One of the things I enjoy most is talking with people who are building businesses. Every founder has a story about the moment they identified a problem, saw an opportunity or decided there had to be a better way. Those stories often provide valuable lessons about leadership, growth, innovation and the realities of entrepreneurship that don’t always make it into company announcements or LinkedIn updates.
That’s the idea behind The Business of Building, a series where I speak with founders, entrepreneurs and business leaders about what they’re building, the challenges they’re solving and the lessons they’ve learned along the way.
For the first installment, I spoke with Misty Leon, founder of Practical Counsel Advisors, a consultancy that helps law firms improve operations, navigate change and adapt to the evolving demands of the legal industry. After nearly 25 years in legal practice, including roles at global law firms, as a law firm partner and in-house at Texas Instruments, Misty launched Practical Counsel Advisors to help firms address operational challenges, technology adoption, AI governance and the increasing pressure on lawyers to do more with fewer resources.
What stood out to me during our conversation was Misty’s unique perspective. Having worked in BigLaw, at a smaller firm and inside a Fortune 500 legal department, she understands the challenges law firms face from multiple angles. She has also seen firsthand how operational inefficiencies, technology decisions and change management issues can affect both lawyers and clients.
In this interview, Misty discusses what led her to launch Practical Counsel Advisors, the operational issues she believes law firms aren’t paying enough attention to, the conversations firms are having about AI behind closed doors and the trends she expects will have the biggest impact on the legal industry over the next several years.
1. What led you to launch your new business?
Over nearly 25 years in legal practice, at global law firms, as a partner in a small firm, and while working in-house at Texas Instruments, I kept seeing lawyers struggle with balancing delivery of high quality work to clients and staying on top of the management side of their practice. I also saw an increasing trend of in-house lawyers being stretched to do more with less and, early in the AI boom, realized AI was going to transform what corporate clients expect from outside counsel. I founded Practical Counsel Advisors to help law firm lawyers stay focused on client work without falling behind on the business of running a practice, and to bring the perspective of someone who has sat on both sides of that equation.
2. What gap in the market did you see that made you feel there was an opportunity to build something new?
Corporate clients are facing a number of challenges all at once, including a rapidly changing regulatory and litigation landscape, expectations to decrease legal spend, and multigenerational workplace issues. There was a push in-house to scale and move legal spend to higher-value categories, but having been a partner at a small firm, I knew that many firm lawyers do not have the bandwidth to halt all their client work to figure out how to respond to new developments. My background positions me to help business law firms modernize their practices in ways that actually work for how firms operate, having spent years as both a practitioner serving clients and as the client evaluating outside counsel.
3. What are the biggest operational challenges law firms are facing right now that aren’t getting enough attention?
4. Everyone is talking about AI. What conversations are firms actually having behind closed doors?
Realistically, I think there is concern about how AI is going to affect billable hours and the need for certain types of talent at firms. There is also a lot of concern about how to use AI responsibly, consistent with ethics obligations such as maintaining client confidentiality, competent use of technology and adequate supervision of more junior lawyers and staff. The technology is moving so fast that it’s challenging to keep up, and many firms are in analysis paralysis, which has created a disconnect between where corporate legal departments are at with AI compared to the firms competing for their work.
5. What are some of the most common mistakes firms make when evaluating technology or operational improvements?
One big mistake is to begin applying new tools or processes before really understanding the problems the firm is trying to solve and what tools are already available. Another is not getting input from staff and junior attorneys who carry out a lot of the day-to-day work when making decisions about adopting new technology or processes, since they often have the clearest view of where things break down. Finally, some firms are still operating under an older model where changes are mandated from the top without the change management needed to make them stick. Any of these can lead to duplication of effort, wasted costs and having to start over.
Successful adaptation requires leaders who are willing to acknowledge gaps and bring in expertise to address them, which is harder than it sounds in a profession that rewards knowing all the answers. It also requires leaders who listen at least as much as they talk, especially when getting input from others on what is working and what isn’t. Taking time to ask the right questions before acting is also key; a poorly designed process can leave an organization worse off than where it started. That’s a lot of what I help firms work through.
7. What trends do you think will have the biggest impact on law firms over the next three to five years?
Definitely AI, and corporate law firms are also dealing with a complex regulatory landscape right now. The availability of AI to clients and everyone inside a firm is pressing firms to address it more quickly than past technology changes. Corporate clients are also expecting more transparency about how AI is being used, and how it affects costs, than clients have demanded with prior technology shifts. That combination of client pressure and regulatory complexity is going to separate firms that truly invest in their operations from those that treat operations as an afterthought.
8. What surprised you most about launching your own business?
How difficult it is to figure out how to structure my days and prioritize tasks. I work with a business coach and believe I am reasonably good at managing my time, using tools like calendar blocking to plan my days in advance. But, there are so many things competing for my attention at any given time, and really tuning out what doesn’t move the business forward is more challenging than I expected, even after having been a partner in a law firm. It has given me a lot of empathy for the firm leaders I work with, who are managing client demands and business operations simultaneously, often without much infrastructure to support them.
9. What is one misconception people have about legal operations, technology or organizational change that you’d love to correct?
That operations and strategy are “nice to haves” that should take a back seat to billable or substantive legal work. Although you have to keep clients happy, over the years I’ve seen lawyers waste significant time defaulting to inefficient workarounds rather than taking time to improve them. I understand why that makes sense in the moment, but there’s a real cost to that approach over time, in terms of lost hours, work firms cannot take on due to limited bandwidth and lawyer burnout.
10. If someone remembers one thing about your business after reading the interview, what do you hope it is?
That I’ve been in the shoes of lawyers trying to balance serving clients while dealing with operations or administrative work – while in BigLaw, a firm partner and in-house at a Fortune 500 company. I built PCA to address problems I lived firsthand, with the added perspective of having been the client making decisions about outside counsel. That combination is rare, and it shapes everything about how I approach this work.
Connect with Misty on LinkedIn and reach out to her to learn more about Practical Counsel Advisors.