Ken Falcon is the Co-Managing Partner of Falcon Rappaport & Berkman LLP (FRB), where he has led the firm’s expansion from a small Long Island practice with twelve staff to a multidisciplinary firm of more than 120 professionals with offices across the tri-state area, Florida, and California. Under his leadership, FRB has become a destination for ambitious associates, lateral partners, and small firms seeking a collaborative, forward-thinking environment that combines complex legal work with a genuine commitment to work-life balance.
WHAT’S COVERED IN THIS EPISODE ABOUT BUILDING A HEALTHY LAW FIRM CULTURE
Ken Falcon built his firm from a solo practice into a multi-state team by refusing to squeeze maximum profit from his people. His leadership centers on honesty in hiring and twice-yearly reviews that track shifting priorities. By deliberately accepting lower profit margins, he’s made real work-life balance possible—the kind of culture that keeps attrition low and inspires attorneys to bring in people they trust.
When Ken was diagnosed with kidney cancer, his partners insisted he take an eight-week sabbatical and divided his work among themselves, a response that revealed the kind of loyalty and trust his leadership had fostered. The experience forced him to rebuild his role around what he actually wanted to do.
In this episode of The Lawyer’s Edge, Elise Holtzman talks with Ken about protecting culture during rapid growth. They discuss screening for fit over credentials, why he’d rather make less money than burn out his team, and how a health crisis taught him to restructure his role around what matters.
2:14 – Why Ken built a law firm that values people over profit
4:38 – How clear expectations and open communication sustain culture through growth
7:21 – The hiring conversations that reveal alignment and ambition
10:42 – Twice-yearly reviews and how they keep attorneys engaged and accountable
13:55 – Rethinking profitability: why FRB chose sustainability over maximizing margins
17:18 – What real work-life balance looks like inside a busy, expanding practice
21:06 – How leadership transparency drives retention and trust
24:37 – Balancing client demands with internal culture as the firm scales
28:10 – The link between compensation philosophy and firm stability
31:22 – Advice for law firm leaders who want to build healthier organizations
MENTIONED IN KEN FALCON | HOW INTENTIONAL LEADERSHIP BUILDS STRONGER LAW FIRMS
Falcon Rappaport & Berkman LLP | LinkedIn
Get connected with the coaching team: hello@thelawyersedge.com
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Elise Holtzman: Hi, everyone. It's Elise Holtzman here, a former practicing lawyer and the host of The Lawyer's Edge Podcast. Welcome back for another episode. Building a successful firm isn't just about winning cases or doing deals. It's about building from the ground up with intention.
Today's guest transformed a small Long Island, New York practice into a multi-state legal powerhouse, putting innovation, firm culture, and smart growth front and center. We're going to talk about how he and his colleagues made it all happen and how to maintain growth, culture, and cohesion in a remote, hybrid, and multi-jurisdiction world.
Before we dive in, today's episode is brought to you by the Ignite Women's Business Development Accelerator, a nine-month business development program created by women lawyers for women lawyers. Ignite is a carefully designed business development program containing content, coaching, and a community of like-minded women who are committed to becoming rainmakers and supporting the retention and advancement of other women in the profession. To learn more about Ignite, visit thelawyersedge.com/ignite.
I am delighted to welcome my guest today, Ken Falcon, who is the co-managing partner of Falcon Rappaport & Berkman, also known as FRB. Ken has overseen the firm's growth from a small Long Island-based firm with 12 staff to a firm with 120 staff and nine offices in six jurisdictions.
FRB has become a destination firm for aspiring associates, lateral partners, and small firms looking for an interdisciplinary firm capable of complex work that makes respect for work-life balance part of its core philosophy. Ken, welcome to The Lawyer's Edge.
Ken Falcon: Thanks very much, Elise. Really happy to be here.
Elise Holtzman: I'm thrilled to have you because I get so excited talking about law firm growth and growth of the individuals that make up that firm. FRB has grown tenfold in under a decade. What are some of the deliberate decisions or the strategies that you have used that have made the biggest difference in scaling successfully and doing it without losing your culture?
Ken Falcon: I think that the most important thing is just the way that we screen our people and the people that we've brought on board. At the end of the day, the number one reason I think that people leave jobs, at least in my discussions with them, is the personalities involved. You have a boss who's mean or a yeller. You have a boss who has goals that don't line up with yours, and you have no way to either express those goals or, when you express them, you're shot down.
You want to grow in a certain way. You want to build a business, and you're shot down. My philosophy is basically, if you don't think that we're the best place for you to be, then you shouldn't be here. I'm not going to hold you here. I'm not going to, for instance, refuse to allow you to develop a book of business because I'm afraid that it's portable and therefore you'll leave.
If I'm going to help you grow a book of business and you're going to say, "Thanks, see you later," I view that as my own failure where we've done something wrong. But a lot of firms are like, I don't even want to go there. This is my star associate. They're billing 1,800 hours a year, doing perfect work with a high realization and collection rate. I don't want them going down to 1,600 a year because those extra 200 hours are $60,000 in my pocket. That's the profit margin.
I think that's the inherent imbalance in the incentives between law firm ownership and law firm employees. Figuring out that balance and getting the employees to want to do the extra work and want the firm to be profitable, but still making sure that the work gets done and their own professional aspirations are really understood and dealt with, is critical.
When we hire people, I ask them what they're looking for very specifically, and we check in with people regularly. During the review process, we do reviews twice a year. It's funny because we are hiring for an HR director because we have an HR team of two, and it should probably be five.
In hiring the HR directors, I've been asking all these people who are HR directors at large companies—or large compared to us, 500 people, 2,000 people—have you ever had a review process where nobody complained about how bad the review process was? They said, "No, literally never." I spoke to two people with 20-year careers, and none of them has ever had a review process where people didn’t complain.
So people complain, but you've got to find time to connect with your people and find out what they want and how their priorities have shifted.
Elise Holtzman: How do you do that thing before the folks even come on or make a determination—you make a determination, or they make a determination—that they want to be with the firm, particularly where you're bringing on a small group, let's say?
Ken Falcon: I ask them straight up. People are generally honest, is what I find. I mean, we've been lied to before. But I ask some pretty deliberate and pointed questions about what they want, what they want for their career, and where they see themselves fitting in the firm. Are they a finder, minder, or grinder? Do they want to grow? Do they want to focus on the technical aspect?
What do they like and what don't they like about their job? If they're interviewing with me, something is the impetus behind that. Why? If it's, "We need a transition plan," fine, we can solve for transition plans. If it's, "I'm really unhappy where I am," why are you unhappy? Because I don't want you coming here and being unhappy for the same reason that you're unhappy where you're at.
But in general, we've made this a law firm that is focused on solving the problems that people have with law firms for our people. In general, our voluntary attrition rate is extraordinarily low. We had a star associate who left us for another firm, and in eight months, she was back.
Elise Holtzman: You mentioned the problems that lawyers have with law firms, and you're trying to solve for those. What do you think the top few of those are?
Ken Falcon: Old white men who don't want to let go. It's number one. It's hard. It's probably hard to hear that. If any of them are listening, I get it. It feels like a direct character attack. It's not. But you have to learn to share, and you have to really share.
It was never culturally a part of the way that law firms operated to share with your people and to look to raise your employees up. It's also very comfortable to make more money. Everybody wants to make more money, but you can't take it with you. Unless you're struggling to make mortgage payments, you have to look at the young attorneys in your office as your future succession plan.
If you want your firm to survive beyond one generation, you have to incentivize them. That means letting go. That means sharing equity. That means making less money. You have to make less money.
If you're not willing to make less money, thank you, because I will take all of your young, talented, brilliant attorneys whom you have trained for years, and I will give them a platform to grow, and I will share with them because that's just who we are. If I had to encapsulate it really simply, that's what it is.
I think that is a really difficult cultural shift to make when you build a law firm around, "How much money can I make, and how quickly can I make it?"
Elise Holtzman: Yeah, it's very challenging. I think the combination of that culture and the understanding that the billable hour is still embedded in so many law firms makes it really hard to shift, especially when the older folks don't want to retire.
And again, not necessarily a criticism, more like an observation, but the culture was, this is everything they did their whole life, and the whole identity is wrapped up around being a partner at this law firm or being a leader of the law firm. It's hard to let go and let the next generation take over.
Ken Falcon: Of course. The prior investment and everything else, and all the time you put in and all that, is tremendously valuable and has tremendous value to the organization. The organization wouldn't be there without you having done that.
But do you have what you need in life? Do you really strictly need the money that you're making and the exact amount of money that you're making? Can you not afford—would you be unable to make mortgage payments? I think the answer is probably no for most of these people who have been practicing for 30 or 40 years.
They made smart investments during a booming economy. If you don't need it, you have to balance: what do you want, really, is what it's about. Because if you don't care about the law firm surviving to the next generation, then go for it. Suck as much money out of the thing as you possibly can.
But if you care about the law firm surviving to the next generation, the balance is, how much money do I need, and how much do I want to invest in the future growth of the firm? We've grown ten times, but we are definitely not the most profitable law firm out there.
Anyone in the equity ranks of this law firm could make more money at another firm—every single one—but we all choose not to. Why? Because it's not about the money for this generation. I mean, it's really not about the money for any generation, but I think for a very long time, the focus has just been on money because that's been the culture of law firms.
Elise Holtzman: You mentioned, again, these problems in law firms. Is there another one that comes to mind for you besides the one we've just been talking about?
Ken Falcon: The other one is giving them growth opportunities. What do they want to do? It's not just hearing them say this and saying, "Well, how slowly can I give that to you so that you stay with me, but you also make me maximum profit between point A and point B?" That is the approach of so many law firms. Actually, funny enough, I learned this very early.
I had my first employee who, when I gave him his first raise, at the time we were paying way under market. I gave him his first raise, and he came to me—and I'm proud that everyone in my firm, I think, is comfortable or should be comfortable coming to me because I'll never fire someone over ego. I want to hear all the problems, and I want you to tell me if you think I'm doing something dumb—he said, "I know it couldn't possibly be your intention to ask yourself how little of a raise could I give to still retain me."
He said, "I'm not going to quit. I'm not going anywhere. But I know we did well this year," and we did. It was a growth year. This is back when my practice was a solo practice. The original practice that's the foundation of FRB was just me to start.
But my first employee—anyway, he said that, and I said, "You know what? You're right. We did do well this year." I reexamined it. And you know what? I gave him an extra five grand or ten grand or whatever it was, which I think was one of the most important economic concepts I ever learned was the marginal utility of a dollar and the idea that ten grand in my pocket versus ten grand in his just made an outsized difference to him. He was with us for a very, very long time.
Elise Holtzman: What about work-life balance? I know you've mentioned that as part of your firm's culture. I think the phrase, for so many years, has been so overused, and some people are convinced, they’ll tell you there's no such thing. Some people will say, if you have it, you can't grow a profitable firm. So what are your philosophies around work-life balance and providing that, retaining that? What does it look like? Tell me a little bit more about that.
Ken Falcon: So I think the biggest problem with the term work-life balance and people who say it doesn't exist is that, like all marketing terms, if it sounds good, everyone says it. Every law firm will tell you that they respect work-life balance, but 95% of them don’t actually respect work-life balance. You can tell because they have the highest profits per partner.
You have the highest profits per partner, you don't respect work-life balance. You can say you do all day, but you don't, because if you respected work-life balance, you wouldn't have the highest profits. The billable hour interferes with it severely because, for a law firm, profitability starts when the associate eclipses covering their own costs, basically.
So you have a system where once the associate bills, call it 1,200, 1,400 hours—whatever it is—to cover costs, every bit after that is profit. So you want to incentivize them to go as high as humanly possible because all the profit lives in the extra, in the above and beyond. It's very hard to achieve work-life balance against that backdrop.
So you have to accept less profitability or just own the fact that you don't actually believe in work-life balance, you believe in the most money possible. And that's okay. There are a lot of people who believe in the most money possible. There are a lot of associates who believe in the most money possible. It does not serve you to lie to them and tell them that you're about work-life balance.
Elise Holtzman: How does work-life balance then show up in your firm? I mean, I think what I'm hearing is lower profitability.
Ken Falcon: Yeah, it's lower profitability, but it's not intolerably low. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be in business. It's just that we, as an equity partner group, don't prioritize becoming millionaires as quickly as possible above the well-being of our employees. We're scaling in such a way that we're looking for where we can improve at the margins.
How can we improve our realization rate? How can we improve our collection rate? What can we do other than just crank the billable requirement to achieve greater profitability? How can we use AI to enable new methods of billing that go beyond the billable hour?
Elise Holtzman: How has a focus on work-life balance as part of your culture helped you with the talent acquisition and retention?
Ken Falcon: Every single person who comes here sees that we put our money where our mouth is. They recognize it when they're here, and they're so happy when they get here, especially when they come out of a toxic work environment, there's a woman who shall remain nameless whose firm had a toxic work environment. When her first employee came here, she was so refreshed that she was like, "Wow, I'm going to tell my friends about this." And she did. All the good people from this firm migrated over to mine.
For me, the greatest indicator that we're doing a good job is that when people join here, they're so happy they tell their friends, they tell their best friends, they tell the people that they wish they could work with about how happy they are. Those people then come and apply. Then, you know, it's like a flywheel.
We are blessed with the problem that very few law firms have, which is I have many more people that want to join this law firm than I have spaces to fit them in. So we get to be very, very choosy. If we find a small or mid-sized firm that wants to come over and needs a transition plan—and most do—I have fantastic people waiting in the wings who are ideal personality fits, who are underappreciated or underserved wherever they are. Then I just plug them in.
Elise Holtzman: I have two wildly different questions based on something you just said, so I'm going to go in a couple of different directions. One is, you mentioned AI. I know that you recently adopted Harvey, which is a generative AI platform that's specifically for law. In fact, Ken, I was walking down the street in New York City outside of Penn Station last week, and there’s this huge billboard now for Harvey up right outside of Penn Station.
So what are your thoughts on AI in the law? I mean, we hear everything from, "This is revolutionary and it's going to be fantastic," to, "Oh my God, this is the scariest thing in the world and the robots are taking over." What's your philosophy and approach to using it?
Ken Falcon: It's scary because all change is scary. All human fear is rooted in change, period. You cannot name a human fear or anything that isn't rooted in change. So sure, it's scary. I love hearing when law firms that we compete against ban AI. I mean, really, it's astonishing. It's an own goal. It doesn't make any sense.
You have to embrace this technology. You have to embrace all technology as it comes out. It's very hard to do, although, honestly, generative AI is very easy to do. This is one technology where even the senior attorneys in my firm who have trouble with basic technology functions succeed using generative AI because it's so intuitive. You're just talking to a chatbot.
So as long as you can type—and we have had attorneys who couldn't type, right? They're used to having their word processing secretary do their typing for them. But barring those few cases, it's a very usable tool, and just putting something at their disposal is tremendously valuable. But if you're too scared and you don't want to do it, if your clients are scared and they won't let you do it, if you want to wait to see where it all shakes out, that's fine. But we are running full speed ahead.
Elise Holtzman: All right. Here's the other question I had in mind. You went from being an individual contributor, a lawyer with a solo practice, to, in a very short period of time—if I'm not mistaken, just about seven or eight years—growing this firm with multiple offices and multiple people. You have very clear philosophies. It's not like when I ask you questions, you're not sure how to answer them. You have your opinions, you have your philosophies. From everything you're telling me, it is helping you succeed in growing the kind of law practice that you want to have. Tell me a little bit about your transformation from lawyer to leader.
Ken Falcon: So one quick point before I do that, just to hit on something, right? Because you're saying I'm not having difficulty answering the questions. I'm in tune with the answers. The reason is, this is not a wordsmithing exercise. I'm not trying to tell you things that I think the market wants to hear or that I think your audience wants to hear. I'm just being honest.
If everyone just did that, they would much more easily succeed in their practice. Again, if you're out for the most money, say you're out for the most money. People will love that. There are a lot of them. But yeah.
So, in terms of the transition, when the firm started, it was just me as a solo practitioner. This was back before FRB existed, which was seven years ago. This was back in 2012, in the Jacobson & Falcon days, which then became the Falcon, Jacobson, & Gertler days, which then became FRB.
I was the chief cook and bottle washer. It was everything. Every solo understands this life. You're doing the billing, you're renewing the copier lease, you're dealing with the clients, you're going to court. Everything was on me.
Thankfully, my process was starting with solo practitioners on the verge of retirement—first Matthew Foreman, and then Myron Jacobson, and then Joe Gertler. Learning from them, learning important things from them about the way that law firms work, and also stepping into their client base and helping them modernize, I started out doing everything.
I had this philosophy about people, and it comes from my father and my grandfather, who were both entrepreneurs in different contexts. My grandfather was an entrepreneur in the Garment Center. My father was a physician. He grew his practice from just him to him and 70 employees, three offices, all that stuff. He just did it by being nice and overpaying his employees.
Again, he could have made more money, but the marginal utility of a dollar for him versus the marginal utility of a dollar for his secretaries is just so different. So anyway, I applied this philosophy and grew and grew and grew.
I really stuck with the chief cook and bottle washer mentality until things broke. It was like, I can no longer do the billing, so I have to hire a biller. I can no longer do the HR administration, so I'm going to hire an HR person. I can no longer do all the operations stuff, so I hired a then managing associate, our now chief operating officer, Allen Abraham.
It was across every strata. I can no longer do all this litigation, so I hired Paul O’Brien. I can no longer do all of this estate work, so I hired Rachael Harding. I can no longer do all the real estate work, so I hired Susan Lee. It was one at a time.
But I guess it's like the Homer Simpson effect, right? If the grooves are in the couch, you're going to continue sitting there. I did that really up until last year, where I was practicing actively. I had a very active practice. I was managing, I was managing the growth. We 10x’d the business in six years, really. It’s going well, but the reality is it was killing me. I was doing way too much.
In September of last year, I was diagnosed with kidney cancer. I’m fine now. Kidney cancer is the best kind of cancer to have. Surgery, no chemo, no radiation, and you’re cured if you catch it early enough, which I did due to my back pain, which may have been stress-induced. So maybe all the stress that I built up and the back pain that resulted from it was a helpful thing, because it ultimately caught the kidney cancer and saved me from dying much later.
When that happened, my partners, who are very caring and kind people—and I make sure to surround myself only with caring and kind people—said, “Do you want to take some time off for yourself?” The truth of the matter is, I did. But I just said, "I can’t. It’s literally impossible. I do so much at the law firm, and it’s never going to happen."
They said, “Let’s do an exercise. Let’s go through your calendar for the next month, and you tell us what we can’t do.” I did. I sat there with them, and to their credit, they parceled out the work among themselves. They said, “You can go. You can take a sabbatical.” I took an eight-week sabbatical.
At the time, I was the sole managing partner. Moish Peltz, one of my best friends from college, stepped up and became the acting managing partner of the firm and crushed it. Did really, really well and brought a completely new perspective to the job. It took a week to transition all the stuff over to him, really. I was like, there are some things that are just not going to work because I have a personal relationship with this incoming partner or whatever. So it’s just not going to work.
He said, “We might make less money, but who cares? You have cancer. Take time off.” And I did. When I came back in January of this year, Moish was—you know, I appreciated his perspective. I said, “Will you be my co-managing partner with me? I know you wanted to step down and hand it back to me." But the reality is, what he identified in the first week—he said, "You are insane. How did you do this?”
The answer was, I did it by sacrificing time with my children—more time than I wanted. I was the latest one in the office every night. I was in the office until two in the morning, three in the morning, when my sons were very young. That’s a great regret of mine. I’ll never do that again.
I mean, I’ll still work hard, and I’ll still work late, but I’m never going to be like, “I am really sacrificing family time that I want because I have to be here.” I now do what I want at the law firm. That’s why I’ve rebuilt my role—I do what I want to do. If there’s stuff that needs to get done that I can’t do, then we will hire, and we will make less money. That is okay. Obviously, there’s a limit to that, right? We still have to maintain profitability and have a healthy business, but there’s a limit.
So at this point in my day, I literally have one client, and she’s fantastic. I said to that client, “My response time to emails is three days, and my hourly rate is the highest in the firm. You cannot expect same-day from me. I have a team that can handle emergencies, and I will loop them in. They’ll know what’s going on in your matter, but that’s it.”
I realized I can’t litigate. I can’t have court deadlines. I can’t have to review court papers, because if I’m in the process of merging in a twelve-lawyer law firm to FRB, I can’t say, “Okay, well, I’m going to have to pause on the merger and not address significant issues in the merger when I have to deal with a summary judgment motion.” It doesn’t work.
You have to balance that, right? Maybe someone can figure out how to make it work with litigation. I just can’t, because I can’t disconnect from it enough. So I found this really nice place of litigation advisory, mostly transactional, that leans on the multidisciplinary practice that is the essence of what makes FRB FRB.
It’s a combination of tax planning, real estate planning, estate planning. How do we, for high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth individuals—and really any real estate entrepreneur—structure things for the next generation? How do we structure things for maximum tax efficiency, maximum operational efficiency?
I’m a real estate investor as well. I built a real estate portfolio from zero to 85 units, with the management apparatus that my brother runs. How do you address these needs that real estate owners have and put them in a position to succeed? There’s enough money there for a lot of these people—for them and their family—to be wealthy forever. But so many people lose their money by failure to plan. I’ve seen it all at this point—or not all, but I’ve seen a lot. So I help them avoid that.
Elise Holtzman: There are so many messages here to unpack from the things that you said. First of all, I’m thrilled to hear that you’re doing well from a health perspective. This idea of understanding that you can step back and that you can rely on other people if you surround yourself with the right people, which is how we started this conversation, that’s so important to you, in doing that, you created the environment. People were not just capable of taking over from you for a while, but wanted to and actually pushed you to do it.
I think it’s very hard. You hear these stories a lot where people suffer some terrible illness and learn these deep lessons. Wouldn’t it be nice if the rest of us could learn those deep lessons from hearing folks like you talk about it?
So I hope that’s one of the takeaways, because lawyers—we’re terrible at this, right? We run ourselves into the ground. We have this overdeveloped sense of responsibility. “If we want something done right, we have to do it ourselves.” So I’m hoping that people take this away and say, “I’m going to do something different because of something Ken said, not because I’m waiting around to get cancer to learn this lesson.”
Ken Falcon: Yeah, I mean, honestly, this cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me. I needed the experiential learning of having a health crisis and being like, “You know what? I am mortal.” I used to teach ethics at Molloy College—legal ethics for paralegals. I was talking about what happens when a lawyer dies.
One of the paralegals raised her hand—and she was a paralegal in training—and she said, “Lawyers just die?” I was like, “I’m sorry to tell you, but everybody dies. We all die.” But it really took that experiential learning for me and having cancer.
During that, I started carrying this around. We’re not on video right now for everybody. It’s a coin that I’ve had in my collection for a long time. I used to leave it in a box because it’s valuable. I would just look at it. But what makes me happy is playing with it. It’s very fun to hold. I started carrying it around. Now this is my talisman. You’ll never see me without it ever for the rest of my life, because I need the object lesson.
I want to make sure that I have the object lesson so it’s permanent and it’s there and it’s my touchstone. When I talk to people, a lot of them have had different experiences—they’ve lost parents young, they’ve lost siblings, they themselves have had a health crisis, whatever it is. It wakes you up.
It would be great if you didn’t have to wait, but Type A personalities, A students who have worked hard their whole lives—telling them, “Hey, maybe you shouldn’t work so hard,” it’s like, “Yeah, very nice, thanks. That’s not how I got where I am. That’s not how I’m going to get where I’m going. I'm going to work hard.” You should work hard. But you should also enjoy your life. You have to make future investments, but the present moment matters. It honestly matters the most.
My friend Sydney Blumstein told me that yesterday at lunch, when we were having a similar conversation. It’s not just that it matters, it matters the most. Because at the end of the day, I can walk out of the office right now and I can get hit by a bus. Then what? Then what was my long-term investment for?
I’m going to go home, and I’m going to see my kids. In that moment with them, that’s all that there is. We are all the youngest we’ll ever be right now. Everyone.
Elise Holtzman: First of all, I want to thank you for even having this conversation with me because so many people in the legal profession are so afraid to talk about the reality of what goes on in our lives, right? Whether it's mental health or physical health, we're somehow supposed to be invincible.
To your point, we're not. We know intellectually we’re not. I mean, it's not like anybody thinks we're all going to live forever. Everybody knows that nobody gets off this earth alive—or not alive, or whatever the answer is. So I do appreciate you sharing this conversation. Again, maybe this opens people up to talking about it a little bit more.
Ken Falcon: Yeah, I mean, this is 100% inspired by my partner. She had a family member going through a mental health crisis, and she told us about it, all of us straight up. I was like, "Thank you for telling me. It gives us context to what's going on. But this is the kind of stuff that people mostly don't talk about." She’s like, "I think it adds to the stigma to hide it."
When I found out that I had cancer, I told my wife I was going to tell everybody. I was like, "How am I going to tell everybody? What am I going to do?" I told my partners I wanted to tell people, but I was like, "I don't want trickle truth. I don't want rumors to spread. I just want to tell people." But I went to our friend's house and I told her, I was like, “Listen, don't freak out. I’m going to be fine, 99% chance of survival, but I have cancer.” She broke down crying. I was like, "I cannot do this. I cannot tell every single person I know that I have cancer, in person, face to face, even though that's what I'd like to do."
So I made this Facebook post. It’s one of my favorite pieces of writing I've ever composed. It was the best thing I ever did. Three hundred people from my life—people I haven't spoken to since elementary school, middle school, high school, college, law school, work friends—reached out to me. I spent my eight-week sabbatical getting lunch and dinner with my old friends.
Elise Holtzman: It sounds like you've really been able to find the gifts. I mean, I think that’s one of the challenges for people when something bad happens—to find the gifts in it—and you’ve been able to do that. So, Ken, as we wrap up our time here together, there’s a question that I ask all of my guests at the end of the show that I’d like to ask you.
There’s a phenomenon called the curse of knowledge, where experts sometimes forget that what is so obvious and natural to them is not at all obvious to other people. When it comes to leading and growing a law firm with intention and turning it into what you really want it to be so that you can enjoy your life, not just your law practice, what’s a principle or piece of advice that may seem obvious to you, but you think is important for people to hear?
Ken Falcon: You have to be nice. You have to be really nice, genuinely. You don’t have to say you’re nice. You don’t have to act nice. You have to be nice. If you’re an asshole, you’re only going so far in this world. It’s not necessarily an asshole trait to pursue money, but if you are pursuing only money and you pretend to pursue other things, that’s not nice. That’s you lying to the people that you’re talking to. That causes fallout. The result of that fallout is FRB’s growth.
So on the one hand, thank you. But on the other hand, really just being honest with all the people whom you’re hiring, even if that makes hiring more difficult, being honest with your employees, even if that means attrition, that’s the fundamental respect that we all owe to each other. That’s it. So be nice, be respectful, and things will fall into place.
Elise Holtzman: Love it. Thank you so much. Ken, thanks so much for being here. This is a really interesting conversation. Thank you for being so open and honest and sharing all of this stuff. I think it’s going to be a benefit to a lot of people.
I’m going to thank our listeners for tuning in as well. If you’ve enjoyed today’s show, please subscribe, rate, and review us at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. In the meantime, be bold, take action, and make things happen. We’ll see you next time.




