Volume 2: Translator

Tell us about yourself and your biggest focus right now 

I’m Joe Woods, Chief Financial Officer at Holland & Hart. I’m the firm's first CFO who didn’t come up at Holland & Hart as a lawyer. Previously, equity partners managed the firm's finances. As the firm grew, they decided they needed an experienced business professional in the role.

Where once the CFO role was about closing the books, managing partner distributions, and maintaining the financials, it’s now evolving into a more strategic function. My goal is to build a modern finance function that supports our lawyers and accelerates value for clients.

What is the one behavior or mindset you believe most determines long-term success in a law firm? 

Intellectual curiosity. Often, law firms reward the appearance of certainty. Partners bill on the premise that they know the answer, and that spills over into management.

You need a tolerance for productive tension. Healthy cultures aren’t ones where everyone agrees in some homogenous way, but ones where people can professionally disagree and challenge each other.

At Holland & Hart, it starts with lawyer leadership and intellectual curiosity. There needs to be an appetite for discomfort, and that’s a real challenge. Firms that have done well for so long on traditional models can be resistant to change.

Firms that can preserve what makes their culture unique while adapting to industry change will be the ones who succeed.

How do you encourage your team to think more boldly? 

I have a metaphor I’m still working on around using AI to amplify what we already do well. Remember when Michael Phelps won all those gold medals nearly 20 years ago? That same Olympics, they started using new full-body swimsuits—advanced technology to shave down time.

If I told you I—someone who is not a swimmer—was going to put on one of those cutting-edge swimsuits and race Michael Phelps wearing a tuxedo, you’d still be wise to bet on him every time. He’s still the world-class swimmer. The speed suit helped accelerate him, but for someone like me, it doesn’t do much.

A lot of people are scared of AI because they assume it’s inherently smarter. I want smart, competent people—the athletes in the metaphor—to think about how to use technologies like AI to take their expertise to the next level.

We are quickly approaching a point where people will spend more time adding strategic value and insights than creating spreadsheets or generating reports.

What is the biggest shift law firms need to make in the next three years? 

Clients are starting to say, “AI exists—where are my cost savings?” If you’re anything like me, you’re using AI and finding efficiencies, but at this point I can assure you my work week hasn’t gotten any shorter. If anything, it’s longer—more outputs, and a greater need for deep review.

One shift law firms need to make is accepting that client pressure isn’t going away. Firms will likely see continued rate and pricing pressure. The firms that succeed over the next three years will be the ones willing to put a stake in the ground and say, “These are the efficiencies we’re capturing, and here’s what we can pass on to you.”

There is also the ongoing question mark of the billable hour. Right now, it is an incredibly important metric for law firms to measure productivity, utilization, and efficiency. It represents the raw materials in our assembly line.

Firms need to ensure the leverage model they’re using—starting with headcount—aligns with how they need to staff and efficiently work matters. Do you have the right number of owners and associates, or in certain commoditized practices, have you recently assessed whether your headcount mix aligns with how you actually deliver the work?

Firms that want to differentiate in light of these factors need to be more proactive. My team is taking this seriously by improving our pricing, analytics, and billing functions.

How are you using data and AI to reshape how your people work? 

The goal on my team is to use AI to move past the rote work that keeps really smart people busy, and give them more time to focus on our larger strategic goals.

Further, I don’t think all AI adoption is good AI adoption at this point. It can create overconfidence in the output from an untrained user. I heard someone say AI is the smartest lawyer in the world—who will also gaslight you with confidence.

There is something firms and teams need to do culturally to say, “Although it seems really smart, you remain the expert. Your review and your competence are more important than ever.”

What's one piece of advice for the next generation of legal leaders? 

Financial and profitability fluency is huge for lawyer leaders—and also for operations, IT, business development, HR, or anywhere else within a firm ecosystem.

More than ever, legal CFOs are positioned to help leaders think about capital deployment. For everyone at a law firm, top to bottom, increasing financial fluency helps them understand why leaders make the decisions they do.

Beyond that, build relationships before you need them. If you consistently add value in small, incremental ways, people recognize it and start to include you.