Wesley Lockett:
Leadership is a giant mirror for all your flaws, everything you didn’t work on, everything you need to continue to work on.
Sonya Palmer:
It is a direct reflection of your own constraints, your strengths, and your flaws.
Wesley Lockett:
And I don’t think a book ever said that, never said, “Hey, everything that you feel is wrong with you is going to be directly reflected back by your team.”
Sonya Palmer:
That is Wes Lockett. And for the last decade, she’s been staring into leadership’s most unforgiving mirror. As chief operating officer at Daniel Stark Law, she’s navigated one of the most challenging transitions in business, scaling from a tight-knit team to a 170-person operation without losing what made people want to work there in the first place. The statistics are sobering. According to research by Harvard Business Review, 70% of high-growth companies experience a cultural breaking point during rapid expansion. Most never recover their original culture, but some do. Here’s what it comes down to.
Wesley Lockett:
I always looked at leadership as a service. It was never really about having authority over others or power over others. It was about showing others what they’re capable of and giving them tools for them to reach their full potential. That’s the rocket fuel for me.
Sonya Palmer:
I am Sonya Palmer, and this is LawHer, powered by Rankings.io. Every episode we explore how women in law can own power faster and keep it longer.
Wesley Lockett:
How I think about power, it’s about what those people can do together and how a team like that can really drive an organization forward. So I don’t think of it as power for me. I think about it as power for what we would call the greater good of the organization and what the mission is for our team.
Sonya Palmer:
Today, Wes shares how to achieve sustainable growth in a high-pressure environment, from building an unshakable foundation…
Why sustainable law firm growth starts with complete leadership alignment at the top
Wesley Lockett:
It really starts at the top.
Sonya Palmer:
To implementing battle-tested systems.
Wesley Lockett:
What it gave us was a framework for running project, and we were much more intentional with the way that we spent our time.
Sonya Palmer:
To choosing the right tools.
Wesley Lockett:
It gave us a lot more data visibility.
Sonya Palmer:
And most critically, protecting the culture that powers it all.
Wesley Lockett:
Work hard, play hard. You bring it every single day in your work to fight burn-off is the play-hard, and it’s really learning to identify what refuels you as a person.
Sonya Palmer:
This is what it really takes to scale from 50 to 170 people without breaking what you’ve built.
Wesley Lockett:
Blood, sweat, and tears. No, it took a lot of intentionality and a lot of flexibility from our whole team.
The two pillars of building an unshakable Law Firm leadership foundation
Sonya Palmer:
The foundation Wes describes has two parts. The first is a lockstep leadership. As the trot turns to a sprint, every leader must be pointed in the same direction.
Wesley Lockett:
If the owner’s partners do not buy into those values and where you’re headed, you’re going to have an uphill battle. And we have seen that. We have lots of sister firms across the country that we work with. They wanted to know how we got to where we are culturally and with our team. And that was probably the number one thing I’ve heard across those organizations. They’re like, “Well, how did you get your partners to agree to that? How did you get your partners to let go of a high-earning attorney when they didn’t agree with the values or they didn’t align with the company culture?” And it is because our owners and our partners, they believe in it. They are serious about our culture. And that is the number one thing. If you do not have buy-in from the top down, you will never get your organization where it needs to go.
Sonya Palmer:
That’s the first pillar of a strong foundation, complete alignment from the top down. Without it, you’re not leading a team. You are refereeing a debate. And while you’re debating, your competitors are moving. Research from McKinsey shows that organizations with aligned leadership teams are 2.3 times more likely to achieve above-average growth. But alignment isn’t a one-time conversation, it’s a daily discipline. The second pillar? Radical self-awareness.
How business leaders can detect and prevent attorney burnout before it’s too late
Wesley Lockett:
So knowing what your purpose, what refuels you, and that’s different for everyone. And sometimes that’s a journey for people. And we walk team members through identifying what that is. So there’s a great book called The Power of Full Engagement, and it walks you through energy management and teaches you to identify what refuels you. And for me, knowing, hey, here are maybe some signs and symptoms of what burnout could be or what that starts to look like for me, and what am I doing to go refuel myself, knowing what refuels me and making sure I have accountability partners and saying like, “Here’s the canary in the coal mine. Are you doing the things to go refuel yourself?”
Sonya Palmer:
Burnout is an organizational liability, but for leaders, the stakes are even higher because everything you haven’t addressed about yourself will get amplified through your team.
Wesley Lockett:
Leadership is similarly to parenthood. It is a giant mirror for all your flaws. Everything you didn’t work on, everything you need to continue to work on, it is a direct reflection of your own constraints. And I don’t think a book ever said that. They just said here, “You need to do this and this and you need to practice this and you need to do these things.” But it never said, “Hey, everything that you feel is wrong with you is going to be directly reflected back by your team.”
How implementing EOS transforms operations for accountability, clarity, and culture + Why protecting your law firm’s culture means letting go of low performers quickly
Sonya Palmer:
The work starts here, clear, unified vision at the top and the courage to see your own reflection even when it’s uncomfortable. Up next on LawHer, building systems that scale. Once your foundation is set, leadership aligned, self-awareness locked in, you need a framework that can handle growth without buckling under pressure. Because in high-growth law firms, small problems compound fast. A communication gap that’s manageable at 50 people becomes a crisis at 150. For Wes’s team, that framework was EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System.
Wesley Lockett:
We started using the Entrepreneurial Operating System. So that’s EOS for short. And that helped us internally run our whole business. And what it gave us was a structure and a framework for running weekly meetings with our team, running projects. We always had quarterly planning with our team. We always had rocks and goals that our whole team set, but this gave us a lot more accountability, a lot more visibility, a lot clearer communication, and we were much more intentional with the way that we spent our time. And it wasn’t a meeting just to have a meeting. It was very structured. It was very get it done, who’s assigned, when is it going to be completed? And so we started identifying some issues in our organization that we felt were always there, but we couldn’t really figure out what it was or what the real issue was. And we really started getting those things cleaned up and it launched our business in a whole different way.
The other thing it gave us was some structure around how we really hold people accountable to our culture. And we love our team, and we love our culture. And we had a real problem with hanging on to low performers for too long, and it was bringing our team down. And so it gave us some tools and systems in there to make sure we stopped doing that, to hold ourselves accountable to having an incredible culture and really keeping it at a high level. And that was another piece that was really game changing for us in the EOS system.
The painful but powerful role of a Functional Accountability Chart in scaling a business
Sonya Palmer:
At its heart, EOS is a discipline for running the business, a set of tools that when used consistently keep everyone rowing in the same direction, even when the current gets stronger. But perhaps the most powerful and painful of those tools is the functional accountability chart.
Wesley Lockett:
The functional accountability chart was also… That’s the first thing that you do in EOS. And while that was extremely painful from a process, I think that was also a huge game changer for us, especially at the leadership level, to get really focused on what we needed and to continually stay focused on that. Is this the right structure? Are these the right roles for people? And to be objective about what is needed in the organization, not have excessive things going on. Like, “Hey, you need to outline this. What is seriously needed? How much time is it going to take? What do these top five roles mean?”
So we’ve taken it a step further. You have the top five roles for each seat, but what I ask all of our leaders to do is have those… At the EOS conference, they call them explode the roles. So a second page that says, “If I have LMA as my top five role, which is lead manage for accountability, on the other page, what does that entail? What are the details of LMA?” And say it’s these 10 bullet points. That’s what this means. So that people are extremely clear about what is expected of them. And to be really having those quarterly conversations where we say, “Do you love this? Do you want to do this every day? Are you excited about doing this every day?” So that functional accountability chart, really, I think was a huge game changer for us as well.
Sonya Palmer:
That kind of precision isn’t glamorous, but it’s what allows high growth teams to treat culture as a strategic asset, something that’s built, protected and served. And here’s what most firms get wrong. They think culture is about being nice. Wes learned it’s about being clear.
Wesley Lockett:
It gave us something objective to say like, “Here’s some examples of how are you living this out, yes or no?” And it’s not about how you feel. Let’s have some hard data and hard conversations because I think that was where some of our leaders were really struggling is that they were like, “It’s a feeling I have.” And that’s not enough. You know what I mean? These are real people. We have to tell them, “This is where you need to improve. Can you do it, yes or no?”
And this is your role and responsibility as a leader is to have this tough conversation and to get them there, or to say, “Hey, it is hard to come in every day where you feel like it’s wrong and you feel like you keep getting bad feedback. It’s not the right place for you. Wouldn’t you be happier somewhere else you know you’re succeeding every day?” And move them on and make sure our high performers know that we’re going to do that, so you’re not being a detriment to the high performers. Because that’s what we really saw is when we cleaned up the right people, right seat, our high performers were so much happier and they were performing better. I mean, it was just a night and day difference, not that it was easy.
Sonya Palmer:
The data backs this up. Companies that systematically manage culture during growth phases are 40% more likely to retain top talent according to Deloitte research. But systems alone aren’t enough. You also need the tools to execute them at speed. In high growth environments what worked six months ago might be your biggest bottleneck today. The question isn’t whether you’ll outgrow your tools. It’s whether you’ll recognize it before it costs you.
The tech upgrade that saved the firm during COVID—and why timing matters
Wesley Lockett:
One of the key things that really was a huge game changer for us was changing CRM platforms, or case management platforms. So we used to be on needles and then we moved to Litify, which is a cloud-based platform that’s hosted on Salesforce. That probably allowed for the fastest change. So it gave us a lot more data visibility, allowed us to have automations to give us a visibility into what we had in a way that we had never had before, but took a lot of focused effort from the migration team, which I was part of, but also in our whole team being able to understand why it was happening, why it was best for them, how it was going to serve them, how it was going to serve the clients. And then over time, these huge changes as we adapt the platform to what we need, to adapt AI, to adapt different document management, and to integrate all kinds of other tools into that system.
Sonya Palmer:
The timing was prophetic. Just months later, the entire legal industry was forced remote during COVID. Firms still running on server-based systems scrambled to adapt. Cloud-based firms like Daniel Stark kept operating without missing a beat. This is the hidden cost of outdated tools. They don’t just slow you down during normal times. They become single points of failure during crisis. The goal isn’t to have the newest technology. It’s to have tools that increase your velocity instead of dragging against it, tools that give your people more time to do the work only they can do, the high value work that moves cases forward and keeps clients coming back.
Owning power faster means stepping into leadership before someone hands you the title. Keeping it longer means building teams that don’t just survive rapid growth, they thrive because of it. Even as the pace quickens, the stakes rise and the mirror becomes harder to face.
For LawHer, I am Sonya Palmer. If something in this episode made you think differently about your own leadership journey, share it with someone who’s on that path. And please hit subscribe because the conversation about women owning power in law is just getting started.
