Every person you meet and every situation you encounter during your journey, regardless of how challenging or futile they may seem, will impact the development of your character and shape your ideals. Every now and then, you process the lessons you learned and determine which of them would serve you best and propel you into achieving the goals you set out to reach.
The challenge of launching a new law firm forced me to reassess what I’ve learned during my years as a lawyer and consider the foundation on which we would build our venture. This led me to recognize that amongst the key investments one can make during their career are the time and effort you put into relationships that are of importance to you. As a law firm, this means making sure your clients are satisfied, and the lawyers are fulfilled.
With clients, ultimately, it comes down to understanding their business, its technicalities, and listening to their needs, challenges, and targets so that you are better positioned to provide appropriate advice. I’ve learned through the years that taking a sincere interest in your clients’ success builds the trust, credibility, and respect needed to ultimately establish passionate and driven team.
Nonetheless, you can only build this rapport with your clients if you have a team that is passionate and driven. Over the years, I found that to allow others to define their own style of lawyering, they must be given the space to try and succeed and fail. Lawyers do not come from one mold, and to assume that one style or method is more appropriate than others would be a failure to utilize people’s potential and ignite their passion and curiosity. Showing disregard for your team's strengths and potential has always been the quickest way to set everyone up for frustration and disappointment.
This is where the “collective ownership” culture ensures that each lawyer knows their impact on the collective, each having ownership of their work, their clients, and the firm, and thereby being given the chance and confidence to grow into the lawyers they aspire to be.
It was on that culture that Hafez & Partners was built from the ground up by the lawyers who were undeniably the firm's core pillars. I must say that, as challenging as it was to start this venture, with an empowered team, having the right mindset, confidence, passion, and ambition, we were poised to take big leaps and determined to work towards exciting new challenges.
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