The LMAF Interview: Elle O'Flaherty

Elle O'Flaherty

Platform

Elle O’Flaherty coaches lawyers with ADHD to excel amid environments and norms not designed with them in mind. A former federal litigator and trade negotiator, Elle understands her target audience intimately: She too lives with ADHD and spent nearly two decades practicing law before launching Interlace Solutions to coach high achieving senior professionals and executives to reach their potential.

Elle recently launched a second business, Converge Coaches. Converge helps early career professionals understand what employers expect of them and how to perform accordingly. With this endeavor, Elle addresses everything not covered by colleges and universities: corporate workplace expectations, communication norms, practical decision-making, and more.

In a word, Elle helps professionals, both neurodivergent and neurotypical, adjust, adapt, and thrive in their surroundings.

When she’s not coaching, consulting, and speaking, chances are good you’ll find her keeping up with her family, working remotely from Washington D.C.’s Hillwood Estate & Garden, or . . . in a tiki bar!

Savvy

What are clients asking for that you just don't see law firms delivering yet?

Definitely AI. I'm obsessed with AI. I think I was roughly the third person to pick it up from a layperson's perspective. When I start talking to lawyers or professionals in the legal world about AI, I notice a huge hesitancy and fear.

People don't get it. They've read the media and are kind of freaked out. But when I start describing what AI can do for your legal practice, it's pretty amazing to see their reaction.

AI is the single biggest tool for the ADHD attorneys I coach, because one of our challenges is starting things and feeling overwhelmed, which then causes us to procrastinate and lose motivation.

But AI helps you get something on the page. It's never going to be the last thing, right?

But it's the first thing that you can then work with.

The other thing I think is teaching soft skills to new attorneys. People are coming from college, from law school, wherever they're coming from and starting their legal careers with a difference from past generations as far as how much they've been able to develop their soft skills. That’s where people need more training and help.

I think you're right on both counts. What's the best advice you've ever received?

If you do something two or more times, automate it, make a template, set it and forget it. Capture the work you've done on that thing and don’t reinvent the wheel each time.

When I was litigating, that meant having a compendium of arguments I had made or having research at the tip of my fingers and retaining it in an indexed way.

These days it can be everything from creating client email templates—I’m a big fan of having those literally at the push of a button. [More on this below.] I love automating things so you don't have to think through again, “What's the perfect way to write this email?,” because odds are if you're a seasoned attorney, you've probably done it before.

What tools of the trade do you most love using in your day-to-day?

I love a stream deck, which is actually a tool for content creators and streamers. [Elle favors the Elgato 15 Key Stream Deck.] It's a little LED screen in a physical box that sits on your desk, and you can program the buttons to do anything you want. In fact, each button can then be a folder full of more buttons. It's infinitely programmable.

I hate the word "weird." It tends to be weaponized. 

I use it for things like inserting a link to my scheduling calendar that I use all the time. I push it once, it inserts wherever I want it to, and I never have to scramble to find that link.

I have built out that [push-button] capability, for instance, across all of Microsoft Word. I use branded templates, like in PowerPoint or in Word documents. I click one button and that template is already there, it's in the document, along with all of the formatting, and I don't have to do anything more. 

You can also program yes-no buttons. I teach attorneys to use these for billable hours. I'll train their paralegals or IT department—and this is a really fun training—to make each button a client logo. It'll be programmed so that you push it once to start the billable hours and push it again to stop. Just that can make it fun to bill hours. I'm hyper visual, so I recommend putting your client's company logo on each button. I've helped clients significantly increase their billable hours and their quality of timekeeping by making the process fun and easy.

Salty

What words or phrase do you wish would go away from the business of law forever?

I hate the word “weird.” It tends to be weaponized. People often think anything different is weird. As a person with ADHD, who also coaches people with ADHD, I've noticed that it really is weaponized against our community when we do things differently, especially in an industry like law that is steeped in tradition. That word clips our wings and our ability to innovate, try new things, and welcome different kinds of thinkers.

What do you wish lawyers, law firms, or clients would stop asking for, and why?

Conformity. If we're looking for novel arguments, it's really important to have people who think differently. So, hiring the same kind of people, looking for the same kinds of thinkers from the same law schools, that's a huge mistake.

Instead, look for people who have different backgrounds, who have practiced different kinds of law, to pull in some of those different experiences.

And of course, I love a neurodivergent thinker because our brains are fundamentally different. By embracing that and changing our hiring practices, we recruit and attract different kinds of people. That's really important.

Some of this starts with our law schools. Law schools tend to have similar application and recruitment practices. Therefore, similar people end up in our industry.

Typical law firm interviews are really made for one kind of person to shine.

I don't think I've ever told this story. When I wrote my law school essay, I created a short newspaper instead of a traditional paragraph-by-paragraph essay. I have a journalism degree, and I used those skills to put it together. I was surprised when some schools called me to ask if it was my essay and even more so when some said they wouldn’t accept it. I withdrew my applications from those schools rather than send in a new essay, because they clearly weren’t the place for me. To them, it was so outside the box. About half the schools wouldn’t accept it, even though it was, in fact, an essay.

That's such a tiny example, but it's the kind of thing that we really need to change if we want to be more welcoming in our industry to people who think differently.

What’s an example of that in the law firm context?

Take the interview process. Typical law firm interviews are really made for one kind of person to shine.

Common interview processes include things like answering questions on the spot. People with ADHD have short-term memory challenges. If you ask us stacked or multiple questions at the same time, we can have trouble remembering all the parts of the questions. This can put us at a disadvantage over other candidates who can retain all of the questions.

Testing for people's ability to recall multiple questions while talking might be a skill set you’re looking for in a litigator. Yet, if you're hiring folks who are doing contracts, they probably need a different skill set. That interview practice may not show you what a great thinker a lawyer can be, whereas giving questions in advance could reveal their thinking and abilities instead of a narrow question recall skill.

 

Personal

What is the worst advice you've ever received?

The worst advice most of us ever receive is when we're in high school and someone says, okay, you're really good at x, and that's what you should be when you grow up. So you follow that through your whole education but when you get to the job you figure out, oh, wait a minute, this actually does not at all suit me.

That was my experience with part of my legal career. We often study things in school and think about how fun it is to study the thing, but we don’t consider what an actual day in the job is like.

I think there’s this natural bravado we're supposed to have, where we have the answers, where we're very assertive. Instead, try being a little bit more humble and welcoming.

Law school is nothing like sitting by yourself in a room reading a 200-page brief. We don’t think about things like “Can I sit still that long?” or “Do I like to work alone?”

Instead, we should be asking people how they like their day to go. Not only “What are you good at,” but also “What do you enjoy doing?” and “How do you like to work?” At this point, I'm pretty good at trade disputes. I did them for years. I never want to do one again. So, asking people what lights them up and energizes them and telling people to follow that, I think, is really good advice.

What advice would you give your younger self?

Don't white knuckle your way through life. Too often we do things because we think we should, or we just don't examine where our choices are taking us. Instead, realize that you have the power and agency to design the life you really want. That means that when things aren't working, make a change and don’t be afraid.

I used to do things that I thought minimized risk. I was afraid of what would happen if I stepped off that path, and so I thought I was stuck with decisions that made me unhappy. But by being a little bit brave, and having a little more faith that things will work out, my life improved enormously. Once I reframed my thinking to go towards what I wanted instead of away from what I want to avoid, that's when all the great things started coming into my life.

What would you be doing if you weren't working in the legal industry?

I think I answered that question with my career pivot! I’ve landed exactly where I was meant to be all along. When I’m coaching someone, there’s nothing more rewarding than seeing them finally understand and accept themselves. Plus, I always wanted to be a standup comedian, so getting the chance to work a lot of fun and humor into my corporate trainings really energizes me. Making someone laugh while teaching them how to manage up is totally on-brand for me.

My focus is executive and ADHD coaching and training for high-achieving professionals. I do a lot of training on professional skills as well as understanding ADHD in the workplace. And then this new venture of training new professionals. I'm hired by everyone across all different industries. So quite a bit of my work is already outside the legal community, although I work with law firms a lot. I just gave a training for a national law firm on ADHD and the practice of law and I’m so thrilled that the legal community has come so far in supporting ADHD attorneys

Where is your happy place and why?

I'm based in Washington, D.C., and there is this beautiful old house [Hillwood Estate and Garden]. It was owned by Marjorie Merriweather Post, this fabulously wealthy woman who inherited Post Cereal from her father and built it into General Foods. She appreciated beauty and art and had this house that was just incredible. For instance, her dining room table took 17 artisans a year to make.

She was also into orchids. On the grounds is this giant hothouse that you can go into and there's every kind of orchid and they keep it up beautifully.

I think the future for the legal industry is teaching, training, and serving clients in a way that energizes and fuels us.

Something about walking around this opulent house filled with art and the beautiful, landscaped gardens really takes you out of yourself. I just think it's magical. It's my work-from-home getaway, where I'll take my laptop and build new training workshops. It inspires me because it's so creative. She did so many creative things, like she built these little strange extra houses, like playhouses for her kids. She just really let her imagination run wild, which I'm not gonna lie, it's a lot easier when you're unimaginably wealthy. But for the rest of us, it's just kind of neat to go to a magical place like that.

Everybody gets a bonus question, if they want it. Yours is, what's one thing the legal industry could implement to be more inclusive?

I think there’s this natural bravado that we're supposed to have, where we have the answers, where we're very assertive, I might even say aggressive. Instead, try being a little bit more humble and welcoming.

In the legal profession, for a long time, we've had this sort of “break people down to build them up” mentality. You see it in law school, you see it with new associates. That's really, incredibly wrongheaded. Instead, let’s try to teach people in a way that suits modern teaching practices. We've learned a lot about adult learning theory and how to accomplish that kind of teaching that I have not seen taken up much by law schools or firms.

Rethinking how we approach this and how much we want to impact people in a negative or positive way could make such a huge difference. I coach a lot of attorneys who are really, really burned out, who are so tired of being pushed around and mistreated, frankly, by more senior people, by partners. I don't think it has to be that way at all. I think the future for the legal industry is teaching, training, and serving clients in a way that energizes and fuels us.