In a recent Platforum9 session, Kara Irwin, a professional with 30 years of experience spanning legal practice, academia, and the nonprofit sector, shared insights on the growing role of coaching in the legal profession. Currently involved in practice management at a London-based SRA-regulated firm and providing professional development consulting for smaller international law firms, Irwin offered practical guidance on how coaching can address the evolving challenges facing legal professionals in an increasingly complex practice environment.
The Evolution from Technical Skills to Personal Development
Irwin’s journey into coaching began through her work providing legal skills training, particularly for firms outside the US and UK serving international clients in English. Her experience revealed a critical insight: whilst lawyers can master technical skills relatively early in their careers, advancement requires fundamentally different capabilities.
“At some point when you’re advancing your legal career, it no longer becomes about mastering technical skills,” Irwin explained. “It really becomes about how do you manage legal practice? How do you manage your clients? How do you delegate? How do you supervise, how do you network effectively?”
These management and interpersonal skills cannot be effectively taught through traditional training methodologies where instructors provide formulas and techniques. Instead, they require individual reflection and personalised development approaches—exactly what coaching provides.
Understanding the Coaching-Mentoring Spectrum
Irwin clarified the distinction between coaching and mentoring, describing them as existing on a spectrum rather than as completely separate approaches. Pure coaching employs a non-directive methodology where coaches serve as sounding boards, supporting individuals to identify problems, explore options, and develop solutions independently without providing specific advice.
Mentoring sits at the opposite end, where experienced professionals share solutions that have worked for them, essentially saying “I’ve been there, I’ve done that, here’s what worked for me.” Many effective coaches and mentors operate somewhere in the middle, helping people think through problems whilst offering relevant experience when appropriate.
The key distinction lies in the approach: coaching empowers individuals to develop their own solutions, whilst mentoring provides tested solutions from experience.
Integration into Law Firm Operations
Both coaching and mentoring can be resourced internally or externally, depending on firm size and specific needs. Larger firms often maintain professional development departments with trained coaches and panels of external specialists. The decision between internal and external resources depends on several factors, including chemistry between coach and client, confidentiality concerns, and the specific nature of development needs.
Some firms now require coaching for partners with significant management responsibilities, recognising that technical legal expertise doesn’t automatically translate into effective leadership. Others embed coaching at key career transition points, particularly promotion to partnership, where individuals shift from client service to management responsibilities.
Overcoming Professional Resistance
The legal profession’s conservative and hierarchical nature can create resistance to coaching, with some lawyers viewing it as too “touchy-feely” or therapeutic. Irwin addresses this resistance by reframing coaching as performance enhancement rather than problem-solving, emphasising its origins in sports coaching.
“Coaching should be seen as a way of raising your performance,” Irwin noted. “This is about taking you as a lawyer and figuring out what’s needed to maximise what you’re able to do. How can you get from where you are today to peak performance?”
The sports analogy proves particularly effective, as lawyers can relate to the concept of athletic coaching focused on optimising performance rather than addressing deficiencies.
The Reflective Learning Connection
Coaching aligns closely with contemporary educational principles around reflective learning, which encourages individuals to analyse not just what they’ve learned, but how they learned it and what alternative methods might prove more effective. This reflective approach proves particularly valuable for legal professionals who often focus intensively on service delivery without stepping back to assess their own practices and development needs.
“Lawyers in practice very often spend so much of their time focusing on delivering services that they don’t take that step back,” Irwin observed, highlighting the importance of creating space for professional reflection and growth.
Addressing Common Professional Challenges
Through her work across multiple jurisdictions, Irwin identified consistent themes that coaching can effectively address:
Burnout and Overwhelm: Time management, boundary setting, and learning to say no to partners or clients represent the most common issues. These challenges often manifest as burnout but require deeper exploration of personal working patterns and professional boundaries.
Transition to Management: The shift from “task monkey” to leader requires developing delegation, supervision, and strategic thinking skills not taught in law schools. Coaching supports professionals in navigating this transition by helping them recognise when and how to evolve their role.
Client Relationship Management: Issues around deadline management, billing disputes, and client expectations require nuanced interpersonal skills. Irwin often employs a blended coaching-consulting approach for these challenges, combining reflective exploration with practical solutions.
The Blended Approach for Smaller Firms
For smaller firms lacking extensive professional development resources, Irwin advocates for a blended approach combining coaching, mentoring, training, and consulting based on specific situational needs. This model proves particularly effective for firms that cannot afford separate specialists for each development approach.
Working on retainer with small firms, Irwin meets regularly with team members to assess current needs and determine the most appropriate intervention—whether technical skills training, mentorship, practical consulting, or coaching. This flexible approach maximises value whilst remaining cost-effective for resource-constrained organisations.
Building Coaching Skills in Legal Leadership
Beyond external coaching resources, Irwin emphasised the value of teaching coaching skills to legal managers and leaders. When supervisors incorporate coaching principles into their interactions with junior staff, they become more effective leaders whilst developing their team members’ capabilities.
This approach addresses the profession’s traditional hierarchical structure by creating more collaborative development relationships and empowering junior lawyers to take greater ownership of their professional growth.
The Confidentiality and Focus Advantage
Coaching offers unique advantages through its confidentiality requirements and forward-looking focus. Qualified coaches maintain strict confidentiality boundaries, creating safe spaces for professionals to explore challenges without fear of professional repercussions.
Importantly, coaching focuses on current situations and future goals rather than exploring past experiences or traumas. “We don’t care about the past in coaching,” Irwin explained. “We care what’s going on for you right now and where do you want to get to and how are you going to get there?”
This approach allows professionals to address personal barriers to performance without extensive personal disclosure or therapeutic intervention.
The Power of Structured Reflection
Irwin highlighted coaching’s effectiveness in breaking cycles of unproductive thinking that plague many professionals. The structured conversation process helps individuals move from circular worrying to strategic problem-solving by providing space to articulate challenges, investigate options, and develop action plans.
“When you wake up at three o’clock and can’t go back to sleep, and your mind’s going around in circles… one of the most powerful things you can do is start talking about it out loud to somebody who is an extremely good listener,” Irwin observed, capturing coaching’s essential value proposition.
Universal Challenges Across Jurisdictions
Despite working with lawyers from diverse jurisdictions and legal systems, Irwin found remarkably consistent challenges. The issues around time management, leadership transition, and client relationship management transcend cultural and legal system differences, suggesting that coaching addresses fundamental aspects of legal practice rather than jurisdiction-specific problems.
This universality indicates significant potential for coaching applications across the global legal profession, regardless of local practice requirements or cultural contexts.
Integration with Professional Development
Coaching’s effectiveness increases when integrated with broader professional development initiatives rather than treated as a standalone intervention. The movement in many jurisdictions to broaden continuing professional development beyond technical legal updates has created opportunities for more comprehensive approaches to lawyer development.
Irwin noted how regulatory changes, such as the UK’s expansion of CPD requirements beyond technical updates, have helped law firms recognise the importance of soft skills development and created openings for coaching interventions.
Future Outlook: Meeting Growing Demand
With the legal profession facing unprecedented challenges—technological disruption, changing client expectations, remote working arrangements, and intergenerational team dynamics—the demand for coaching is likely to grow significantly. The profession’s traditional focus on technical competence proves insufficient for navigating these complex challenges.
Irwin’s blended approach model offers particular promise for expanding coaching access beyond large firms with extensive professional development budgets. By combining coaching with complementary interventions and focusing on practical outcomes, smaller firms can access these development tools without prohibitive costs.
Conclusion
Irwin’s insights demonstrate that coaching addresses fundamental gaps in traditional legal education and professional development. Whilst law schools excel at teaching technical skills and legal reasoning, they provide little preparation for the management, leadership, and interpersonal challenges that define successful legal careers.
Coaching offers a powerful tool for developing these capabilities by empowering lawyers to reflect on their practices, identify improvement opportunities, and develop personalised solutions. Its focus on performance enhancement rather than problem-solving makes it particularly suitable for the legal profession’s achievement-oriented culture.
The growing integration of coaching into law firm operations—from partnership transition support to ongoing leadership development—suggests recognition that technical competence alone is insufficient for professional success. As the legal profession continues evolving, coaching provides essential support for navigating change whilst maintaining high performance standards.
