Firm Realities, Authentic Networking, and Sustainable Careers with Murray Gottheil

Welcome to Studying Law Around the World. I'm Claudio Claus. In each episode, I talk with lawyers, law students, and professors from different parts of the world to talk about legal education, careers, and what the profession looks like in real life. We talk about the hard parts, the surprises, and the decisions that shaped their paths. Whether you're planning to study abroad, thinking about working in another legal system, or just curious about how law works around the world, this podcast is for you. Today I have the opportunity to interview Murray Godhill. Very excited to learn about his story and some of the insights he'll be bringing to us. He's a retired business lawyer with nearly 4 decades of experience leading corporate law teams and managing a mid-sized firm. Through his platform Law and Disorder, Murray has become one of the legal profession's most honest and thoughtful voices on firm culture, mentorship, and many other topics. Thank you so much for making the time to be in the podcast this evening, Murray. Well, thank you very much for having me and for exaggerating the scope of my reputation. I really appreciate that. And to start us off, why don't you tell us a little bit more about your story in your own words, and what does life look like in these days for you in retirement? Well, my story is very simple. I worked very hard, too many days a week for close to 40 years. People used to ask me if I liked being a lawyer and I always said, I love what I do. I hate the pressure I do it under. Eventually the pressure and the stress got to the point where it wasn't as much fun as it, as it had been. So I got out and retired. And now that I've been retired for almost 6 years, I realized it would have been nice to have retired earlier because it's way more fun than practicing law. And now I, what I did when I retired is I moved out of Toronto. I moved to the country and now my days consist of taking long walks, going down and looking at the lake, writing some cynical and sarcastic things about the legal profession. Occasionally, you know, speaking to younger lawyers, doing a little bit of mentoring, occasionally teaching a course on business law or doing, or doing a presentation. And most importantly, I try to disappear for several months a year on cruise ships. And I'm just back from a 2-month and 3-week cruise from Santiago, Chile to Tokyo. All the traveling I never had time to do because I was working 7 days a week. Fantastic. I couldn't think of a better introduction. So, so you did say that you, you enjoyed being a lawyer. When you look back then, what were some of the parts of being a lawyer that you enjoyed the most? Well, I was a business lawyer and my client base was primarily owner-operated companies from, I'd say, medium to large privately owned companies. I was in a mid-sized firm, which was Normally in the range of about 25 to 35 lawyers during the time that I was there. Our fees were a little high for the mom-and-pop shops, and we weren't geared up to handle the multinationals. Although we would do niche work for some pretty large companies. So what did I enjoy? I enjoyed being on top of files, meeting with clients, being strategic. I used to describe my perfect day. My perfect day would be, I would arrive in the office not too early, having not bothered to try to drive in rush hour. And I'd arrive just in time to go to a really interesting meeting with a client. I'd take a junior or a student with me. We'd sit in the meeting. I'd be brilliant. I'd draw pictures on the board. I'd, you know, I'd listen to the problems and I'd come up with solutions and we developed grand strategies, how we were going to solve problems and get things done and structure things. And then I would leave the room and the young lawyer would, you know, draft the retainer letters and make arrangements to get the deposits. And then, you know, perhaps do whatever work was coming out of this meeting. And I would go for a nice long 2-hour lunch with somebody to a good restaurant, my partners would pay for it. And in the afternoon, I'd have to do it all over again, have another nice meeting, come out of the meeting, not have to do any work after the meeting. So what did I like about it? I liked the contact with people. I liked being smart and strategic and being able to solve people's problems. What I didn't like was then having to do all that work and get things out on time and draft documents and argue with other stupid lawyers about where we should put the word reasonable in. And all that crap. So the problem with that is you have to do the tough slogging for a number of years before you can get to the point of being able to do that. That's the first problem. The second problem is that eventually that young lawyer you trained to do all that stuff, if you've done a good job mentoring and training them, they start having their own clients and then they disappear and you have to train somebody else to do it. So it's very hard to get to a point where you can always do the fun part and not have to do all that tough slogging part. And, you know, as much as I love going to lunch for 2 hours, 2 and a half hours, the problem is you can only enjoy the lunch if you're not sitting at lunch worrying about getting a draft out by the end of the day. So to get to that part, point in your career where you can do the fun parts without being stressed about the non-fun parts is, is really difficult to do. Something that you've mentioned just now and, you know, throughout much of what you've written in the past is a little bit about the pressures of the profession, even burnout and personal experiences with that. And At what point in your career did you notice, or did you start to question whether that way is sustainable or not? You know what? I wish I could say that I had ever figured that out before I retired, but I don't think that I did. I think you enter the profession and certain expectations get set. You are exposed to people and somehow you develop a definition of success, and then you fling yourself into it trying to achieve it. Whether that be getting really good at your craft, knowing what you're doing, or developing a client base or managing the firm or training and mentoring or all the different components that you do. So you do all of this stuff. And if you don't have a definition of success for yourself that involves more than just your professional success, you end up sacrificing your health and your personal time and your fitness to do all of these things. When do you realize that it isn't sustainable? You don't. When you, when you get to the point where you can't cope and you're, you're not physically well, all of a sudden it hits you that something has to give. And then if you're like most of us, you, you know, you take some time off, you lighten your load, and then when you feel a little better, you delve right back in and make all the same mistakes again. The other thing is that when you're going through this profession, you can function at a certain level, but that level sometimes is dependent on your personal life going smoothly. When you have challenges in your personal life, whether they be health or health-related matters for your family members or marital problems or whatever, all of a sudden The professional life that you were sort of holding together starts feeling that stress and that strain. And you tell yourself when you get through those personal things, things will go back to normal. I think it was really only very, very late in my career when I started figuring out that doing it the way I was doing it was not sustainable. In, in my last 4 years, last 3 years, I guess, of my career, I withdrew as a partner in my firm and then Became a, you know, became a contractor, basically senior counsel for 3 years. When I did that, I had finally begun to figure it out. So I started working from home exclusively. I'd been commuting for, you know, for almost 35 years or so. I'd been commuting a significant distance. I started working from home. That was the first time in my career that I ever started going to the gym almost every day. There's a rule in law firms, which nobody talks about. And the rule is that if your billings are high enough and your client base is big enough, you can do whatever the hell you want. Okay. It's, it's, nobody will tell you that, but that's just a fact. So when I got to the, you know, that point of deciding I'd had enough, I couldn't keep commuting and working at the pace I did. I was winding down towards retirement. I wanted to start doing, you know, doing a little more simply. And I withdrew as a partner. I just told my partners, I'm now working from home. I didn't ask permission. I just did it. I'll come to the office for meetings, you know, occasionally. That's it. And I started, you know, in the last 3 years of my career, I literally I worked from home and only worked on the clients I felt like working on and said no to others. Went to the gym every day, finally started balancing it. But the reality, the truth of the matter is at that point I was also getting a bit older and really sort of ready to be done with all of it. So I would say I never learned the lesson, never learned it well, sort of picked it up in pieces and then promptly forgot about it from time to time. And by the time I did learn it, I was near the end of the road anyway, and I was just about done. Many of our listeners here in the podcast are young lawyers or law students getting ready to get into the profession. I've read quite a bit of your writing. I think that there is quite a few pieces that touch on different points of, you know, the gap between what law students expect and what the profession really is in the day-to-day and maybe even how different that is from what might be portrayed on law school and what skills are required there. But What are some of the biggest misconceptions that you see from, you know, a young lawyer coming out of school and joining a law firm, that expectation to reality gap? You graduate law school. Not everyone coming out of law school, you know, has been in school most of their life and has no prior actual exposure to life and career, but many don't. So you graduate law school, you spend a lot of your life going to school, trying hard to get good marks, maybe working in summers, but You don't have typically a whole bunch of life experience. You're also at a stage of your life where you may not, you may or may not have a significant, you know, other in your life. You may not have children. You, there's a lot about life you haven't had to juggle yet. So you come out of law school and somebody has given you the impression, a few different impressions. One is that if you work hard, you're smart, and get the best marks, you're probably going to, you know, be a great lawyer. And that law firms will recognize that and they'll appreciate you for your, for your diligence and your brilliance. Another impression you've been given is that they've taught you in law school what you need to know to practice law. The third impression we'll give you is that all the truly successful lawyers work at the biggest law firms and everybody else is a loser. So those are the 3 general impressions that people graduating law school tend to have. Now you show up at law firms. What you don't know is that they're pressure cookers. You don't know that there's a lot of, a lot of demand for pure number of hours put in. You don't know that you haven't been trained and you don't actually know what it takes to practice law. And you don't know a lot about life and about how to balance personal life, professional life, nor do you necessarily understand that working in big law firms isn't the be-all and end-all. So there is a huge gap. Another thing you don't understand coming out of law school is the economics of law firms. You know, they're businesses and you don't necessarily understand what is important to them and that they won't tell you what's important to them. So what's important to them is 2 things. You produce a lot of hours that can be billed to clients. And ultimately, not in the short run, but in the long run, it's important that you develop the ability to bring in business. Those are the 2 things that matter. They won't tell you that. They'll tell you it's important to know your law code and to be able to draft good documents and everything else. So while you are plugging away at trying to be this technically excellent lawyer, you're not understanding that in the long term, your success is going to be about How you communicate and get along with people, what your cultural fit is in the firm, your ability to generate money and develop clients. Let me give you an anecdote from my own articling, and I was not hired back articling. Let me say that. And, and it was not because I wasn't smart enough. I was, you know, top of my class at law school and all of those misconceptions, I had them, but I wasn't hired back. And I was told that I wasn't hired back because I didn't have enough self-confidence. I want to compare myself to another student we had. So back in the day, this is really old, guys. So try to understand this, young folks. There was no email. Okay. You did your documents. They got typed up by your secretary. They, you put them in your out basket and a fellow with a shopping cart came by and picked them up and delivered them to whoever you addressed them to. And his job in a good-sized firm was wandering the hall all day long with his shopping cart. delivering memos. So you got memos into your inbox, you put them in your outbox, and these were not on a computer screen because they didn't have a computer. They were on a desk, real physical inboxes and outboxes. I know I'm old. And every time I finished work, wanting to be efficient and show how efficient I was, I would immediately put my memo in the outbox and I would, and I would grab the next memo from my inbox and start doing the research or drafting or whatever it was I'd been asked to do. I was pretty efficient. I thought the guy The student in the cubicle next to me was pretty stupid because he wasted all his time. When he finished memo, he picked it up. He went to the elevator, went up to the top floor where the partner was, walked down the hall, chatted with the partner's assistant, who we called secretaries in the day, got to know them, found the partner, talked to the partner a little bit about the memo. They exchanged some pleasantries. They knew about each other's personal life. Guess who got hired back? It wasn't me. It was, it was this other fellow because somebody had taught him the rules of the game. Nobody had taught them to me. I thought, keep your head down, get all your memos out fast. Boy, will they be impressed. Okay. So what do young people coming into the profession not know? They don't know anything about the profession. And they should ideally spend a lot of time figuring out things about the profession before they, you know, ever get into it. And no, you don't figure it out by watching Boston Legal on TV. Oh, now I'm dating myself again, because that's been off the air for a number of years. You don't figure it out watching any TV show about lawyers. You don't figure it out watching movies, you know, about, about law firms and lawyers or reading John Grisham books. You figure it out by getting out there and meeting a whole bunch of lawyers and finding out what it is they do in their day. You'll probably be pretty surprised. It isn't as exciting as you think. I was researching a little bit and reading a little bit about your work before we got together in this podcast. And, and I think at some point I saw something that, that you said maybe that you started out your practice. Not being, you know, quote unquote, a natural marketer. So I'm curious, you know, what did you learn about building client relationships, building a book of business? I'd like to start by talking about a seminar I went to given by a lady. Her name, she's passed away. Her name was Donna Messer. And Donna billed herself as an expert on networking. When I went to this seminar, I think it was, I was invited. It was given to about 150 accountants. And one of the accountants took me as a guest. And Donna had a business card and her business card basically just had her name. And then it said, how can I help you? And she walked and she explained her theory of networking. Her theory of networking is you go out, you meet people and you ask them what you can do for them. Okay. So when I am out, when I was out meeting people, I eventually learned there's no point sitting and telling them that I'm smarter than the other lawyers that they've met and that the lawyers in my firm work really hard and diligently. And our, you know, we're more clever than everybody else and our fees are more reasonable. Nobody cares. Absolutely nobody cares. Okay. You meet people, you try to, you know, build a relationship with people and you ask what you can do for them. That to me is the essence of networking, which is for me a fundamental aspect of marketing. But I got all sorts of things to say about marketing. So let me jump around a little more. Again, dating myself, there was a recession in the '90s. We had no work to do. So what did we do? We went out, took our partners out. To sales training, 3 days of real sales training, not sales training for lawyers, but real sales training. And they taught me a few things. One of the things they taught me was that it's okay to ask for business. Lawyers don't know that. They think they're professionals. You can't go around just asking for business. It's unprofessional. Well, it got to the point where, where people told me I was shameless about asking for business, which is fine. Another thing they did, an exercise. The exercise was write down everything that says why people should hire you. I'm smart and I work hard. Our fees are reasonable, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Make a list. Okay. Now cross off the list everything that, you know, your competitors' competitors can do just as well. Okay. Cross out half the stuff on the list. Okay. Now cross out everything your competitors will say they can do, even if they can't. All right. Now cross out everything else on the list. Is there anything left on your list? Because that's the thing you should be marketing. The one differentiating factor is the thing you should be marketing. So what did I learn about marketing? I learned about establishing relationships. I learned about trying to differentiate myself from others. I learned about not presenting myself as your typical lawyer, but trying to develop relationships. Let me tell you a few other quick stories. I would go to lunch with people. I did. People used to say, Murray, what's— what was your best talent as a lawyer? Was it your negotiation? Was it your encyclopedic knowledge of the law? Was it your flexibility and ability to take abstract legal concepts and strategize as to how to achieve your client's goals. And I used to say, well, I was great at all that stuff, but the best talent I had as a lawyer was lunch. I did a great lunch. Okay. You're supposed to laugh at that. That was supposed to, you know, get a little bit of a chuckle. All right. Thank you. Okay. So I would do lunch 4 days a week, right? And when I did lunch, my goal again was not to tell people I was the best lawyer in the world. My goal was to get to know them. There's a principle I like to tell people. People assume competence. So when you go to hire a dentist, do you do a lot of research to find out if the dentist graduated at the bottom of their class or at the top of their class? Or do you see a little certificate on the wall? It says dentist, member of the Royal College of Dental Surgeons. They must know how to fill my tooth, right? And if you went to a dinner party and the dentist started telling you how he was a better dentist and he did better fillings than the next dentist, you'd say, God, this guy's pretty boring. So remember that people assume competence. They're going to assume competence in lawyers as well, which means if I'm going to lunch and only talking to people about what a great lawyer I am and how my firm's better than everybody else's firm, I'm just boring them. I'm not establishing a relationship with them. But if I get to know them, we talk about personal stuff, we find out what we have in common, then at the end, it may not be a friend yet, but we're on the road to becoming friends. And friends like to deal with friends. When I go to hire a lawyer, if I'm going to assume they're all equally competent, which one am I going to hire? I'm going to hire the one I like. And how do I know if I like them if I don't know anything about their personal life? So when I go and meet people and they want to keep it only professional because they think it's unprofessional to talk about personal things, then we're not establishing any type of relationship and they have no reason to hire me. Now, as I used to say to people, I'm going to now take this to an extreme. So I'd say over lunch, I would talk about personal stuff. And some of the stuff, you know, I might, I might tell them that, that I'm on my second marriage and I ran away with a beautiful young lawyer who was originally my articling student. Horrors, shock, you know, what a scandal. And there might be some people hearing that who might just write me off and want nothing to do with me. There might be other people hearing that'll say, thank God I can finally talk to somebody about things in my personal life that nobody, you know, That, that, that I've always been hesitant to talk about because I'm afraid people will, will think, think, think less of me, but you know, but here's somebody who's willing to show his vulnerability. I can show my vulnerability. Right. And I used to say, look, if I go to lunch with 100 people, 20 of them aren't going to like me. Another 20 of them are going to like me. And the rest of them, none of them will forget me. So in terms of marketing, you know, to me, it's about networking. It's about getting out there. Another thing I'll tell young people about marketing is everybody does it differently. The problem is a young person goes into a law firm. They see senior partners, senior partner markets by, you know, going to cocktail parties and telling funny stories. And young person thinks, God, I don't, I don't, I just don't think I could ever do that. That's just not me. Right. And therefore they, they believe they have no ability to develop business. Nothing's further from the truth. With the exception of a few sociopaths, and, you know, maybe Sheldon from Big Bang Theory. would never be able to market. With the exception of a few people, we can all do it. So if I look at my prior firm, I did lunch 4 days a week, sometimes 5. That was my thing. And I very often came back from lunch with a new file or new client. Okay. I had a partner who never did lunch. I had one partner whose, whose marketing expenses for the year were about $9,000 of lunches and whatever. And, and this other partner whose expenses were $300 a year. He would rather sit in his office and work than ever do lunch. He did it the hard way, his marketing. He did fantastic work for clients. He delivered on time every time. When somebody left the company he was working for, he made sure to call them at their new company, ended up with both, you know, with both companies as clients. And over time he developed the client base by doing great work and by just following up with people. Okay. Yeah. Didn't build the biggest client base in the firm, but he did the type of marketing that his personality allowed him to do. Okay. I had another partner who did develop one of the largest client bases in the firm. He did, he did lots of drinking without, you know, in bars with his clients at night. He took them to lots of hockey games and basketball games. He took a group to Vegas once a year. God knows what they did. I never went. Nobody will say what went on in Vegas. He took them to cigar smoking lounges, right? He did all of this stuff and I don't drink, hate smoky rooms, can never hear anybody in a, you know, in a crowded bar, don't want to go to Vegas, you know, don't smoke. I couldn't market the way he did, but interestingly enough, my client base was just this much bigger than his some years. And his was this much bigger than mine other years because, but we did completely different things. I had yet another partner who did none of that. She gave speeches, but she was so good at what she did. When she stood up in front of a group to speak, it was obvious to everyone that she was better than whoever their existing lawyer was. And she would walk out of a presentation with 3 new clients. I would speak, be the other speaker at the presentation. I'd walk away with no clients. And that was after I learned to speak pretty fairly well. So the point is everybody can do it differently. One final example, we had a young lawyer who, you know, we used to do a lot of the golf tournaments and, and some of the women liked the golf, but a lot of the women didn't like the golf and they'd come to to the golf tournament. They'd skip the golf. They'd come for the dinner portion. Now, one day they got there and the golfers were still out, you know, still out golfing. And they were sitting around waiting for everyone to come for dinner. And they got into a conversation about how much they're tired of being told to market the way the men market. They want to do something different. And one of them said, what do we like doing? And they decided to set up a book club. So they set up a book club. They invited all sorts of other female professionals to attend the book club. They set out some basic rules. Rule number 1 is you don't have to read the book if you're too busy, which was an interesting rule for a book club. When at the time a James Bond movie came out and they thought the fellow playing James Bond was very sexy, they all skipped the evening and went to see the movie. The first book they were supposed to read, I think was called something about angry housewives eating bonbons or something like that. So they, they serve bonbons at their meeting. You know, the point, my point is everybody can find a way to market and to develop business. However, some of, some people are more natural than others. I was not the slightest bit natural at it. Okay. And I can tell really embarrassing stories about just how bad I was at it, but I did figure it out eventually. It would have been nice. It took me about 15 years to figure out. It would have been nicer if I'd figured it out earlier. And I tell a lot of young people, if you don't have that confidence, go get it, go to Toastmasters. No, go learn to do public speaking. You can speak up, you know, whether it be in an internal meeting, in a client meeting, or to actually give presentations. That's a tremendous advantage. Go learn how to do that. Go to counseling, read self-help books, go fix yourself up psychologically and be ready for the profession. I just really appreciate those examples. And I think that that's something that we need to hear more and more again, you know, leaning into our strengths, figuring out what actually makes sense for you according to your personality, to the things that you feel comfortable doing. So I appreciate you bringing those up. I think that's important. Listen to the people who tell you, oh, you can't do it my way. You'll never be able to do it. You're a backroom person. No, you're a backroom person just means you're not going to have job security. You're not going to make big money. So why the hell would you accept that starting out? Absolutely. Absolutely. As we, as we go towards, you know, wrapping up today's episode. Now that you have some distance from practice in a way, is there, you know, a piece of advice that you usually give to someone who's trying to build a law firm, build a legal career while still protecting their health to some extent, family, personal life? All right. Thought number 1, which I've already alluded to, go out there and before you start in the legal profession, become your best psychological self. It's important. Work on your confidence, work on your ability to do public speaking, work on networking skills. If you have time management issues, work on those. Go out and become your best self before you even start in a law firm. That's number one. Number 2, number 2, your definition of success. Develop a definition of success for yourself. If you don't develop it for yourself, the profession will give it to you. Law school will help you. Hone that and the profession will fill out the information for you. And you will never even realize that you've bought into it without thinking about it. So if your definition of success is going to be work at big law, write a lot of materials so that you're well known, give presentations, you know, maybe write a book and be known in the profession as the expert in your area, make a lot of money and work for the biggest, most prestigious clients. That's great. That's your definition of success. Go for it. But also understand the cost of that and how that, you know, is going to mesh with work-life balance, with family, with relationships, with time for health and everything else. If your definition of success is, I don't got to be the best known lawyer in the world. I don't have to have the best reputation. I do have to be ethical, honest, and the amount of effort I'm willing to put into things and family, you know, plays plays a certain important role in my life. And I will consider myself a success if I earn half the money they're earning in big law. And I have all the weekends at home with my, with my spouse and my kids. That will make me successful. So you need to understand what is successful, what success means, and what the trade-offs are in money and time and everything else. Think about, about how life changes as you go. And here's where we get into sensitive area of gender, but the reality is that the profession is harder on women and the profession does not give them an equal shot. So women have to look at it and say, okay, what's the reality going on here? I'm going to join a firm. There are going to be certain amount of demands for hours. And I'm then going to have a family. Am I sure that, that I'm not going to be doing way more than, you know, than half of the domestic work, that I have a partner in this relationship is going to be doing their full share? Or am I sure that I'm comfortable with hiring, you know, hiring people to do a significant amount of the childcare? And how am I sure that I'm at a firm, if I am doing more than my proportionate share of the domestic responsibility, whether it be for children or for aging parents or whatever, that this type of firm isn't going to penalize me for it? So there's a whole bunch of thought process that would be wonderful if, if men and women did equal share of the domestic responsibilities, but somehow we're here in 2026 and the women are still doing more than their share. It would be wonderful if the law firms didn't just pretend that everybody was the same. So if they have somebody doing more than their share, it'd be nice if the law firm wasn't penalizing them for it. It would be nice if the law firms didn't look at a man who wants to do more than their share of the domestic responsibility and sort of, you know, sort of give him the side-eye and penalize him because, because he's not, you know, living up to the male stereotype. There's a lot of nonsense still going on in law firms. And I think it's very important for both men and women, but for women in particular, to understand that, to fit all that into their definition of success and to understand themselves. Yes, I'll put in everything now. Will I put it all in when I have kids? Will I put it all in when my Parents are aging and somebody has to take care of them. You know, what type of relationship am I in? Is the support going to be there? Am I willing to farm it out? Somehow it's tougher on women than on men still. I really appreciate you coming in the show. You mentioning all your insights, you know, all the way from things you saw in your career to points just like the ones you just made, you know, advice for people who are entering the profession and being a little bit more aware of the realities that are very much unspoken rules of the profession. That maybe reacts that way and rewards that way, but don't really name the name. So I really appreciate you making the time and coming on the show to say that. Thank you