swim lanes for your employees that give them enough guidance, but to your point, enough autonomy so that even your junior folks feel a real ownership over getting things done in the way that you crafted them as that owner, right?
And so I think of one example. I was working with a firm recently, kind of mid-size, mid-size law firm, larger than the ones that you’re talking about, but not a super large firm. They had competitive fees on hourly rates, and they said that their hallmark was client service. And by the way, this is what every firm says. Every firm says, “We are the best at client service.” What’s interesting is when you actually dig in and ask, “So what qualities do you look for in a new hire to ensure that ethos? And what programs do you have in place at the firm that support client service? And how do you reward excellent client service?” You’re usually met with crickets. The answer is, “Well, we don’t have anything, but we say we have great client service and we know our people do it.”
I dug in and realized, in fact, they were not really differentiated from any other firm according to their clients and they had a workforce that didn’t feel, for the most part, under the partnership level that they had any skin in the game when it came to client service. And so this firm was wondering how come we’re not winning more work? We put a bunch of programs in place as a result. And one of those… And so it’s a combination of different ones that kind of get you to an end result, but the one that I thought was really a fun one, we gave legal assistance, a small discretionary fund to just… And I called it the Client delight fund.
It was a way, let’s say you have a client who’s rescheduled their conference call with the partner for the third time in a row. They’re super busy, send them a $10 Starbucks gift card and just say, “I know you’re busy. I thought you might want a cup of coffee.” Maybe a client mentioned on the phone, “Oh, I’m going to be away. It is our anniversary. I’ll have to schedule the call later,” send a bottle of wine. Doesn’t have to be super expensive. It’s the thought that counts. The client’s noticed. But also to your point, you now have a workforce that felt incredibly proud of the impact they were able to make. And those assistants, to hear how they spoke a few months later, those are my clients. I care about those clients. I care about them staying at the firm. And so there is a way to make sure that you’re actually creating programs that support your ethos and to bring everybody at the firm along with you.
Eric:
Yeah, I love that example. And it reminds me, I did an internship with Disney when I was in college. And to call it an internship is really, really glorifying, the position. Basically, Disney was getting college kids to come work and do everything from cleanup trash to point out where the bathrooms were. So I do consider my position lucky there because I didn’t have the cleanup trash. But every week, as part of the internship, they’d have somebody come in from Disney and they would talk about what makes them special. And just to wrap around the example you gave, and one of them was you have to exceed expectations. So Disney has made a living off of, you’re going to have someone with enormous expectations come to our park. We need to exceed them.
And the coolest thing that I thought they did that I learned from them and that stuck with me was that they said, “Even though all I did was point out where the bathrooms were and show people where the shorter lines were, if I saw a kid drop their ice cream cone, I could walk up to any vendor and I could get a new ice cream cone and hand it to that kid. If their balloons went flying up into the sky, I could walk up to the vendor and I didn’t have to go check with a manager. I didn’t have to get permission. I could just walk up with my badge and do whatever I wanted to make sure that that kid’s experience was awesome,” which does have an impact, because one, it’s immediate. It goes from the worst experience because the kid’s crying because their ice cream is melting on this hot Orlando blacktop. They’ve got a brand new ice cream cone in their hand and the parents love it, and the kid had a good experience.
So I love that about empowering employees to send a bottle of wine, send a Starbucks card, do something immediate. And because that person has the relationship with the client, they might know that they love a certain sport or that they went to a certain school and they can really personalize that type of gift.
Shireen Hilal:
Yeah. And I think it is that finding that balance between creating guidance and making sure everyone feels they understand their role and it is defined enough, because to your point earlier, as you grow, you’re going to have to add process, right? But allowing it to be breathable and letting there be still autonomy to create those moments of delight or to do what truly matters for your clients and pushing that, that look, “We say we’re client service first, and that means every single role here has a piece to play in that.”
Eric:
So skipping forward now to maybe some technology is such a huge part of today’s businesses and especially law firms, and I think one of the things that you talk about would be innovation, adaptability. I don’t know if you have a set of products that you say, “Hey, here are the best” How do you work… Let’s just say that there’s a law firm, and I do see this a lot where you’ve got a super successful law firm, they have amazing verdicts and settlements, but let’s just say that the partners are on the older side and a lot of them weren’t in that era of when you could even market, you weren’t even legally allowed to market advertise as an attorney until I think it was the late ’70s, early ’80s. I know I’m screwing that up. But with that being said, if you want to succeed in today’s legal world, you have to embrace technology. So do you have some examples of what you use or how you would go into a law firm to help them use technology to make them more advanced and more efficient?
Shireen Hilal:
Yeah, so I think one easy way, and you touched on it, is the marketing. It is an extremely crowded market and clients have plenty of choice. And so these are relationship businesses. And if you can shift your marketing efforts towards more content driven strategies, webinars, thought leadership pieces, things that allow you to engage more effectively with your target audience at a lower cost compared to some of the other methods like in person and it lets you build trust and authority in a space at the same time, that’s highly effective.
And then what I would usually recommend doing is for your current clients, and especially if you serve the corporate market and you have a recurring corporate client, I find it’s more impactful do one-on-one activities with them. You don’t need to go to a big gala, spend money on these tables. You often see firms, I find, spending marketing dollars in places where they’re most likely to reach their competitors. And it’s just not effective, but for some reason they’re drawn to it. And so I would say instead of going to a conference and educating your competitors, unless you happen to have a business that’s highly reliant on referrals from a particular type of firm that’s going to be at that conference, you can probably instead spend that on real content-based marketing to solidify yourself as the expert in the field, and then getting down with individual clients to understand their needs so that you’re better serving and innovating your services and marketing efforts to fit with the reality that’s happening with your current clients.
Eric:
Yeah, that makes sense. And it brings up something that I’ve seen be very successful. So seeing some very successful law firms, one of the things that I’ve noticed is that you’ll have partners, let’s just say two. One is an amazing trial attorney. One of them is just back room, going through legal documents, doing all the real legal stuff. And then the other lawyer is kind of the face. Let’s just say that they can go out, they’ve got great relationships, they can speak to a camera like a newscaster, rainmaking, meaning they’re creating these relationships with other law firms that are helping to bring in a lot of referral business.
Is there something to be said for that strategy? Do you like the divide and conquer if you’ve got multiple partners in a firm? Do you have people soar with their strengths and saying, “Hey, Tom, I see that you’re doing a lot of this work when Kathy might be really better for that because it suits her personality more”? Or do you let law firms find their own way when it comes to what the partners are going to focus on for growing the business, which is a huge part of that is bringing in more clients?
Shireen Hilal:
Yeah. Everybody doesn’t love to swan around, right? And so some people are very good at it and it’s sort of in their nature. And for others, to your point, they’re more comfortable sitting behind the computer and writing briefs or even going into court, and so they’re more on the service side. This is, again, where there’s no such thing as a cookie cutter strategy. And so something I ask if I’m going into a firm… I’m actually working with a firm right now, it’s two partners. They grew their firm and they grew it mostly by word of mouth, which is a testament to how great the work is that they do, but they’re now in a position where they’ve grown the firm, they have a lot of mouths to feed, and they’re realizing “We need a more proactive business development strategy.”
So I’m working on that with them, but the first thing I’m asking is, “What do you like doing and what’s your comfort zone?” Because asking somebody who hates writing to do a bunch of articles and get published in Law360, I mean, it’s going to be an uphill battle. These are very busy people to begin with. And so asking them to do something non-billable that they despise doing is just like a recipe for disaster.
On the other hand, if you love to write and you hate swanning around at conferences and being at cocktail parties, maybe the right avenue for you is to write and be in publications that your clients are reading. And so I think just the answer is it depends, which I know is the classic lawyerly response, but it really is, let yourself shine in a way that’s authentic. Because the other thing is clients buy on trust. And so if you’re not being yourself and putting forward your strength, it’s going to fall flat.
Eric:
Yeah, I think the most glaring and somewhat entertaining example of this is I follow a lot of law firms on Instagram just because I’m curious what other people are doing.
Shireen Hilal:
Sure.
Eric:
And you can see some people that are real naturals, they love it. Like this is their best time of the day, and they’re glowing. And then I see other attorneys that are kind of square pegs in round holes and they’re doing it because somebody told them to do it, “You’ve got to have a social presence.” And I feel in some of those situations, it’s doing more harm than good. If that’s your calling and you wanted to be an actor, but your parents told you to go to law school, hey TikTok’s for you. But if you are that legal brief writing, love doing depositions, stick with that strength and either have another partner or find somebody at the law firm that can handle that point.
Shireen Hilal:
[inaudible 00:32:17] your clients in ways that are comfortable for you. And so for example, maybe you’re an immigration law firm and a lot of your clients are corporates who have immigration needs. And so your key buyer is the head of HR. Well, call SHRM, which is the Society for Human Resources, their group, and ask if you can publish with them. And maybe that’s a way that you still reach that audience and you’re an authority, but in a way that’s comfortable for you.
Eric:
Yeah, I agree. Well, Shireen, this has been very enlightening. I think anybody who’s in a law firm could use what you do. I do think there’s probably a perfect size law firm that you’d be very beneficial to talk to. So if someone is listening to this, wants to get ahold of you, or find out more about you, where would you like to steer them?
Shireen Hilal:
Sure. In terms of getting in touch, I always love to hear from law firm leaders on what they’re struggling with, what they’re seeing in the market, and of course, help them if they’re looking for assistance with lackluster financial performance, processes that they’ve outgrown or strategies that aren’t cutting it anymore. You can find me on LinkedIn. It’s Shireen Halal, S-H-I-R-E-E-N, last name Hilal, H-I-L-A-L, or on my website, it’s www.maiorconsultants. Maior is M-A-I-O-R.com. And I also publish a quarterly column in Law360 answering law firm leaders questions on how to better run their businesses. So you can see me there too.
Eric:
Excellent. Well, I will give you an on the spot testimonial. Shireen, actually we hired her to come to one of our leadership meetings. She came extremely prepared, listened to everything, and provided a lot of value to us during that meeting. So I can tell you from personal experience that she’s really great at what she does. So if there’s any interest at all, please reach out to her.
Shireen Hilal:
Thank you, Eric. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2:
Thanks for listening to the Legal Mastermind Podcast presented by Market My Market. You can check out additional episodes and recaps at legalmastermindpodcast.com.