Confidential coaching for law firm partners navigating difficult colleagues, partnership politics and high-stakes career decisions.
Based in Melbourne, working across Australia and internationally.
“The client is God”. A former managing partner of Allens said that in 2005. It still resonates.
You know the cost of this culture. The impossible hours. The expectation that you’re always available. The difficulty of saying no to a partner, a client or a piece of work without career consequences.
Add to this the internal politics of partnership. Competing for work, managing difficult colleagues, navigating power dynamics, protecting your practice while being seen as a team player.
You’re operating in a system where every move carries risk.
The problem isn’t the risk. It’s that you’re expected to navigate it when no one will tell you clearly what you’re being judged on, how decisions are really made, or which unspoken rules matter most.
You’re being asked to perform, absorb pressure, and keep things smooth. Over time, that ambiguity becomes costly. You start carrying risk that isn’t formally yours, second-guessing your judgement or delaying decisions because every option seems to cost something you still need.
This work gives you a place to read those situations accurately, so you can:
make stay or exit decisions without waiting for clarity that isn’t coming
handle difficult partners or colleagues without absorbing the political fallout
set limits with clients or within the partnership without breaching unspoken rules
stop carrying organisational problems as if they’re personal failings
I work with partners who need a confidential space to think through situations they can’t discuss internally.
Often they’ve already spent months managing something alone—a difficult partner, a client relationship that’s become untenable, or positioning for a role they want—and they can feel how their options are narrowing.
This isn’t about legal strategy or technical skills. It’s about reading the system accurately enough to make moves that don’t cost you more than they gain.
I bring formal training in organisational psychology and 25+ years working with senior professionals in complex environments. That means we can work with both the commercial realities of your practice and the interpersonal dynamics at the same time.
The work focuses on judgement under constraint: how to respond when authority is unclear, options are limited and there’s little margin for error.
You make fewer moves you need to undo later. Less political repair is required. More room to manoeuvre remains as situations evolve.
Some partners work through a specific situation. Others continue because the cost of getting it wrong—to their practice, their relationships, or their standing in the firm—is too high.
Partners who wait often find that by the time they reach out, their options have narrowed and the political cost of each move is higher.
The work happens through regular, confidential one-to-one conversations focused on live situations and decisions that matter.
We slow things down just enough to examine what’s really influencing the situation: the partnership politics, the power dynamics, the commercial pressures, your own role in it, without losing sight of timing, consequences or what’s realistically possible.
My role is to test your read of what’s happening, surface where it may be incomplete, and help you think through the implications of different moves before you commit to one. The value isn’t only in advice, but also in avoiding actions that create more problems than they solve.
If this is the kind of thinking space you’re looking for, you can schedule a conversation here.
I’ve delivered more than 7,400 one-to-one sessions over 25+ years, working with partners and senior lawyers at Seyfarth, Linklaters, Allens, Hall & Wilcox, including specialist firms such as Davies Collison Cave and Griffith Hack. I also provide executive coaching to leaders across various industries.
I have a PhD in organisational psychology, am a registered psychologist with formal training in business and counselling psychology and have published in the Law Institute Journal.
The first conversation is about understanding what you’re dealing with and whether it makes sense to work together.
It’s confidential, 30 minutes and there’s no obligation to continue.
Many partners aren’t certain this is what they need when they first reach out. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t.
Either way, you’ll leave that first conversation clearer about what you’re dealing with, even if we don’t decide to work together.
My article in the Law Institute Journal:
Boundaries at work: It’s a two-way street
