Outside of law, it seems every profession is having a ‘love-in’ on coaching. Maybe Showtime’s Dr. Wendy Rhoades captured the zeitgeist in the TV hit Billions, but a once-in-a-generation health crisis has helped summon a perfect storm for performance coaches, career coaches, business coaches, leadership coaches, and sales coaches the world over.

In law firms though, coaching is still mostly seen as remedial in purpose. The message sent to lawyers: if you have a problem, you are not delivering, then you can have a coach to ‘fix’ it. Not really a vote of confidence, a perk, an opportunity to maximize your productivity, career, practice, leadership skills or make your millions, like Wendy’s traders at Axe Capital.

But it’s changing, and as someone who has passed through pre-law, law school, legal training, internship, mentoring, and speaks daily to Australia’s finest Partners, I have a working theory about why; lawyering favours those who can synthesise complex information, but the relentless pace of change today is ‘running interference’ with a natural tendency towards perfectionism, and hard deadlines. Post-COVID, directly or indirectly I increasingly hear: