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Building Successful Integration Programs with Amber Walsh and Erin Ryan of McGuireWoods LLP 9-4-25
00:33:34
In this episode, McGuireWoods leaders Amber Walsh and Erin Ryan share how their innovative partner integration program strengthens retention, fosters belonging, and drives long-term success.
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- [00:02]
A
Onward headhunting is the source for elite M and A operations and finance executive talent exclusively for private equity funds and their high growth portfolio companies. When top tier leadership seems impossible to find, Onward delivers with speed and accuracy. This is retained search built to shape the future of your most important assets. Learn more on LinkedIn or visit onwardheadhunting.com to start the conversation. And let's move your most critical executive searches Onward. This is Scott Becker with the Becker Business Podcast and the Becker Private Equity Podcast. We're thrilled today to be joined by two brilliant leaders from McGuire Woods. First we're joined by a regular guest, Amber Walsh, who serves on the executive committee at McGuire woods and also used to head the healthcare department and works at the intersection often of healthcare and private equity. We're also joined today by Erin Ryan. Aaron serves as the Director of Partner Integration and Business Development coaching. Aaron's role and Amber's role are both so important because they're both highly involved in the concept of onboarding talented partners to the firm and make sure that they integrate well and succeed and thrive at the firm. Firm has actually done a tremendous job of this way above industry averages the last several years and a lot of that's due to the efforts of Aaron and Amber and how they go about it. Aaron and Amber, let me ask you to take a moment first and introduce yourself and maybe set the stage for why partner integration is so important. The investment in lateral talent. And this is so important not just for law firms but every kind of business. So probably a lot of lessons to be learned across the board. Erin, can you take a moment and introduce yourself?
- [01:48]
B
Absolutely. Scott, thank you so much for having me on. My name is Erin Ryan. As Scott said, I am a member of of McGuire Woods. I sit in the marketing and business development department and most of my career I've spent in business development for almost 17 years here at this firm. So I have built my career on connecting people, helping them generate revenue for the firm and making sure that people overall have a great experience here.
- [02:16]
A
Simply amazing when you join the firm, the evolution of business development professionals and law firms. And can you take just a moment on that subject because that was a newer thing when you started to join the firm and it's still a new thing in a lot of firms. Talk a little bit about that role of business development and business development coaching from someone who doesn't practice law directly.
- [02:39]
B
Sure. Much to my parents chagrin, I never entered the practice of law after law school, but I did find this amazing corner of the field that is focused on helping law firm partners especially, but certainly associates, to go out and give the best client service that they can. And so oftentimes, you'll find with large law firms, they have teams of people who do this. I tacked on this business development coaching piece when I went out and got a certification in executive coaching. And I have actually found that in this newest iteration of my role, which is what we're talking about here today in the integration space, it is a perfect marriage, all three of these things. Business development coaching, traditional business development support, and the integration focus. Because ultimately, at the end of the day, I found that what I'm doing with lateral partners is coaching them through whatever may be in their pathway that day. Maybe it is traditional onboarding. I don't know how to use this technology, Erin. I don't know how to do this thing that the firm's asking me to do. Or maybe it's, Erin, I need to have this difficult conversation with someone in another department or with my practice chair. Maybe it's, hey, how do I communicate this really great win that I just had? What do I do with that? So it's been really exciting to have this. This marriage of skills that I've acquired over the years.
- [04:04]
A
Thank you. I want to come back to in a moment and talk about getting a coaching certificate from the International Association. Before I do that, Amber, can you take a moment and introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about both? Amber was a prodigious business development firm, prodigious leader at the firm. Now also helps does a ton of work in helping other partners in building their practices and what they do. Before we get into that, Amber, can you take a moment to introduce yourself?
- [04:32]
C
Yes, absolutely. And this is one of the most fun things that I get to do at the firm. As you mentioned, I was the chair of the health care group for six years after you and before Holly Buckley, who is our fabulous chair, took over the role. Now, been almost four years since that transition happened. And when I transitioned out of the role of chair of the healthcare department, we were at this flexion point with the firm where we knew that we needed to do something more significant, more focused, much more intelligent than what we had previously done in the realm of lateral partner integration. I was fortunate enough that the timing worked out well and I had a passion for it that I became the chair of the firm's first lateral partner integration committee and spent that first six months at the end of 2021 in building out the program, investigating what others did, where we were Maybe lacking. We conducted over 60 interviews with professionals, both departed internal at the fir other law firms, recognizing that we were really performing pretty consistently with the rest of the AmLaw 100, the top by size, 100 firms in the country. We were performing pretty consistently, but none of us were performing to a level that was satisfactory. It is incredibly costly to hire and not fully integrate. And Erin can talk to you in a minute about the components of the program. But we kicked off the program after that first kind of investigative and building period. We were fortunate to have Erin join our work as someone who knows the firm and has the perfect kind of skill set and desire for the role to join us as the director of integration. And we just finished up our first three years of the program really running functionally. And Erin can talk to you about the tremendous success, but it is something that, as you said at the beginning, we do believe very much transcends law firms. It's not just law firms that need to focus on integration and that can find success with a well structured program. It's something that any industry certainly can.
- [07:18]
A
Benefit from 100% and certainly whether you're a private equity fund, any kind of business, quite frankly, integration of partners, integration of colleagues is so, so important to long term success. You do sort of organic recruiting, then you do your ladder recruiting and ultimately both supplement each other and both have to work to make a successful firm or business of any sort work for the long run. And when you think about the fundamentals of an integration program, I look back at the old days, somebody joined a firm, they did a little bit of orientation and then they were sort of set free. What does that look like today in terms of integrating partners versus what it might have looked like 15 years ago or 20 years ago?
- [07:58]
B
Hopefully very different. And you know, we did get by doing that for a long time. And I know your audience is fairly numbers focused. So I do want to just put a little data around this. When at an inflection point that Amber was talking about, when McGuire woods and firms in general were starting to take a look at this and say, hey, I think we can do this better, we were blessed with some reporting that was coming out of big outfits like Major Lindsay, like Decipher. And what they were telling us is that large law firms typically lose 25% of their lateral partners by year three and 50% by year five. So when we talk about that costly investment, everything that goes into recruiting, whether you're at a law firm or a fund, everything that goes into that, into getting them to sign on that dotted line, walks out the door 25% of the time by the third year that that person is there. And you know, you start to look around and think, nowhere else in an organization would we be okay with making that kind of investment and then just leaving it up to chance. So that was a huge boost in making the case for really focusing our efforts on this. I am happy to report that at our three year mark, which was just a few months ago, we have lost just 9% of lateral partners that have walked in the door in that three year mark. So we are beating market metrics by quite a bit. And that leads to the question you just asked, Scott, which is what, what happens? How has it changed? And I think we have to start at the premise that this is not a checklist exercise. We lived in checklist land for a long time, as many organizations do. You know, someone comes in, you've got to get them to do this, sign that, take that training, meet that person, done and done. But here, if it were that easy, frankly, we wouldn't be talking today. This would not be an issue and it wouldn't be something that we needed to unpack and figure out. So when we did go all in on this, on this idea, I actually stepped back and thought, how do we do this in other spaces of our lives? You know, law firm, aside from side, how do we do this as people? So I focused a little bit in some sociological research and if you don't mind, I would love to just share some of the findings that I had because it really roots our conversation in where to go if you are wanting to focus on integration. So I read a lot about. Oh, awesome. I read quite a bit about kind of classic assimilation. How large cities form, what happens when different cultures come into melting pots of cities. Some of the most interesting reading I did was actually about older adopted children coming into existing families. And as an adopted child, I found, you know, I sort of went down some rabbit holes in there. But what I came out with were five foundational needs that have to be met for any human to do this successfully. Whether we're talking about families, whether we're talking about cultural assimilation, no matter what the scenario. And the five foundational needs that have to be met are a sense of community, a sense of belonging to, a sense of identity, access to information and access to resources. Think about those five and it's fairly easy to see it that in any of those outside professional organization scenarios, that makes sense, you can't come into, you can't try to assimilate into a city or you can't try to assimilate into a family without those things. So everything that we do in the integration program and how we think about it is rooted in those things. And it's in service of getting our lateral partners to achieve and fill those needs as efficiently and as productively as they can.
- [12:15]
A
Aaron, give me a second here. So I've got community, identity, resources, data, information. I'm missing one of the five. Could you tell me what that fifth one is that I missed?
- [12:27]
B
Yes, it's that sense of belonging. And that's a, that's a big one. I think belonging and identity are two of the most important ones that are often overlooked. Community makes sense. That's where we think about, okay, they, you know, they have to be on board with the culture of the firm. They've got to mesh with the people. You've got to like the person. They have to like the firm. That makes sense. But belonging and identity are two psychological factors that are absolutely present that I don't think we could give enough credit to. So when I talk about belonging, I'm thinking about not just how a partner's work fits into the firm's strategic plan, you know, of course that's important, but how they fit into any number of the smaller communities around the firm. How they fit into their office. Do they feel like they belong to the group of people that are present in their office, in their practice, in their department, in the industry? Do they feel like they belong within the client base? All of those are really valid questions. And we also need to think about the things that might signal the opposite of belonging. Even if they're unintentional, if someone comes into an organization and they're reaching out and saying, hey, nice. Would love to get some time on the calendar and those outreaches go unanswered, that signals to them that they don't belong. If they walk down the hallways and there's closed doors everywhere, that's that that triggers feelings of not belonging. So we need to be very conscious about those as well. And then the other important one is identity. For many people, this is a life changing move. You know, for the people on, on the side of the existing organization, it's, it's less than that. It's an email, it's an announcement, it's a, hey, welcome, glad you're here. But for that person, this is a life changing move. And it can feel a little bit like Alice in Wonderland. You know, you were sitting in a conference room yesterday with all of the Institutional knowledge and social capital and professional identity that came with that. And overnight you're not, you're rebuilding all of that from scratch. And that can really mess with someone's sense of identity, even if they don't know it. So part of our job is to help them figure out who they are professionally and personally in this new environment and how they want to be understood.
- [14:42]
A
And when somebody comes over laterally to law firm or another business, it could be life changing, it could be high risk, could also be filled with opportunity. And I think you really nailed it when you talk about this. Sort of, it is life changing for that person. Whereas for the other 1200 people at the firm, another 5000 people at the firm, 1200 lawyers, 5000 people, whatever the number is, it's not as life changing, but. But for the person who's coming in, it really is. Talk for a second about sort of the combination of your role and the person's role, and then working with department chairs or other parts of the firm integrated in well, it strikes me as it's both a team game that also takes some amount of self, starting by the lateral partner and some coaching from you. And how do you sort of make those pieces work together to encourage somebody to integrate well and have a great career at the firm?
- [15:36]
B
That's a great question, Scott. And you know, it is worth noting that of the five foundational needs that need to be met, only two of them are squarely within the firm's control. And those are the easy ones. Access to information and access to resources, we can do that. But the other three, the community, belonging, identity, that does require all of those parties. It requires the lateral, it requires the leadership of the firm. It requires everyone in their orbit and of course me to make that happen. Because that's not a unilateral. We can't manufacture that. We can't manufacture that for them. So, you know, I think a lot of people listening, this could probably identify with the importance of good communication. And that is the glue that holds so much of this together. Scott is really hyper focusing on good communication, communication through the lateral, communication with the department chairs, communication with firm leadership, communication amongst those groups, opening up doors to communication with other people in the firm. And that is truly what I come to work and do every day, is just communicate as clearly and as, as effectively as possible. So our program does include a regular cadence of communication that is just baked into how we do things now. But it also has that softer side of making it okay, making it expected that we communicate about everything going on in a lateral partner's experience.
- [17:17]
A
That's fantastic. And Amber, let me switch to you for a second. Back in the day, there was a bit of you hired somebody and there was a bit of always still is a gamble so that person fits in and integrates well. At some point there was probably more or less integration. There felt like at times some sink or swim type of piece to it. Now there's much more effort to bring people into teams and to get them onboarded well and. And integrated well. Can you talk a little bit about how you've seen some of this positively change over the years, particularly as Aaron has taken over this role of leadership? Some of the things that you've seen as real positive in the evolution of integrating in lateral partners?
- [18:05]
C
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the really interesting components of this, and we knew this from the beginning when we were building out the program three and a half years ago, we knew that there was a really close connection to good upfront recruiting and that there's, there's. If you do the recruiting right, it makes the integration easier and vice versa. Because good integration has also helped our recruiting. When you can talk about the opportunity for success and what the firm has invested in someone having a greater chance of success, that is a powerful recruiting tool. But one of the things that we found is that we have tried to change a little bit of the conversation in the recruiting phase. There is someone from the lateral partner integration committee, which is a committee of about 12 partners plus a few of our non practicing lawyer professionals that sit on that committee. One of us meets with every single person that is given an offer to join our firm as a lateral partner. And we very much believe part of our job in the recruiting cycle is to make sure that everyone is hearing what the potential lateral partner candidate is telling us. Because I think one of the biggest failure points is when the firm had one set of expectations for that individual and the individual had another set of expectations and they were completely disaligned. You're right out of the gate setting yourself up for failure. And we've done just in having better recruiting conversations, we've been able to build that bespoke program for the individual that actually meets what both parties, the firm and the individual had in terms of expectation setting. And then when you also pick the right people to be their sponsors and you identify very clearly everyone at the firm's role, most importantly with the lateral partner himself or herself. But next with Aaron, the sponsor, the committee, et cetera, when everybody's really clear on what their role is it's made a tremendous impact and people I think are less floundering in oh, how can I help this person? You're very clear on how to help this person succeed and vice versa.
- [20:46]
A
And Amber, let me ask you a follow up question to this because it alludes to something you talked about is how much is success in integration due to bringing the right people in and good selection in the front instance between both the candidates and the firm and how much does it do to the program going forward and how we integrate the person in and how do you look at those two things? And I know there's not a perfect answer to that, but how do you look at those two things versus getting the right person in that also believes the firm is the right person, right place and the integration efforts overseen by you and Erin and others to make sure that integration happens?
- [21:23]
C
Well, I think they are of equal importance and it's in order to have that successful integration, you have to make sure that the candidate really understands us as a firm and that we understand them. And then you can mold your expectations throughout the recruiting process. When you find out this person did not want to play it a particular role that you thought they might play, they still may have a great opportunity at the firm. It just may not be what you thought it was when you started the conversation. All those things are really important. I think they're of equal importance. It's having the right conversations, selecting the right people and having them select us right at the outset and then actually kind of sticking to that and kind of keeping everyone honest of we made these mutual commitments to one another. And now let's make sure that we're all putting our best foot forward. Is it going to be 100% successful? Of course not. That would be ludicrous to expect that. And but Erin shared with you, it's we have considered it to have been quite successful and all the different pieces that we add each year, we kind of add these different, different features to the program each year. I think that they're going well and have been well received and I think can certainly transcend the legal industry. And think about those in other organizations for which it is equally as costly to lose somebody as in a law firm 100%.
- [23:05]
A
And in so many industries the cost of replacement is so expensive and the cost of losing people is so expensive, particularly terrific people. Aaron, let me ask you this question. When people start to work with you, is there a point where you could start to get a sense of this person's likely to integrate in well, this person, it might be more challenging to integrate. Well, and what are some of the telltale signs that. That stick out to you in terms of people's integrations, as to how they're likely to end up succeeding or thriving?
- [23:36]
B
Yeah, gosh. Well, if. Listen, you've given me a new goal, Scott. If I can get this 100% right, I'm going to cash in and just be the fortune teller for lateral partners. I think I'm getting better. You know, it's one of those. The bigger the sample size you have, the more accurate you're going to be. I do think one of the telltale signs, though not 100% of the time, but one of the signs is. Is truthfully how much they engage with me, if that signals to me that they feel an ownership in their integration. They are curious about the firm, they're eager to know more, they're eager to meet people, they're eager to collaborate. That is a huge white flag, green flag, I should say. Now, if we look at the opposite and kind of when I can tell that someone may not work out, it's not rocket science, they're kind of blowing me off. Or they're not eager to engage, they're not eager to collaborate. They just sort of want to put their head down and kind of operate in a silo or alone. Of course, that's probably going to be less successful. Again, I can't emphasize enough that no matter what setting we're talking about, we are still talking about humans, human beings, and we all have similarities as human beings, and they're going to be more successful if they are curious and they want to engage. They check their ego at the door. They own what's happening around them, and they are actively engaged in how they want this to go.
- [25:10]
A
No 100% that you could tell partly just by the energy of engagement and so forth. And I couldn't agree with you more about what you said about fortune telling. You never really know till somebody's working for a period of time how successful, how effective they're going to be and so forth. And so I do think there is part of it. It just takes a little bit of time to figure it out. But there probably are some signs that people are really eager to make it work. And that itself probably indicative of a good sign if they're really eager to try and make it work and really communicative about it working. And so the hit rate over the last few years has been remarkable. Up to only losing 9% of partners after three years. That's a remarkable stat compared to the industry averages. Amber. And I'll ask Aaron and Amber both this question. Sort of one or two pieces of advice you would give to people in an integration program, whether a law firm or another type of business. Amber, any thoughts that you would have on sort of how to integrate people in.
- [26:08]
C
I think one of the very most essential parts of our program that is absolutely applicable to any industry is the role of the sponsor. And, and we, I think, made a real improvement in selecting an individual partner within the firm. Sometimes it's one person, sometimes it's two people who are the lateral partners sponsor. And we're very intentional that it not be the department chair. Because in our firm, the department chair has so much administrative and business obligations, responsibilities. And if you are constantly putting the success of the lateral partner onto the department chair, again, in our firm's organization, it may be different elsewhere. It's not going to be as successful. You have to have someone whose practice aligns who's in the same office. Possibly we make a choice in a variety of ways, but we are very, very thoughtful on selecting a sponsor with the input from the lateral and the input from the department chair and other leaders. And that person really owns and takes responsibility. Yes. In the end, the lateral partner is responsible for his or her own success. There's no one more responsible than the partner himself or herself. But the sponsor role is something that we did not really elevate until we put this program together three years ago. And I think that has made all the difference. So if I had one piece of advice, it would be to include and really lean on and empower the sponsor.
- [27:58]
A
Thank you very, very much. And how do you select the sponsor for every lateral partner? How do you sort of look at that? Is that an official role, that there's an official sponsor for a lateral partner?
- [28:08]
C
Yeah, there is an official role, absolutely. And we communicate, Aaron. Aaron does a lot of communication with the sponsors to remind them, hey, the partner retreat is coming up. Make sure that you are guiding your lateral partner that you are sponsoring through the retreat. Hey, the holidays are coming up. Make sure that you're really attending to their needs in terms of, you know, silly little things like client gifts, things that can be impediments for someone success if they don't feel like they have that information. So we, we select the sponsor with the input of all the firm leaders. Our managing partner, Tracy, often will have somebody because he's involved in recruiting a sponsor in mind, regardless it whether or not it is in that person's office. Sometimes they are, sometimes they are not. They always have a vested interest in the person's success. And we use that phrase a lot, a vested interest in that person's. And we've had really good luck with getting the right sponsor, but we've had to be pretty thoughtful about who that was going to be.
- [29:26]
A
Fantastic. Thank you so much. And Aaron, let me turn it back to you. A couple core thoughts on sort of what leads to effective integration.
- [29:36]
B
Yeah, I want to put a fine point on what Amber said because she is absolutely right that the sponsor plays such a key role in the bilateral experience. And for those listening, I would challenge you, if you are choosing a sponsor of some sort within your organization, to put on a lens of how that lateral partner or employee is experiencing the sponsor. It's a little bit of a nuance, but oftentimes we approach a role like that with will this person do this? Will this person invite them to this? Will they call them about this? Those are all very checklisty. But we have sort of turned it and said, who in the firm will make the lateral partner feel like they trust them? Who in the firm will make the lateral partner feel that they are being genuinely invested in and how, what will that look like? So it's, again, it's a little bit of a nuance there, but this is all about the lateral partner's experience and not necessarily about what, you know, the hard checklist type things that a sponsor is doing. So I just wanted to put that fine point on it. I think my contribution to best practices would be measuring. You know, Peter Drucker said, if you can't measure it, you can't improve it. And I'm constantly looking at how we can improve this. We're never going to get it 100% right. If we do again, we'll cash in on it. But this is a constant evolution based on how. Based on what's going on in the firm. Based on what's going on in the market. Based on what's going on in the lateral market. So we are in a constant feedback loop from day one in all of the directions that I've mentioned already. Feedback from the lateral, feedback from firm leadership, feedback from the sponsors, feedback from the lateral partner integration committee. It's done in objective kind of survey type ways and also in subjective ways because I am in such constant communication with all of those parties. It's always a point of conversation, how can we be doing this better? And I'm constantly looking at comments, at feedback, what comes up in the course of conversations where we can just iterate around the edges and continue to make this as good of a program as it can be.
- [31:57]
A
Thank you. Aaron, I'll ask you one more question. And again, if this is a question you don't want to answer, you don't have to answer this. Okay? Just let me know if you're ready.
- [32:05]
B
Okay.
- [32:05]
A
Okay. So here's the question. Which is a better academic institution? And just bear with me on the question. University of Wisconsin or Kansas University? University of Kansas. Which is. Which are you a bigger fan of which is a better school?
- [32:24]
B
Oh, Scott, I'm gonna have to plead the fifth on this. This is a loaded question. I have given a lot of money to the University of Wisconsin, so it's hard for me to go go astray. I know where your alliances lie.
- [32:38]
A
Well, well, I'll ask you a follow up question of that is. And Amber, you could answer this. Is Jim Harbaugh a more unethical coach than of Kansas or the coach of Wisconsin?
- [32:52]
C
Oh, boy.
- [32:53]
B
I mean, we, we've got some real.
- [32:56]
C
Sour grapes align I hosting dynamics going on here, Aaron.
- [33:03]
B
Oh, boy.
- [33:06]
A
Is such an unfair, so unfair civilization and synthesis of the entire question. Exactly, exactly. Anyways, I want to thank the both of you for joining us today on the Becker business podcast, the Becker private equity podcast. What you're doing is so, so important and all I try and do is not get in the way of it. Thank you both for joining me. Thank you very, very much.
- [33:29]
C
Thank you, Scott.
- [33:30]
B
Thank you.