LIMITLESS LAWYER with Charlotte Smith

"We have to re-think culture."

Raad Ahmed is the Founder & CEO of LawTrades.

Raad is a visionary. Raad is inspiring. He's a personality that likes to march to the beat of his own drum!

In this episode, his fun, free-spirited personality shines through. 

A fascinating guest, he began his journey of entrepreneurship during law school. 

Raad is captivated by the concept of building his own Utopia.

What does a world look like where the power is leaning towards individuals rather than institutions?

Enter LawTrades. 

In Raad's new world, lawyers don't need to rely on law firms for the infrastructure that they have traditionally provided. 

In this podcast, we hear Raad's origin story. 

We talk about fundraising and LawTrades recent series A. 

We discuss:

• Inspiration for the future of legal work. 

• Pivots, mindset, and reinventing after a challenging start. 

• His tips on fundraising in the Legal Tech space. 

• Legal freelancing, flexible work, and how the future can look.

• Meditation, breathwork, and debugging your brain.

• The Oura ring & wearable tech for peak performance.

And, of course, changing the culture in law.

 

To hear more from Raad & LawTrades connect here: 

https://www.lawtrades.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/raadahmed/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgTVjN_Gq2_wXV5yLL8J_Rg

https://twitter.com/R44D

 

 

In this episode, Charlotte interviews Mary O'Carroll, Chief Community Officer, Ironclad. 

• We discuss her career as a Legal Ops pioneer. We hear how it started  (pivoting from a career in investment banking) to leading and scaling Google's Legal Ops team, then taking on a new challenge as Chief Community Officer at Ironclad. 
• We cover the emerging CCO roles (Chief Comunity Officer) and what they entail. 
• How Community roles inform product development and company-wide strategy 
• We discuss the importance of building a strong culture in hyper-growth legal teams. How cross-functional relationships are key for collaboration and progressing the business forward. 
• We discuss the future of work. Hybrid and fully distributed teams if they're here to stay, and how building strong virtual relationships is crucial for team success. 
• We unpick the mindsets around overwork, and not having "time" to invest in key relationships. 
• We discuss Unicorn status, and the pains Legal Leaders experience managing their team's energy when scaling from 200 to a team of 1500.

We hope you enjoy this episode.

Connect with Charlotte here: 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlottesmithlawyercoach/

Mary O'Carroll, Ironclad:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/maryshenocarroll/

 

Doug Leonard has had a fascinating career in, and outside the law Over the span of 35 years, Doug has experience as a law firm administrator, as a business leader, as the Former Chair of the Disciplinary Board, Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, experience with the ABA National Well-being Taskforce, and now as a Leadership coach and consultant with a focus on organizational communication.

In this episode of the Limitless Lawyer podcast, we connected on the topic of well-being in the law– we explore: 

• Developing empathy as a leader.
• Creating understanding and awareness around common pitfalls lawyers can experience when it comes to professional conduct matters. 
• How you can grow and evolve in your career, by leaning into areas of interest with curiosity and an open mind. 
• The National Taskforce on Well-being, and Doug's involvement. 
• The culture of drinking in the legal profession and how this contributes to wellbeing challenges. 
• Actively managing a firm's culture to create an environment of high energy and success. 

Learn about Charlotte

https://www.charlotte-smith.com

Instagram: @limitless_lawyer 

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlottesmithlawyercoach/

Learn about Doug

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dleonard17/ 

https://douglasleonard.co/

"Our brains are like an open API and people can just put in things over time, parents, friends– all of the things that make us who we are in our history. One I got clear on the stories, then it's just a matter of batch checking that against the actual reality. This is where your lawyer brain can be so fantastic. We can interrogate ourselves and interrogate our thoughts like a witness. Is anyone actually expecting perfection? And you start to break down these stories." 

In this episode, with Mel Scott, host of Counsel Podcast, and senior in-house lawyer at Megaport, we explore:

• The power of investing in your growth.
• How our belief systems are formed, and how to call BS on the stories we tell ourselves.
• How cultivating a limitless mindset can involve feeling the fear and doing it anyway.
• Advocating for yourself, and impact on output when employers invest in your professional growth. 
• Why having a strong personal brand is one of the smartest investments for our legal careers. 

Connect with Mel Here: 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theinhouselawyer/

Counsel Podcast page on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/counsel-podcast

Instagram: @theinhouselawyer

Clubhouse: @inhouselawyer

Learn about Charlotte's upcoming Mastermind: 

https://www.charlotte-smith.com/mastermind/

Instagram: @limitless_lawyer 

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlottesmithlawyercoach/

 

"Crafty Counsel's mission is to bring joy, insight and connection to legal professionals, and in particular in-house, legal, and when we think about in-house legal, we don't necessarily just think about someone who's working full five days a week, employed as a solicitor or attorney or whatever the relevant term and in that jurisdiction, but we include people working in legal operations, compliance, the sort of expanding definition of the legal world. We want to be the media brand for those people."

In this episode with Ben White, Founder of Crafty Counsel, we explore: 

• His career journey and moving from private practice at Clifford Chance to in-house got his creative juices flowing regarding entrepreneurship. 
• How leaning into and following your interests and building relevant experience helps create clarity around vision and value proposition. 
• Building the confidence to become a founder using a risk analysis-based approach. 
• Learnings in the first years of entrepreneurship. 
• Making pivots and maintaining a mindset of resilience during these times. 
• The secret sauce to being a successful entrepreneur. 

How does training as a professional athlete, on track for the Olympics set you up to be a Founder in the legal tech space?

Meet Tom Dunlop, Founder, and CEO of Summize, a legal tech company. 

"As soon as you put that pressure on yourself, you increase your chances of failure, significantly, and that's why we foster a huge culture of personal development of continuous improvement at Summize"

In this episode we explore: 

• How Tom ended up shifting from a promising sports career to the legal industry
• How working as an in-house lawyer for high growth software companies propelled him on his journey to becoming a founder 
• How to create a mindset of resilience, and Tom shares lessons from his sporting career we can all learn from
• How Summize was born, from inception, to how he validated his idea and raised seed investment 
• The distinction between having an entrepreneurial mindset and becoming a founder 

This is a fantastic episode filled with so many amazing nuggets of gold. 

 

We hope you enjoy listening. If you enjoyed please don't forget to give us a 5* rating on I-Tunes and Spotify

 

 

“There's a certain energy that you have to have to do a role like this. You have to be ready to engage people constantly and have very similar conversations over and over again to try and make sure they're on the same page as you need them to be.”

In today’s episode of the Limitless Lawyer Podcast, we have Helen Lowe, Head of Legal Operations at EasyJet, one of Europe’s most well-known airlines. 

I am excited to interview one of the most impressive leaders in the Legal Ops space. Helen has had a fascinating career, from audit at KPMG to change management at a nuclear decommissioning site. 

In this conversation, we discuss: 

• Her career journey and how she was recruited into legal ops. 
• Leadership, talent development, and creating a high-energy culture.
• Building resilience in the face of setbacks from a change management, and career development standpoint. 
• The importance of developing our mindset muscles, showing up with consistency and persistence. 
• Recruiting into legal ops! We explore if lawyers or those with alternative backgrounds are preferred. 
• The impact that COVID-19 is going to have on work culture in the legal space. 
• The importance of leveraging the value out of your legal technology. 
• We discuss the O-Shaped Lawyer, and why client-centric solutions are what many in-house legal teams are crying out for. 
• Entrepreneur lawyers, digital nomads, and the demand for autonomy, flexibility in the workplace. 

If you enjoyed the podcast, we would love for you to give it a 5* Review in Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

To kick off season 3 of the Limitless Lawyer podcast, we speak with Alice Stephenson, Founder of Stephenson Law. 

Alice is a Brit who is now located in Amsterdam. She founded Stephenson Law. She's an innovator, a visionary, and is leading the charge of changing the face of the legal profession and disrupting the way we practice and deliver legal services.

We will discuss: 

• Her career beginnings and move from human resources to legal. 
• Experience of working in private practice. 
• Shifting to deliver in-house consultancy work and the difference between practice and in-house work. 
• The vision for the firm and what lawyer identity means when it comes to Stephenson Law lawyers!  
• Personal Branding and developing your own personal brand!
• Breaking the mold, leadership, and speaking up! 
• Diversity and changing the culture of law firms, and why she believes it has to be leadership lead. 
• The billable hour model, and selling professional service, and how we can take a more holistic approach to deliver legal services and performance metrics. 
• Fear of making mistakes in the legal profession and how as leaders we can challenge this fear-based paralysis. 

Connect with Charlotte 

www.charlotte-smith.com

https://membership.charlotte-smith.com/

20% discount PODCAST 

 

"You really start to become really resourceful when you have nothing to lose."

One of my favorite podcast conversations to date!

Meet Sarah Ouis, a French-qualified lawyer living in London.

She is a breath of fresh air in the legal profession, doing incredible work in the space of legal design.

Her legal career begins with an array of challenges.

• A "fake" legal internship in London. 
• A job in a coffee shop.

Sarah unapologetically shares her journey with adversity in such an authentic manner. She has a wicked sense of humor, bursting with creativity, and is a huge inspiration to the legal industry.  

Sarah is rocking legal content on social media and is a thought leader and pioneer in the space of legal design. Tailoring legal advice with UX (user experience) in mind. 

In this episode, we talked more about:

✅  How to thrive in adversity + cultivate a mindset of success.

✅  Trusting the process and the importance of self-awareness and self-reflection.

✅  Authenticity on Social Media for Lawyers.

✅  Creativity in the Legal Profession.

✅  Legal design, designing for the end-users, + GDPR Pizzas, The Contract Love Stories, and much more!

 

About Sarah Ouis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-ouis-lawyeruk/

About Charlotte:

Charlotte Smith is the founder of the Limitless Lawyer podcast. She is a professional Executive Coach for Lawyers based in Silicon Valley, California. She is a Certified Professional Coach (CPC) with the Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching (iPEC) and is a member of the International Coaching Federation.

https://www.charlotte-smith.com/

Connect with Charlotte here:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlottesmithlawyercoach

"What do I want to be known for? And how am I going to cultivate a network and start to position myself amongst the audience that matters to me?"

I am thankful for the opportunity to speak with Jay Harrington, the Founder of Harrington Communications

In this episode, we focused on contextualizing how lawyers, legal professionals, and executives can cultivate and shape their personal brand around a platform like LinkedIn.

Jay is a former lawyer who now serves the legal industry promoting Thought Leadership, Marketing Communications, and Business Development

More about Jay: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayharrington/

About Charlotte:

Charlotte Smith is the founder of the Limitless Lawyer podcast. She is a professional Executive Coach for Lawyers based in Silicon Valley, California. She is a Certified Professional Coach (CPC) with the Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching (iPEC) and is a member of the International Coaching Federation.

https://www.charlotte-smith.com/

Connect with Charlotte here:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlottesmithlawyercoach