Dan Couvrette, CEO, Divorce Marketing Group, Divorce Magazine and Family Lawyer Magazine, interviews Lizanne J. Ceconi on work-life balance.
Guest speaker: Lizanne J. Ceconi
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Dan Couvrette:
Welcome everybody and thank you for joining us today on this Family Lawyer Magazine podcast. This podcast is part of a series of podcasts titled Work-Life Balance where I have the opportunity to interview family lawyers from across North America to uncover what they do to manage a busy practice with the rest of their busy lives. We talk about their successes and their lessons in working towards the work-life balance they’re seeking to achieve.
My name is Dan Couvrette. I’m the CEO of Divorce Marketing Group, and publisher of Family Lawyer Magazine, familylawyermagazine.com, Divorce Magazine and divorcemagazine.com. And it’s my pleasure today to be speaking with Lizanne Ceconi.
Lizanne works with a nine-lawyer family law firm in New Jersey. And she’s a founding partner, of the firm. And I’ve known Lizanne for about 10 years now. I invited her to talk about work-life balance. When I first talked to her about this subject she described herself as being a work in progress to which I said, “Aren’t we all.” It is my pleasure to have Lizanne on the call with us today. Welcome, Lizanne.
Lizanne Ceconi:
Thank you, Dan.
Dan Couvrette:
Let’s start off by asking you what do you hear when somebody says “work-life balance”? What comes up for you and what does it mean to you?
Lizanne Ceconi:
Well, I think the first thing it means to me is what I think all of us strive for, is to have that work-life balance. But I think what it really means is being good at what you do but still having a life outside the office with family, friends, and time off.
Dan Couvrette:
Do you really have a distinct division between your work-life and the rest of your life? Is there a hard fast line where you say, “After five o’clock I do no business, I make no phone calls”?
Lizanne Ceconi:
Oh, I wish. I will tell you though, ironically, I just got back from a week at a spa in California, which is something I do once a year. And I do it with some girlfriends. It’s my week away from the office. And, literally, away from the office, everything gets shut down, everyone knows that I am not reachable and I just do a lot of mind/body work for the week.
It’s very deliberate and it’s always necessary.
Dan Couvrette:
And how rejuvenated do you feel after that week?
Lizanne Ceconi:
I feel very rejuvenated. It’s really important to have certain times that you’re completely unplugged. And I think, especially in a family law practice, you just need to do that.
Dan Couvrette:
Do you feel that you’ve attained the work-life balance that you’re striving for or are you still, as you described yourself, a work in progress?
Lizanne Ceconi:
Oh, it’s still work in progress. You know, it’s really hard when you care about what you do to really be able to distance yourself from it. And I don’t know that anyone has fully achieved it — and I’m not sure it’s fully achievable. But I’m still trying.
Dan Couvrette:
Are there things that you changed in the past? Have you always done this one week off or are there other things that you’ve done to help you achieve more of a balance? Were you more out of balance at some point in your life? What did you do to get yourself pointed in the right direction?
Lizanne Ceconi:
Yeah, I mean, a lot of things. I was a sole practitioner for a number of years. And, while I loved being a sole practitioner, I realized that I couldn’t do it alone. First, I formed a partnership and then we grew the firm. And it wasn’t necessary that we intended to have nine or ten lawyers, it was more that we were really trying to have that work-life balance.
Dan Couvrette:
You thought you’d be better off working together than being solos. Somebody could handle the administration and that sort of thing?
Lizanne Ceconi:
Well, delegation is crucial.
Dan Couvrette:
Right.
Lizanne Ceconi:
And being able to know what work you should be doing and what work you can delegate is really hard, particularly when you start as a sole practitioner, you know, because you’re so used to doing everything yourself. So suddenly saying, you know what, I can really give this to an associate to work on, or this isn’t something that I need to work on, or I don’t even need to be the lead attorney in this case are all really important things. But I think one of the most important things to learn is that you can say no.
And it’s also a really hard one. But whether it’s saying no to the client who says, “Can I have your cell phone number or your home phone number?” or whether saying no to a case, saying, you know, “I just don’t think that this is a good fit for the firm,” or, “I think it would take too much energy.”
So I think you really have to think about that. You can’t let your ego get in the way and just say, “Oh, I want to bring in the most cases,” or, “I want to hire the most attorneys.” I think you really have to look at what the clients’ needs are and whether or not you can accommodate them.
Dan Couvrette:
One of things I notice about you, Lizanne — we’ve known each other for about ten years — is that it seems to me that you’re very precise and you make decisions. You know, a lot of people can’t make a decision. Do you see yourself as being somebody who can make decisions and let go of the other options and keep on moving forward?
Lizanne Ceconi:
You have to. I mean, I think, you know, you’re right because if you start obsessing over decisions that have already been made you’ll just make yourself crazy and you won’t be a doing a good job at anything that you do.
I tell the younger lawyers in my office about decision making when they come in and say, “What do you want me to do next on this case?” or, “What should I tell the client?” You know, often times I say, “Well, what do you think the decision should be and how do you live with that decision?” but you have to make it and you have to move on.
But it certainly doesn’t mean you shouldn’t question what you’re doing and, obviously, you have to give it thought. But then once you make that decision, you’ve got to move from there.
Dan Couvrette:
I work with a lot of attorneys and they struggle with not being able to capture all the information or not being able to make decisions as easily as I see you being able to. I’m just wondering if there’s anything about your upbringing or your background that helped train you in that area.
Lizanne Ceconi:
I appreciate the observation. I think it’s probably coming from a large family where you didn’t have a lot of time to be indulgent. You know, you empathize with the situation that someone’s in, you identify what the options are and then you say, okay, you make a choice and you move on from there.
Dan Couvrette:
Right. This is the way your parents were, you mean?
Lizanne Ceconi:
Oh absolutely.
Dan Couvrette:
When you say a large family, did it have thirty children or how many children were there?
Lizanne Ceconi:
Well, no, you know what; it wasn’t even so much my family. There were only four of us in my family. But my mother came from an extended family of 49 first cousins. So, you know, big family, all kinds of issues, lots going on all the time. And so it was sort of, “Get over it. Deal with it and get over it.”
Dan Couvrette:
Do you have a sense that you’re achieving your potential? Are you achieving what you hoped to achieve?
Lizanne Ceconi:
Absolutely, professionally. To tell you the truth, I never envisioned a firm this big. It’s not where I saw my future. So I think professionally I am achieving my potential. On a personal level, I have a great personal life but what I’m not achieving as much as I want to is that balance.
Dan Couvrette:
What do you think is different between you setting aside one week, and being able to achieve that on a day-to-day basis?
Lizanne Ceconi:
Well, I think on the day-to-day basis it’s harder to have those kinds of boundaries. And in a busy practice and when you really care about the people that you are providing services for you want to do a really good job, but there’s also a limited amount of hours.
Lizanne Ceconi:
So learning that delegation and still making people feel that you care about them, and want what’s best for them, it’s a balance. And it’s hard.
Dan Couvrette:
If you were trying to work more towards that — and I’m not suggesting that you should be — but if you were really doing your own self-diagnosis would you say it’s a matter of more delegation in your case?
Lizanne Ceconi:
Absolutely. I think it’s education also to the client to say when they come in, “I will not be doing everything on your file because there are certain things that other people in the office can do as well at a lower hourly rate.” And sometimes I get too involved in the case and I forget about, “Wait a minute, I could give this to someone else to handle.” Or the client will say, “But I want you to handle this,” and so I think I need to be better in terms of assuring them that they’ll still get great service even with a less experienced attorney in the office.
Dan Couvrette:
When you meet with a client would you also bring in the attorney who might be assisting you on the case right up front or do they come in later? How does that work?
Lizanne Ceconi:
It usually comes in later. What I generally do is I have an initial consult and for most times it’s just me and the potential client. And I spent probably an hour and fifteen minutes to about an hour and a half, sometimes even longer, with that potential client. And I gather a lot of information and I also try to get to know them. And it’s a flat fee so that they’re not looking at their watch saying, you know, “Why am I talking about that recent trip to Italy I took?” you know, as opposed to, you know, something … “What does that have to do with my case?”
And it’s really that we’re interviewing each other. What I’m trying to assess is what this person’s needs are, and do I think this person can be served well and will they be satisfied in the office. And I know they’re interviewing me too, along those same lines. But then what it also does is it then gives me a sense of what other attorney in the office I think would be a good fit with that client.
I try to match up the personalities. And I won’t know that upfront. So what I would tend to do is at the end of the consultation I tell them, you know, what the retainer would be and, often times, then I tell them that I have a certain attorney in the office in mind that I would be working with. Or in some cases, I say, “I don’t think that your case needs someone at my hourly rate,” there might be someone else in the firm… or I’ll come up and I’ll say, “Look, I have someone else in the firm who I think could do a great job for you at a lower hourly rate,” and then would give that person’s name at that time.
Dan Couvrette:
Has technology contributed to a better work-life balance for you or has it made it harder to get away from work?
Lizanne Ceconi:
Well, it’s done both. I mean, the good part is I have a beach house and, with the technology, I can actually get a lot of work done down there, transmit the work and send the work to be done in the office without having to be there. And then the other part of it, obviously, is that you never get away from it. It’s ten o’clock at night when you hear you iPhone buzzing and, some client is sending you some heart wrenching e-mail or, something that they’re sort of musing over and you just say, “Uh,” you know, I have to shut it off.
And I do try and do the 9:00 p.m. rule which is to shut down everything by nine o’clock at night. I just find I sleep better.
Dan Couvrette:
The good and bad news is you can work everywhere, anytime.
Lizanne Ceconi:
Exactly. And I think that it also sets up sort of this catch-22 ‘cause you want to be able to provide good service to the client but sometimes then what you do is you set up unrealistic expectations.
And one of the things I found that I’ve really stopped now is that when people send out e-mails they expect more of an immediate response. And what that’s done in the past is it actually takes away from the idea of processing what it is that they’re saying. No one strategizes or thinks things through because they want this immediate response, or I’ll get an e-mail that says, “Okay. Now that this has happened, what’s our next strategy?” And I see those e-mails and in the past I would say, “Uh, let me figure out what I need to respond to this client,” and now I realize that’s not an e-mail discussion. That’s an in-person discussion or a telephone conference.
Now that my response to that is, “Please call my assistant,” or, “I’m going to have my assistant contact you to schedule a time to either come in or for us to block twenty minutes,” or however long I think it’s going to take to address so that we can talk about this issue, that it’s just not an issue appropriate for e-mail. I think that that helps educate both of us that, this is much more than just a two-sentence response.
Dan Couvrette:
Lizanne, I want to thank you for taking a few minutes to talk with me. And I’m going to end with one last question, and that is if you could change one thing in the world what would that be?
Lizanne Ceconi:
Oh, that’s a good one. I guess world peace, an end to poverty and hunger, you know, something good.
That’s what I’d like to see.
Dan Couvrette:
Thanks so much for your time, Lizanne. And if people are interested in listening to our other interviews and podcasts please click here.. You can always find our podcasts on iTunes. And if you’re looking for information to help you through your divorce or looking for other resources for your clients please visit divorcemagazine.com.
Thank you once again to my guest, Lizanne Ceconi of Ceconi & Cheifetz in New Jersey. Take care.
Lizanne Ceconi:
Thanks, Dan.
Lizanne J. Ceconi is a Founding Member and Managing Partner of Ceconi & Cheifetz, LLC, a family law firm in Summit, New Jersey. She has been practicing family law for more than 25 years and is a leader in the profession. She is a former chair of the New Jersey State Bar Association Family Law Section. Ms. Ceconi served as President of the Union County Bar Association, only the third woman to hold the position in its 103 year history. She was also the first woman to lead the Northern New Jersey Family Law Inns of Court. Since 1993, Ms. Ceconi has been approved by the Administrative Office of the Courts as a certified mediator. Ms. Ceconi has lectured extensively.
Dan Couvrette is a marketing expert to family lawyers and divorce professionals. The CEO of Divorce Marketing Group, he is the publisher of Family Lawyer Magazine and Divorce Magazine.
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