Most lawyers who feel crushed by their practice assume they are the problem. Not tough enough. Not efficient enough. Not built for it. What if the real issue is the way the firm was designed?

Alex Tieu came into law sideways. During COVID her husband, who had run their family firm for years, got very sick, and Alex stepped in to help. She brought two decades of running real estate and technology companies with her. What she found was a firm structured the way most firms are structured, and a set of problems she recognized as design problems rather than people problems. Today that firm has more than eighty people and over twenty-five attorneys. In this conversation, she and Gary talk about what actually changed and why it worked.

What you will take away:

Separate the work only an attorney can do from everything else, and give the rest a system and an owner
Rethink work-life balance as coverage rather than hours, because time off only helps if the work is genuinely handled while you are gone
Build more than one growth path, and match compensation and staffing to each one rather than forcing everybody onto the partner track
Run workload reports and automatic task handoffs so cases keep moving when someone is out sick
Recognize people publicly and let the recognition come from coworkers, not only from management

Alex Tieu is co-founder and CEO of JLG Lawyers, a California plaintiff-side employment firm. She is not a lawyer, which is exactly why her view is useful here. She has run large organizations before and she sees law firm structure the way an operator does, as something that was built and can therefore be rebuilt.

If this one lands, subscribe so you do not miss what is coming, and leave a review if you have a minute. More at garymiles.net.

TIMESTAMPS

[00:00] — The ladder nobody questioned
[01:35] — How Alex came to law
[04:54] — Burnout as a systems problem
[06:11] — Attorney-only work, everything else delegated
[07:08] — What work-life balance actually requires
[12:30] — More than one growth path
[18:34] — How they measure culture
[28:38] — The human middle, explained
[29:44] — Why lawyers get jaded
[34:06] — The false choice to stop accepting

GUEST BIO

Alex Tieu is co-founder and CEO of JLG Lawyers, a California employment law firm, where she leads business strategy, operations, technology, and organizational development. The firm represents employees who were pushed out, underpaid, or retaliated against, and has grown to more than eighty people and over twenty-five attorneys. Before law, she spent two decades leading in real estate and technology, including managing hundreds of real estate professionals at Keller Williams and serving as COO of Propy. She runs the firm with her husband Michael, her partner of twenty-five years.

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