Why Change Management Stalls in Law Firms
Why is change management so difficult in law firms?
Firms invest significant time and resources in changing behavior. They communicate strategic priorities, provide training, distribute data and analytics, introduce new tools, and establish new policies. And yet behavior often remains stubbornly unchanged.
At PipelinePlus, our work with law firms has led us to think about change through what we call the 3Es of Change Management®: Educate, Empower, and Embed.
Educate builds awareness and understanding. Empower creates the conditions for people to put that understanding into practice. Embed reinforces the new behavior until it becomes part of how the firm operates. The framework is simple. The difficult part is moving from one E to the next, particularly from Educate to Empower.
Why doesn’t Education always lead to behavior change?
Most law firms are quite good at Education. When leaders want to change behavior, the natural response is to provide people with more information. Communicate the strategy. Share the data. Introduce a new tool or process. Conduct a training program.
There is good reason for this. Education is relatively easy to deploy at scale. One communication can reach hundreds or thousands of people. A training program can provide an entire partnership with the same information. Dashboards and analytics can make previously invisible patterns visible.
All of these things help on an intellectual level.
But understanding what to do and consistently doing it are two different things.
Consider something as seemingly straightforward as collaboration. A law firm can explain why cross-selling matters. It can train partners on how to identify opportunities. It can provide data showing the financial upside of cross-selling and which clients have untapped potential. It can even give partners technology that makes opportunities easier to identify.
None of that necessarily means partners will collaborate differently on Monday morning.
At some point, more Education produces diminishing returns. That is when change management needs to move into its second stage.
What does Empower mean in change management?
Empowerment is about creating the conditions in which people can put what they know into practice.
New skills require practice. New behaviors are easier to adopt when they are simple to try, the cognitive load is manageable, and people have enough psychological safety to experiment without feeling that every attempt needs to be perfect.
This changes the nature of the intervention.
Instead of simply telling the partner body that they should collaborate more, Empowerment might involve a one-on-one conversation helping an individual partner identify one colleague with whom collaboration makes sense and facilitating a productive conversation.
Instead of training someone on how to have a difficult pricing conversation, it might mean helping them prepare for an actual client conversation, practicing how they will frame it, and debriefing afterward.
Instead of presenting another dashboard, it might mean sitting down with an individual and asking: What does this information suggest you should do next?
Productive discussion matters. Coaching matters. Accountability matters. Leadership reinforcement matters. Incentives and compensation can matter. And proactive reinforcement is key. These are the things that are harder to scale.
And therein lies one of the central challenges of change management in law firms.
Why is behavior change difficult to scale in law firms?
Law firms understandably want change initiatives to scale.
If the goal is greater collaboration across a 1,000-lawyer firm, working intensively with 20 partners can seem inadequate. A firmwide initiative feels more commensurate with the size of the objective.
But the desire for scale can inadvertently push firms back toward the interventions that are easiest to scale: another communication, another training program, another policy. That can create the appearance of progress without necessarily producing much behavioral change. It can also create an environment where incessant messaging becomes the norm.
Empowerment often requires a different mindset.
Rather than initially asking, “How do we get everyone to do this?” the more useful question may be: “Where are people ready to begin doing this?”
That distinction becomes especially important when the prevailing culture does not yet reinforce the behavior leadership wants to encourage.
Sometimes you have to work your way in from the edges
Culture rarely changes everywhere at once.
When the broader environment is resistant to a new behavior, trying to convert the entire organization simultaneously can consume enormous amounts of energy. There may be more leverage in identifying the people who are already willing, or at least willing-adjacent. Give them opportunities to experiment.
Reduce the friction associated with the new behavior. Provide coaching and reinforcement. Help them experience progress. Then let those successes begin to create momentum elsewhere.
This is what I mean by “working your way in from the edges.”
It is admittedly incremental. But incremental should not be confused with insignificant.
A few partners demonstrating that cross-selling can strengthen rather than threaten client relationships can influence how their peers think about collaboration. A practice leader who becomes more effective at coaching colleagues can demonstrate a different model of leadership. A handful of partners who navigate pricing conversations successfully can begin to change the internal narrative around rate confidence.
Those experiences provide something Education alone cannot: evidence from inside the firm that a different behavior can work. It's where true momentum begins.
From Education to Empowerment in law firms
For decades, law firms have turned to us for help with Education. We’ve delivered keynotes, workshops, and webinars on business development, pricing, succession, strategy, and other growth solutions where firms want to build greater awareness, knowledge, and skill. That work remains important. But increasingly, we’re seeing firms recognize that Education alone isn’t enough.
A keynote can introduce a new way of thinking about business development. A pricing workshop can give partners better language for communicating value. A succession program can help senior partners understand what an effective transition requires.
But the harder question comes afterward: What happens when everyone goes back to work? That is where Empowerment enters the equation.
Increasingly, our work extends beyond the keynote, workshop, or training program into more individualized interventions that help people put those ideas into practice: coaching, facilitated conversations, accountability measures, leadership reinforcement, and tools that reduce the friction associated with adopting new behaviors.
The objective isn’t to replace Education with Empowerment. It is to connect them.
Education creates understanding. Empowerment helps convert understanding into action. Embed makes that action sustainable.
And we’re seeing more law firm leaders recognize that if they want meaningful behavior change, all three need to be part of the equation.
How does a law firm Embed behavior change?
The third E is Embed.
This is where a new behavior stops depending primarily on individual effort and begins to become part of how the firm operates. Processes reinforce it. Leaders model it. Incentives support it. People see colleagues doing it. Expectations shift. Eventually, what once felt like a “change initiative” simply becomes part of the culture.
But firms can be tempted to jump from Educate directly to Embed. They communicate the desired behavior and then try to institutionalize it through systems, policies, metrics, or compensation.
Empowerment is the bridge between the two. People need opportunities to translate knowledge into action before a firm can reasonably expect those behaviors to become habitual.
How do you know when it’s time to move from Educate to Empower?
None of this is an argument against Education. Education is the first E for a reason. People need context. They need information. They need to understand what is changing, why it matters, and what is expected of them.
The question is what happens next.
When people understand the desired behavior but still aren’t consistently adopting it, another round of messaging or training may not address the real obstacle.
At that point, the questions become more personal:
What psychological, cultural, or emotional aspect is getting in the way?
Is the desired behavior simple enough to put into practice?
Do people have opportunities to practice it?
Is it psychologically safe to experiment?
Are leaders modeling and reinforcing the behavior?
Do incentives support it or undermine it?
Are there willing or willing-adjacent individuals who could demonstrate what progress looks like?
Those questions move the conversation from Educate to Empower.
And once enough people are practicing and reinforcing the behavior, the conditions begin to emerge for Embed.
At PipelinePlus, this is increasingly how we think about our role in helping firms navigate change: not simply providing the Education that introduces new ideas, but helping firms determine where and how Empowerment can turn those ideas into new behaviors, and ultimately Embed them into the culture.
Because the measure of a successful change initiative isn’t how many people heard the message.
It’s what people do differently afterward.
Authored by: David Ackert
David Ackert is Co-Founder and CEO of PipelinePlus. Under David's leadership, PipelinePlus has developed a portfolio of leadership development programs, strategic advisory services, executive communities, and technology-enabled learning solutions focused on Rainmaker Readiness, Rate Readiness, Leadership Readiness, Collaboration Readiness, Succession Readiness, and Commercial Readiness. Read David’s full bio.