Laura Leopard | How to Leverage Data to Help Your Law Firm Grow

Elise Holtzman: Hi, everyone. It's Elise Holtzman here, a former practicing lawyer and the host of The Lawyer's Edge Podcast, where I sit down with successful attorneys, legal marketing specialists, business leaders, and authors to talk about how lawyers and law firms can grow and sustain healthy, profitable businesses.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of The Lawyer's Edge Podcast. I'm really excited to welcome my guest today, Laura Leopard. Laura is the founder and general manager of Leopard Solutions, now a SurePoint company, the largest law firm data platform for serving the legal industry with actionable intelligence and insights on more than 5,500 law firms worldwide and 6,800 US corporate legal departments.

Laura has spearheaded Leopard Solutions’ growth and development over the company's 18-year history, and she continues to push the envelope, designing new systems, business intelligence programs, and data points for its expanding client base.

Beyond her entrepreneurial success, Laura is a passionate advocate for diversity and women in law. She is frequently quoted in the media, and her commentary has appeared in Law360, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bloomberg Law, and Above the Law just to name a few. Laura, welcome to The Lawyer's Edge.

Laura Leopard: Thank you, Elise. I'm looking forward to this conversation.

Elise Holtzman: Well, I'm delighted you're here. Laura, your reputation precedes you. I've had the opportunity to hear you speak on several occasions, and so I'm thrilled that you're here to talk to me a little bit today about some of the things that you care most about.

I'd love to start with a little bit about your background. Tell me how you got into the world of data and competitive intelligence in the first place. Then how did you wind up doing all of these things exclusively for the legal industry?

Laura Leopard: Well, like most people in the data industry, I started as an actress, which is true, which is true. I actually had a friend who was working for a legal recruiter, and he would complain to me that the data that they used to make these cold calls was really terrible.

I did some of those cold calls for a legal recruiter. I agreed. We started a very simple, no-tech version called The Leopard List, where we compiled a list of New York associates, and then we handed it to people, put it on a disc, and handed it to people. That's how it started.

It was a subscription service because I said, “I'll give you three of these discs a year.” That's how it began. I knew nothing about the law. I knew nothing about what a lawyer does. So I really had a crash course.

We had several years. We had a pretty good runway where we had time to really learn the industry. We listened to legal recruiters, we listened to attorneys and what they had to say. I could call people for advice or what a better clarification was. So we really learned it after we started it. It was a very interesting process.

But it was a very simple business until my partner, Mary Ellen Cozza, joined the business. From that little Excel spreadsheet, she took us online and we built our first search engine. That's when things really began to take off because it enabled us to put more data in, to update it more frequently, and to make it more of a live database. You could make changes more easily.

We began to see that this data could do more than just be a simple list. From New York associates, we built it out across the country. We added partners into the database because when we started, people said, “Oh, don't bother putting partners in because they never move.”

Elise Holtzman: Oh, isn't that funny? The world has changed so much.

Laura Leopard: It's changed tremendously and I really do think we had a huge part in that. When we started, legal recruiters could recruit from the people that they knew. So they were all generally former attorneys. They would call up people that they went to law school with and they would get introductions.

There was a gigantic Martindale-Hubbell book that people would use a ruler and just go down and try to search for people. That's how you had to recruit. So you really did have to have a foot in the industry to be able to do that job.

What we did was democratize the data and we let the smallest shop have access to the best data that the largest shops also had access to and it opened the door for more people to be able to recruit.

It made recruiting easier. I'm not going to take credit for all the lateral movement that goes on today, but we did have a big part in changing how people recruit and how they found attorneys.

I do think we played a pretty big part in that and it's been a very interesting journey. But once we moved beyond recruitment, we understood that the data could do so much more, and that's when we stepped into the intelligence base.

Elise Holtzman: I'm going to want to ask you more about that in a couple of minutes because I think this is one of those things that most lawyers don't really understand. That's not a criticism. Why would we need to understand it for the most part? They're busy practicing law. But I think it's important for people to understand that.

One of the things I do want to point out is I love your story because it illustrates that cliche, something like jump out of the airplane and build your parachute on the way down. Your story sounds very much like one of those where you didn't even know what industry you were stepping into.

You didn't know anything about it, but you sought out the people and found out what their needs were, and you supplied a solution for those needs. Isn't that really what the service industry is all about? That's certainly something that lawyers can relate to.

Laura Leopard: Exactly. Exactly. What is that great Henry Ford quote? It's like, if I gave them what they wanted, I would have given them faster horses. Nobody really knew what to ask for because it never occurred to them. But I have to say, too, at the time that we started, even law firms having websites was relatively new.

So that's why everyone used a Martindale-Hubbell book. No one was going to the web because no one could go to the web. But then when those law firm websites came on, it made that data more accessible.

It also made the ability for us to take it off the websites and then continuously update it through the year. That's something new. If you were sourcing from a book that was printed in January, and you were trying to source from that book in the following December, you were working with some very old data.

Elise Holtzman: You and I, I think, are of a similar vintage in terms of age and stage. So I remember that. I remember the Martindale-Hubbell books. They weren't even books. They were tomes. They weighed tons. You would go blind trying to read it because the type was so small.

Then the library would always be getting in the updates and the supplements and they would be stuck in the back. I remember as a young attorney doing legal research that way. It really is amazing what's happened in the last 18-plus years since you started your business.

Speaking of all of that, we know there's consistent rapid growth. I mean, this stuff grows and changes all the time. I think for, again, many lawyers and law firm leaders, it's really hard to keep up.

Let's talk a little bit about the kinds of information that you use and provide to your clients and what people are doing with that stuff. First of all, what sorts of clients do you typically work with?

Laura Leopard: We have clients of all varieties. We still work with legal recruiters, we work with law firms, we work with corporations, we work with law schools, and we work with some legal tech vendors. Our data is important to many different parts of the industry that may use it in different ways, but the data is all valuable.

Elise Holtzman: What are some of the ways in which people are using this data? Can you give us a few examples? For example, what would a corporation or corporate legal department be doing with it? What might a law firm or a law school be doing with it?

Laura Leopard: Well, the corporations that we currently sell to, they have law departments that are like a large law firm. They employ 400 attorneys, 500 attorneys, and they are also having to constantly source new talent. That's why they use the product.

They actually have a new product coming out for them in October. Hopefully I can get a chance to talk about that later, but that'll be for corporations. Law schools use it to help law students decide where they should go work after law school so they can find out more information about the firm, they can find more information about attorneys working there.

They have to make some big decisions relatively quickly. Usually where you go when you summer associate, that's probably where you're going to spend the first year or two of your career. Before they make those big decisions, they like to go and get information about the law firm that's non-biased, that's not coming from the firm itself. That is where the reporting that we have really comes into play.

They can look at a law firm. They can see how many people they have in the practice areas that they're looking at. If they're a woman, how many women do they have on staff?

If they're diverse, how many ethnically diverse people are at this law firm? All of those things matter when they're making these big decisions and we're really the only place that they can go find that information.

Elise Holtzman: Back in the day, we didn't have any access to that. I've been amazed at what is available now. While I don't talk to law students very frequently in the work that I do, I gave birth to one who is currently in law school. She just accepted a 2L summer offer.

There's so much more data available. I mean, she would report on certain law firms what's going on internally. I would say, “How do you know that?” That's how she knows it is because of the kind of data that you provide.

Laura Leopard: That's right. That's right. It's incredibly important. When you, as a woman or as an ethnically diverse person and you're looking to make that big decision, we know from looking at the data that where you go and join, if there are more people, there are more women, there are more women in leadership, you might do better at that law firm because there's going to be more opportunity for you there.

If you go to another law firm that has very low numbers, you might do well there, but you're going to be more of a trailblazer and the climb might be a little bit harder. It's really good to know all of that going in. That's why it's important to put that information in their hands.

Elise Holtzman: On the flip side, it's important for law firms to recognize that all of that data about them is available to people. They can't hide anymore from what's going on internally and from what their statistics look like.

I mean, we know a lot of the stuff gets published. But as you point out, there are lots of people who have access to data about their firms. As they make decisions, depending on what they want their brand to be in the marketplace, I think it's important for them to pay attention to those things.

Laura Leopard: Absolutely. As corporations also are more attuned to working with law firms in some instances that I want a diverse team, I want to work with a diverse law firm, that's important to us as a law firm client, and they can see this data as well, and that's going to inform their decision-making.

It was incredibly important to us to get this data into the database. I have to tell you, Elise, we resisted it for years. People had asked us to put diversity information in the database, and we were always really terrified to do it, and we didn't know the best way to do it.

Then the summer of George Floyd happened. We put our pens down. We stopped everything we were doing and we figured it out. We said, “We are going to get diversity information in our database in order to help those people to be found so that they can be hired.”

We took the tack of we're going to look at probability of diversity. We're not going to actually talk about specific ethnicities. We're going to look at data points, which is what we do. We're data people. We assemble data points. Then we say, “This person has a high probability of being diverse. This person has a high probability of being gender diverse.”

Then people can search for those attorneys, but only if they're a member of The Mansfield Rule, or they have signed a Leopard Diversity Pledge, which ensures people who have access to that data are going to treat it properly, which is to include those attorneys, not exclude them.

We really wanted to safeguard it, and we worked incredibly hard. We took our entire staff. It was all hands on deck to get this data in, and it all had to be looked at by human beings and vetted twice by human beings to make sure we got it right because it's so important.

Now thankfully, we can report on this on every single law firm in our database, all 5,505 law firms, we can report on diversity. We're not getting it from a survey, we're not getting it from outside means, we are doing the research and assigning that probability.

I have to tell you, the reporting is astounding. It's astounding. The differences between hiring patterns in law firms, it's really eye-opening and it's something all law firms should see and it's something all of their clients should see.

Elise Holtzman: It's really interesting that you're providing that data now. I also think it's interesting, and this is a little bit off topic but I think it's important to point out that you obviously approach this project with a certain set of values, whether they're personal values or organizational values inside of Leopard Solutions.

It's not, like you said, “Oh, let's jump on the bandwagon and give everybody this information.” I'm curious a little bit about that process. Was that something that was a little bit controversial internally? Or did everybody say, “No, you're right. We've got to make sure that this is only in the hands of people who we believe are going to use the information appropriately?”

Laura Leopard: It was controversial when I first proposed it to the team because they were all very concerned about how this data would be used and they were incredibly worried—and with good reason—that it would be misused.

But when we presented to them the final proof of concept, we said, “Here's how we're going to do it. Here's how we're going to assure that this data is used properly,” they were great with it.

We actually followed the roadmap that was set by Diversity Lab because you have to sign that pledge to be a member of The Mansfield Rule. So we said, “That's how we can do this.” They have to re-sign this pledge every year.

I've actually had people not sign the pledge because they work for partners in the law firm that says, “Don't bring me a woman,” or “Don't bring me anyone who's diverse.” Respectfully, they haven't signed the pledge. They do not have access to that data. But everyone can see the overall numbers. Everyone can see what firms have a balance of ethnically diverse attorneys and those who don't.

Elise Holtzman: Right. So people can get the basics and have access to trends.

Laura Leopard: That’s right.

Elise Holtzman: Speaking of corporate culture, late in May of this year, SurePoint Technologies, which is a leading provider of legal software solutions for mid-sized law firms, announced the strategic acquisition of your firm, Leopard Solutions. Laura, what made you decide, after nearly 20 years of working independently and doing your own thing, that you wanted to align with SurePoint?

Because that's a big decision, especially when you are that entrepreneur. Even if you didn't know it back when you were a theater person, you are an entrepreneur. You saw that opportunity. You jumped on it. You've been growing with it. As somebody who owns my business, I think there's some pride of authorship and ownership and “This is my baby,” and all of that sort of thing. So I'm really curious about what made you decide to go forward with SurePoint.

Laura Leopard: Well, it was a bit of a journey. We've always had good growth, but it's been steady growth every year. We had decided as a company, Mary Ellen and I had decided we are really going to go for hyper-growth this year.

We have the products. Every law firm that sees what we have, their jaws drop. We really should be everywhere. We're going to go for hypergrowth. And we realized we just couldn't do it on our own.

Up until this point, we really hadn't taken outside money. But I had investors emailing me every day, five times a day. I had people sending me gifts to get them to talk to them and we always said, “No, no, no, no. I never wanted anybody to tell us what to do,” because that's just me. That's my personality.

But SurePoint was different because they actually were a client and they saw what we had and the unique potential of what we had and we started a conversation. I understood that fundamentally, we both wanted the same thing. We wanted to help law firms grow.

While we are in about 40% of the top 200, we were just beginning to sell to a lot of mid-sized firms. There are thousands of mid-sized firms. It's a much bigger market than that top 200, and they need this same data. So it reminded me, for recruiters, we democratize the data, we let those small recruiting shops have the same data that those big shops did. This would be the same thing, to give these mid-sized firms the same tools, the same data that they use, that the big firms use to enable them to grow.

SurePoint wanted to help firms grow and to optimize what they’re doing and to automate what they could and to scale their business. Well, we wanted the same thing and we also needed help scaling Leopard and making that mid-size market aware of Leopard and what we had to offer. So as the talks continue, it all just sort of fell into place.

Plus, they are just the nicest group of people. They really are. They're really nice people and welcoming. They said, “Laura, we want you to come in and we're going to let Leopard be Leopard.” I said, “That sounds good to me.” It really has worked out to be a great combination.

Elise Holtzman: Yeah, I love hearing that. I can attest to that because I've met some of the SurePoint people, and I agree with you that so far, everybody's fantastic.

Laura Leopard: Yeah.

Elise Holtzman: What are you most excited about now as you look ahead? I mean, obviously your own growth as an organization, but for the clients that are out there, for law firms and other folks who use your data, what's got your attention right now?

Laura Leopard: Well, we're still working on connection reports and stuff in our Business Intelligence Suite. The Business Intelligence Suite is incredible, really incredible.

Elise Holtzman: What does that mean? When you say business intelligence, just from a layperson's perspective, what are some of the kinds of things that are going to be in there or in there already and perhaps are going to be in there in the future?

Laura Leopard: Well, okay, I'll put it this way. We have two intelligence platforms. One is called Firmscape. It was our first intelligence platform, and it was all about competitive intelligence. If you were a data head and a data geek, you would love it. You can run reports and you can sort firms and you can see growth decline, who's growing, who's not. There was all kinds of great market competitive intelligence there.

But what we realized was some of the information in there wasn't transferring up the chain to the CMO, to the COO, to the CEO, and those were the people that really needed to know this intelligence that we had. We wrote a program called BI and I said, “Here's what I want you to do: Instead of delivering like a spreadsheet or a chart like we do in Firmscape, I want you to just give them the answer. Give them the answer to their question on a platter.”

There's no question about what they're looking at. In our BI Suite, there's a report in Firmscape called the Firm Entrance and Exit Report, which shows ROI on hires, entry-level and lateral hires. Well, in the BI Suite, we actually tie that to money because we know they care about money.

How much money did you lose in lateral hiring in the last five years? Was it lateral hiring or entry-level hiring? Did you use it because there was a problem in a location? Was there a problem in a practice area? We really distill it all down to where it's super simple and it's clear right in front of them.

By connecting it to money, they can understand, “Wow, we left,” and there was a firm I looked at today, they lost $27 million in recruitment in 2022. Eye-popping numbers. They're not alone. There's a lot of money that's lost in recruitment. It takes a lot of deals coming into the door to make up for that money but it was something that we wanted to shine a spotlight on.

We also took our law firm database and connected it to our in-house database. So now a firm can say, “Oh, does anybody at my firm know anybody in Capital One?” “Oh, look at that. I've got 50 attorneys that work from my firm that know someone in Capital One,” and I can tell them how they know them so they can do a warm call into Capital One to try to facilitate business.

I can do the same thing with a recruiting connection report. Does anybody at my firm know Bill Jones? You know what they do now? They send out an email throughout the farm. Does anybody here know Bill Jones? Maybe somebody will answer, maybe somebody won't.

But we can show them, “Yeah, you've got 10 people at your firm that know Bill Jones. Five of them went to law school with them. A few of them worked at them at past firms. These are the people that can make that warm call.”

We make all of these connections through our data. It's not like we're crawling LinkedIn. LinkedIn has a lot of bad data. It's all fungible data because everybody can put that in themselves.

All of these connections are being made from our attorney database and our in-house database and the history that we have on all of those attorneys. We've really been around for 20 years, and all of that data, we are mining history. We know where they worked. We know where they moved to. We know what practice they were doing when they were at that firm.

All of that rolls up. I mean, I like to say I'm an actress, yeah. I'm a storyteller. Our job at Leopard is to tell the full and complete story of an attorney and what they really do at the firm. Attorney bios are like a Yellow Page ad. You really have to ferret out what they do. That's our job.

Then that attorney story rolls up along with all the other attorneys to give you the story of the firm. All of those firms, those 5,500 firms, they all roll up to tell the story of a market. Now you can say, “Oh, look at that. M&A is going back up again.” “Oh, look at that. This is being depressed in this area.” “San Francisco is having a problem with this. Denver's having a problem with that.”

It's all simple and it's all right there for you to go look at. We know firms have problems keeping up with alumni. Well, we have an alumni tracker that can go tell them where all their alumni are, where they went. They may have known they went to Jones Day.

Well, they left Jones Day two years ago and they went somewhere else. We can tell them where they went so they've got really more up-to-date information. So the BI Suite is about solving business problems with data so that firms can make better data-driven decisions.

Elise Holtzman: I'm really glad you explained all that to me because even though I know that this data is out there, I don't think that I fully understand how law firms and in-house legal departments and others are using this on a daily basis and in a practical way, in a way that is going to reduce expenses, increase the bottom line, help people make better decisions.

One of the things I'm curious about is the adoption of this in the legal industry. Do you find that a certain type of law firm is more likely to be interested in using this information than another?

For example, do you find that the larger law firms who have more resources and maybe have more business professionals, such as COOs, CEOs, and CMOs, are more open to using that stuff? Do you find that midsize and smaller firms are getting on board? What's your experience?

Laura Leopard: Well, back in the day when we first started, law firms, they didn't want to do recruitment in the normal way because they just thought it wasn't done. Nobody makes a call. We're going to end up in the news about moving people.

Well, all of that's changed. All of that's very much changed. Actually, there were a lot of outside recruiters that moved in-house into law firms and they all said, “Why aren't you recruiting this way?”

Once we got in there and they were able to see some of the reporting and stuff that we had, then it made its way up the chain, and especially once we had the BI Suite, then the marketing departments have been very interested, the CI departments are very interested.

But those people, one way or another, could get that data because they have resources to do it. The firms in the top 200 of those firms with a thousand people, they have money to burn for all kinds of information that they need. They could get it from multiple sources.

It might not be as good—I'm biased about that—but it might not be as good, but they could do it. Mid-sized firms, they don't have a CMO generally. They don't have a CI person. Yet, they need the same information. I think the struggle with the mid-sized firms for us hasn't been selling them the product once they see it. It's been getting them to know about it.

That's why the marriage with SurePoint made so much sense. Everybody, everybody would use data to make better decisions if they could. The industry was slow to get there, and there are still law firms where the person at the top makes decisions based on their gut, but those decisions might not lead to the best outcome. So knowing that you are making data-driven decisions makes the most sense.

I mean, years ago, before I even created Firmscape, I remember a recruiter saying to me, “Oh, the Chicago market is really hot. It's really hot. There's lots of movement going on.” I went and I looked at our data. I'm like, “No, it's not. That's just her experience. That's just what she's seeing and feeling.”

Data is telling me something completely different. There's also a difference between good data and bad data. At the beginning of the year, there was an article that came down that talked about how legal recruiting was going to tank in 2024. It was going to be far behind 2023.

I don't know where they got their data, but we looked at ours and we said, “That is completely wrongheaded. That is not correct at all. That is not what our data is showing.” Using data, very important. Using the right data and using accurate data, even more important. Whatever data source you're using, vet it, make sure it's accurate before you bet your company on it.

Elise Holtzman: We talked about this idea of using all of this data for growth and for change. You started talking earlier about being passionate about diversity. You mentioned the George Floyd situation. I also mentioned earlier that you're passionate about empowering women in law.

How, if at all, can we use data to help achieve success in retaining and promoting women in the profession? So if we have the data—and I don't even know who we is, who are the we that's using this stuff—if we have the data, can we do something with it to help advance the cause?

Again, you started talking about it a little bit before, but what do you want to see people do with the data? How do you want them to use it in order to advance some of these causes that you are so passionate about?

Laura Leopard: Well, data is power. Data is power. Knowledge is power. Knowing that there is a problem is instructive. There are firms who have very low diversity numbers. Perhaps they're happy with that or perhaps they just don't know how low they are.

There's also been an enormous amount of data that has come out to say the more diverse a law firm is, the better it does, the better outcomes they have in court. There are so many ways that diversity helps a law firm and there are law firms that need to hear that their diversity numbers are not where they should be.

For women in law, we've looked at numbers, the women on the partner level, the numbers are very low. Women on the associate side, however, has done a dramatic change since we first started this company.

Even in the last five years, there's been a big shift. More women were in law school. More women graduated. Now there are more women that have been hired as an associate than men, which is a very interesting development.

Law firms did recognize that they had a problem with women in mid-career. They were dropping out in mid-career. They weren't advancing to partnership. They were going to in-house. They were going somewhere else and we were asked why.

So we did our very first survey of women a few years ago where it was for women who had left Big Law and the question was “Why did you leave?” The answers were hair-raising. It was astounding to me the sexism that they encountered in their firm and we really couldn't come out with that the way it was.

So I started interviewing firms to see, “What are you doing to help women? What are you doing to help women stay at your firm?” We got some really great answers. I actually put a list together of like 14 things that law firms could do to help women stay in the profession.

There are things that firms can do, but you have to have a commitment to do them. You actually have to do them. We followed it up. Another two years later, we followed it up with a survey for women still working in Big Law. Their answers were also hair-raising, but there's still some good firms out there doing good things to help women.

We just did a survey for ethnically diverse attorneys, the first one ever done. Because we have them in our database, we could email them and ask them to take our survey.

I have to say all the problems are very similar, they're not getting work fairly. They're not being assigned work fairly. They have partners that always assign work to the same people. They don't try other people in the department. Well, the answer to that is you're not measuring work assignments, you're not measuring to see who's getting what, and you can't fix something unless you're aware of it.

You have to be able to see it to measure it, to know if you're doing what you need to be doing. You also have to not just talk to them on an exit interview, you have to talk to them while they're at your firm and find out how they feel, how they feel that they're being treated, are they being assigned work properly. That's how you can solve a problem before they walk out of the door. You have to be aware of it.

There will always be sexism. There will always be racism. Always. No one's going to be able to eradicate that. But what you can do is say, “We won't tolerate it.” That is the key thing. We won't tolerate it. When they see it, they call it out, and people are disciplined or they're let go for their behavior.

You can't care that they're a rainmaker or not. If they have made racist comments to attorneys at your firm, they got to go. It's having that belief that you want to support and to help them succeed at your firm and then standing behind it by not tolerating racism and sexism in your firm. That's incredibly important.

Elise Holtzman: It's a great point, and what strikes me is that it goes both ways. Like, you can have all the data and the handwriting is on the wall. But if you're not committed to making change, it's not going to happen. The data is meaningless.

You can also have all the best intentions in the world. There are many, many people out there in law firm leadership and in other parts of the legal community that do, that want to drive change.

But without the information that they need in order to make proper decisions, to your point, they're not necessarily going to be able to move ahead with their goals as quickly as they otherwise would. So I think that that's really, really interesting when it comes to this particular issue.

Laura Leopard: Yeah, it is. There was actually an answer on our ethnically diverse survey of attorneys. They said that very thing. They said good intentions. Good intentions can also be harmful. You may have an outward goal for the firm, but unless it's supported and followed by everyone at the firm, it's going to fail. That's how good intentions fail because they're not committed and there's no follow-through where there should be follow-through.

Elise Holtzman: Laura, as we wrap up here today, I want to ask you a question that I ask all of my guests at the end of the program. 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 others.

When it comes to using data to help a law firm grow and thrive and achieve its goals, what's a principle or piece of advice that may seem obvious to you, but is important for people to hear?

Laura Leopard: You have to believe in the numbers. I've seen people look at numbers and say, “Oh, that can't be right,” because they don't want to admit that the numbers are telling a story that they don't want to hear.

So if you have good data, you can believe that the data is right and then you can work around it to improve that data, to improve that numbers. But if you're really going to make data-driven decisions, you got to believe in the data. You have to be willing to go where the data tells you you need to go, where your problem is.

There are a lot of people that still like to make those gut decisions. But in a world where those decisions can mean the collapse of a firm, I saw a firm in our growth decline report today where they had 138 attorneys leave because they didn't like something that the firm did. I bet it was a gut decision that they made that change and 138 people walked out the door.

You have to be really careful. Knowing that you are making a data-driven decision, whether you like it or not, that's going to help the firm grow or meet a milestone that you really want to make, that's what you need to do. It's thinking differently, it's working differently, and it's opening your mind to a new way of doing things. That is essential if you want to grow and succeed in today's world.

Elise Holtzman: Well, thank you, Laura. What a great way to end. I think that that is a call to action for so many law firm leaders. I appreciate you being here with me today and sharing all this information because, as I said, I think there's so much value to what you do and I think there are still a lot of people who don't totally get it.

Hopefully, we've been able to illuminate things for some folks today. Thanks again for being here. I also want to thank our listeners for tuning in. 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.

Thank you for tuning in. 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.