» Keynote Speeches and Firm Retreats

As a dynamic and experienced speaker, Robert Cullen can deliver an informative and entertaining keynote speech to your firm or organization.  Focusing on such critical areas as advanced leadership skills, assessment of high-end client development, and entrepreneurial improvement, his speeches will help your associates and partners excel in becoming Leading Lawyers. 

Tailored to your needs and goals, his speeches will help your firm or organization improve client-relations, develop Leadership skill-sets, and apply important insights for building a more successful practice.  His keynote speeches will enable firms to design and implement plans for leadership talent improvement and to generate practical strategies for talent retention and development.  They can also provide detailed blueprints for small and mid-size firms to obtain individual and organizational leadership improvement. Effective at firm retreats or for offsite training, Mr. Cullen's customized keynote speeches are designed to meet your precise objectives.  He is the author of the book The Leading Lawyer, A Guide to Practicing Law and Leadership published by West Thomson.  In addition, Mr. Cullen has been teaching law for over a decade and has developed one of the nation’s first semester-long course on Leadership for Lawyers. Seminar participants have found his keynote speeches lively, engaging, substantive and informative.

» Leadership Skills Seminar

It is often hard for lawyers to accept that we have to learn new or unfamiliar skills outside the law itself.  We presume that our legal training and skills are sufficient.  But our clients want us to be great leaders, problem solvers, innovators as well as great lawyers.  Extraordinary lawyers use legal and leadership skills.

Research clearly shows that we can learn exceptional leadership skills, as well as the basic tools of legal practice.  The Leading Lawyer always remains a zealous champion for his or her client, but is not circumscribed by the constraints of the advocacy model.  Instead, the Leading Lawyer brings to bear the vision and expertise of forward-looking, interdisciplinary insight, entrepreneurial innovation, and the ability to negotiate, mediate, collaborate, and achieve positive results for all sides.

This program is focused on the development of the insights and practical skills necessary to have an extraordinary career in law.  The Introductory Leadership Skills Seminar introduces you to the tools and methods that the most successful lawyers in the country use to distinguish and build their practices.

The Introductory Leadership Skills Seminar can be customized to meet your needs.  Mr. Cullen  has developed a variety of modules that range from 2.0 hours to a 2-day/16-hour seminar.   Introductions can be designed for the improvement of young lawyers, or custom-configured for partners or groups of both.  As an experienced law professor, Mr. Cullen  has tailored the development program especially for lawyers and the unique roles that we play for our clients and constituents

Here is what the Introductory Leadership Skills Seminar will focus on: 

• Extraordinary Lawyers “think like lawyers”; they also think and act like leaders. 

• What makes some lawyers great?  They practice law and they practice leadership. 

Successful lawyers have the qualities that distinguish them as fine lawyers. In addition, they incorporate leadership skills in their practices to create opportunities, build relationships and create positive change for their clients, organizations, and communities.  Leadership is the essential ingredient to an extraordinary career in law.  In short, extraordinary lawyers think like lawyers, and, more importantly, they act like leaders.

• What is Leadership? 

Leadership is an identifiable set of skills and practices that are available to us all, not just a few charismatic men and woman.  (Kouzas and Posner, The Leadership Challenge)

Leadership draws on the process of persuasion, for example, by which an individual (or leadership team) induces an individual or group to pursue objectives held by the leader or shared by the leader and his or her followers.  (Gardner, On Leadership)

Leadership is the process of using identifiable skills to influence and inspire others to achieve positive results.   (Cullen, The Leading Lawyer)

• Leadership is for everyone.   Every lawyer can develop leadership skills by working at it, and by reevaluating outdated assumptions that unnecessarily limit one's perspective and options.  The process starts with understating the necessary skill sets and fostering a zeal for continual improvement.  Once one decides to become a leader, one can develop the skills and characteristics to create change.  Leadership is for the first-year associate and the social justice lawyer, as well as for the managing partner and corporate counsel. 

• Leadership is learned.  Are leaders born or made?  Everyone who writes on this subject and who has analyzed the evidence agrees: leadership skills can be learned; leaders are made, not born. 

» Advanced Seminars: 2-4 Hour Modules

In addition, subsequent seminars--which can be mixed and matched, and tailored to your time and budget constraints--will introduce you to the following skill sets:  

• Credibility—How Leading Lawyers Earn It

• Vision, Entrepreneurial and Innovative Skill Sets

• Team Work and Motivation

• Building Strategic Relationships

• Leading Change

• Communication and Persuasion

• Leadership Negotiations

• Having Difficult Conversations

» Leadership Development Programs and Coaching

• We provide extensive leadership development programs for groups and individuals.

• We work with many types of legal organizations including law firms, in house legal departments and government agencies to ensure that all our development programs are practical and customized for each organization.

• These programs are based upon the most innovative research and academic programming as taught in Mr. Cullen’s Leadership for Lawyers class at University of Santa Clara Law School.  

• We develop and draw upon competency models, 360 degree feedback surveys, and other assessments.  We are familiar with developing insightful Individual Development Plans for individuals and follow the success of those plans through the coaching process.  Mr. Cullen is also certified on the Center for Creative Leadership’s Benchmark Assessment tools. 

• We provide individual coaching as well as larger programmatic training to practice groups, management committees as well as to individual leaders and managing partners.