Two talks. One fee.
I take a small number of engagements a year, so each one gets the preparation it needs.
Talk one
Where Is Your Energy Going?
45–60 minutes, or a half-day workshop. For bar section meetings and annual conferences, law firm retreats and professional development days, women’s bar organisations, in-house legal departments.
Who is in the room
Lawyers who are good at this — which is exactly why nobody is checking on them.
What is going wrong
Your strongest lawyers are not failing. They are doing the same excellent work and paying more for it every year.
The cost lands somewhere specific and unglamorous: detail that gets missed, decisions that pile up undecided, the associate who quietly stops asking questions, the partner who is present at every meeting and in none of them. It reads as an individual problem. It is almost never one.
Why the room should care
Every one of those costs is an exposure — to the client, to the file, and to the firm’s obligations. Competence is not only what a lawyer knows. It is what a lawyer can still do at four o’clock on the day everything lands at once.
What changes
- A way to see where the energy is actually going — not a time audit, an honest look at what the work costs and what it returns.
- Do different, not more. The specific moves that give capacity back without adding a practice, an app, or another thing to fail at.
- Why your greatest strength is your biggest risk — and what to do about the trait that got you here and is now billing you for it.
This is not a wellness talk. Nobody is asked to breathe deeply, and nobody is told to try harder at resting.
Talk two
Planning Ahead So You Never Need Me as a GAL
45–60 minutes. For estate planning, elder law and small-firm general practice sections.
Who is in the room
Lawyers who draft estate plans — and lawyers who advise families and assume someone else drafted one.
What is going wrong
Plans get built for death, not for incapacity.
The power of attorney exists, but it is stale, or unfunded, or it names an agent who has moved, died, or is the reason the family is in front of a clerk. Nobody stress-tests the document for the day capacity actually goes, because that day is not the day anyone is thinking about when they sign.
Why it matters
When the plan fails, the family lands in front of a clerk, and the court appoints a stranger to work out what your client would have wanted.
That stranger is me. I go to the house. I read what is left. And I can tell you exactly what I can and cannot recover from a file when the person who could have explained it no longer can.
What changes
The specific drafting and review moves whose absence I see, repeatedly, from inside live files — and the questions worth asking a client while they can still answer them.
The honest part
I don’t do estate planning. I have nothing to sell the people in this room, and no referral arrangement to propose. I just keep seeing the same avoidable thing from the other end.
Fees
| Keynote, in person | $5,000 |
| Half-day workshop | $10,000 |
| Keynote, virtual | $3,000 |
Travel and expenses billed separately. Both talks price the same.
Tell me the organisation, the audience and the date. I’ll tell you within two working days whether it’s a fit.