Things worth taking with you.
Guides and tools I’ve built for law firms, plus the books I actually recommend when someone asks what to read. Everything here is free and nothing asks for your email address.
Built for firms, free to use.
The Project Setup Tool
Most firms trying AI are typing into a blank box and getting generic answers back. This walks you through building a persistent project in Claude with your own instructions, reference material and working rules, so the answers arrive already knowing your structure. Written for firm administrators and operations staff, not engineers. Covers what belongs in a project, what must never go in one, and how to keep it current.
Where Growing Firms Get Stuck
A short book on the operational failures that show up on a predictable schedule as a firm grows: the intake process that worked at forty matters a month, the handbook nobody has opened since 2019, the case-management system you pay for twice. Drawn from the same work I do inside firms.
Books I recommend, and why.
Not a reading list — a short shelf. Every one of these has changed how I look at a firm, and each note says who should bother.
Running the firm as a business
- Managing the Professional Service FirmDavid H. MaisterThe book that named the problem. Why a firm full of excellent practitioners still runs badly, and why leverage, utilization and pricing are the three dials that actually move. Dated in its examples, right in its bones.
- The E-Myth AttorneyMichael E. Gerber, Robert Armstrong & Sanford FischThe law-specific version of the argument that you have bought yourself a job, not built a business. Read it if the firm stops functioning the week you take vacation.
- Traction: Get a Grip on Your BusinessGino WickmanA concrete operating rhythm — scorecards, a weekly meeting that ends on time, an accountability chart instead of an org chart. A lot of firms I meet are already half-running this and don’t know it has a name.
- The GoalEliyahu M. GoldrattA novel about a factory, which sounds like the least relevant thing on this list. It is the clearest explanation ever written of why fixing the wrong step makes the backlog worse. Substitute “matters” for “parts” as you read.
Process & systems
- The Checklist ManifestoAtul GawandeWhy highly trained professionals resist checklists, and why they are wrong. If you have ever missed a deadline that a five-line list would have caught, start here.
- Measure What MattersJohn DoerrGoal-setting that survives contact with a busy quarter. Useful mostly as a corrective to the firm retreat that produces twelve priorities and no owners.
People
- Who: The A Method for HiringGeoff Smart & Randy StreetA repeatable interview structure. The single highest-return change a growing firm can make to hiring, because the cost of a bad legal assistant is measured in months.
- Radical CandorKim ScottFor the partner who avoids the hard conversation until it becomes a termination. The framework is simple enough to actually use on a Tuesday.
- Turn the Ship Around!L. David MarquetA submarine captain stops giving orders. The best book I know on pushing decisions down to the people holding the information — which is the whole game once a firm outgrows one person approving everything.
Money
- The Great Game of BusinessJack Stack & Bo BurlinghamOpen-book management — teaching everyone in the building to read the numbers they affect. Uncomfortable for a lot of firms, and transformative for the ones that try it.
- Profit FirstMike MichalowiczThe accounting is unorthodox and your CPA may wince. The behavioral insight — that money left in the operating account gets spent — is correct, and it is the reason profitable firms still feel broke.
Short pieces from inside the work.
What I keep running into in law firm back offices — the patterns, the fixes, and the occasional expensive mistake. No newsletter, no sign-up; just a page you can check.
Reading is cheap. Fixing the thing is the hard part —
and the first conversation is free.