This is one of the problems I am currently working on.
The idea is to build a simulator that helps lawyers understand where they are already commercially strong, where they may be weaker, and what they can do next to improve.
The starting question is simple:
Can a lawyer become more commercially effective if the path from self-awareness to practical action is made concrete enough?
What the individual lawyer should get
The simulator asks a lawyer a structured set of questions and turns the answers into a practical view of commercial strengths and weaknesses.
The purpose is not to produce a label or a personality score. It is to help the lawyer see where improvement may matter and to suggest small, realistic actions based on the answers they gave.
A useful result should therefore answer three things:
- Where am I already strong?
- Where am I weaker or less consistent?
- What are a few practical things I can do to improve?
What changes when colleagues participate
A lawyer can invite other people in the firm to complete the same assessment.
That creates a second level of the problem: can individual perspectives be combined into a useful picture of the firm without losing the differences between them?
At firm level, the aim is to make visible:
- shared commercial strengths;
- recurring weaknesses or gaps;
- areas where different roles see the firm differently; and
- patterns that may be difficult to see from a single person's perspective.
From diagnosis to improvement
The firm-level result should not stop at a report.
If several people participate, the simulator should also give the firm practical input for a workshop: what to discuss, where perspectives differ, what strengths to protect, which areas to improve first, and how to turn the discussion into concrete actions.
The working sequence is therefore:
individual reflection → strengths and weaknesses → practical suggestions → shared firm view → discussion → workshop → improvement actions
What I currently think
My working hypothesis is that commercial development becomes more useful when feedback is specific enough to act on, but simple enough that lawyers can recognize themselves in it.
At firm level, I think the value may become even greater if individual responses reveal patterns and disagreements that can be used as the starting point for a structured conversation rather than as a final score.
What I still do not know
Which questions produce genuinely useful reflection? Which suggestions lead to actual behavior change? How much aggregation is needed before a firm-level view becomes meaningful? How should differences between partners, lawyers, leadership and business development be represented? And what kind of workshop guidance actually helps a firm improve rather than simply discuss the results?
Those are the questions I want the simulator to help answer over time.