The Practice Playbook Podcast with Susan Guthrie

What happens when conflict reaches beyond the mediation room and into our neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, courts, housing systems, and community gathering spaces?  Community Mediation Matters is a special eight-part series from The Practice Playbook Podcast, created in partnership with the National Association for Community Mediation, or NAFCM.  Join host Susan Guthrie for conversations with N...

When someone asks AI to recommend a professional with your expertise, does your name come up? More and more, attorneys looking for a mediator for a complex commercial dispute, business owners searching for an arbitrator, and potential clients trying to find the right lawyer are turning to ChatGPT for answers. And if your name doesn’t come up, what can you do about it? Susan Guthrie welcomes Erica...

You can be an excellent professional, mediator, or lawyer and still struggle to build a successful practice. It may be one of the most frustrating truths about these professions, because knowing how to carry out your craft and knowing how to build a business around it are two entirely different skill sets. That is why we are tackling the questions heard most often from practitioners about what mig...

Growth is not always the next right move. Sometimes more clients or more visibility are not what you are actually looking for. In fact, perhaps you'd actually want less of them. When a practice feels off, the instinct is often to reach for more marketing, more referrals, or more revenue. But growth is not automatically repair. If what a practice needs is some repair, growth only multiplies what is...

Your fees are not just how you get paid. They may be quietly building the practice you are trying to escape. Every fee structure creates consequences. Hourly billing, flat fees, subscriptions, packages, phased fees, and hybrid models do more than determine revenue. They shape client expectations, boundaries, scope, workload, value perception, risk, and sustainability. That means the real pricing q...

"That's the way we've always done it" might be the most expensive phrase in your practice, even when you never say it out loud. Susan Guthrie explores the practice rules professionals follow without ever consciously choosing them, from availability and referrals to pricing, customization, and the very definition of success. The last two episodes of The Practice Playbook Podcast explored whether yo...

A full calendar can feel like proof that a practice is working. The phone rings, the referrals come in, the consultation requests land in the inbox, and from the outside, that looks like success. But inside the practice, a full calendar can hide a lot. In fact, a full calendar is not the same as a healthy practice. In this solo episode, Susan Guthrie continues the lead-up to the launch of The Busi...

Have you ever looked at your practice and thought, this should feel better than it does? Not because you hate the work. Not because you're bad at it. In fact, the opposite is often true: you may be very good at the work, you may care deeply about your clients, and you may have every outward sign of success, and still feel like something is off. That's the question we tackle in a special series abo...

AI in the legal world is often met with fear instead of curiosity, but Susan Guthrie has a different take: used with the right skepticism, it doesn't replace professional judgment, it frees practitioners to use more of it. That shift is exactly what's playing out with Descrybe, the legal research tool that's gone from a free startup product to one of Anthropic's official launch partners for Claude...

There are two words that can make you excellent at your work and quietly sabotage the practice you actually want, and most professionals say them without noticing. A colleague floats an idea, and before they finish the sentence, you are already building the response that starts with "Yes, but." Stephen Seckler calls it the yes, but reflex, and he has spent a career helping lawyers and dispute reso...

The best business relationships have nothing to do with business. Not at the start, not in the room, not over coffee or at a conference. Phil Fornaro, attorney and podcast host, calls what he has built relationship capital, and with a client conversion rate approaching 100%, he has the results to prove that leading with the relationship instead of the business is not just a nicer approach, it is t...

This episode is about what happens to legal and dispute resolution pricing when AI does in twenty minutes what used to take a full day, and why the subscription billing model may be the answer. Clients know their lawyers are using AI, and they want to know why that is not showing up in what they are charged. It is a fair question, and most practitioners do not have a good answer yet. Here is the p...

Imagine a potential client calling your office for a consultation, and before you can even finish saying hello, they say, "I've been following your podcast for two years. You are already my professional. I just came to meet you." That is not a fantasy call. That is what it looks like to win a client before they ever call you, and how a podcast can make it happen.  Susan Guthrie sits down with Denn...

Artificial intelligence is becoming part of the infrastructure of modern professional practice, and it is already reshaping the competitive landscape. The question is no longer whether to use it. The question is what professionalism looks like now that it is here. In this solo episode, Susan Guthrie shares two real conversations that capture the tension so many professionals are feeling right now....

If opening LinkedIn lately has made you feel like AI evolved while you were busy working, you are not imagining it. The changing face of AI has real implications, and things are shifting faster than most professionals realize. We are no longer in the era of asking AI to draft an email. What professionals are navigating now is the movement from AI as a tool to AI as infrastructure, and that distinc...

Every assumption you have made about how clients find, evaluate, and hire legal professionals is being rewritten in real time. How they search has changed. How they evaluate trust has changed. How quickly they expect a response has changed. And if the practice you have built is still operating on assumptions from five or ten years ago, this episode is your wake-up call. Susan Guthrie sits down wit...

Most people think leadership happens because someone notices you. But real influence is built when people learn they can trust you to show up, follow through, and lead when things get hard. Susan Guthrie sits down with her friend and longtime colleague Liz Hill, Director of Communications and Development at MWI and current Chair of the ABA Section of Dispute Resolution, for a refreshingly candid c...

For the past three years, most conversations about AI in the legal and dispute resolution professions have fallen into one of two categories: fear or hype. Either AI was coming to replace everyone, or it was being presented as a magical solution that could somehow run your practice for you overnight. But professions are finally moving into a new phase of the conversation, one grounded in practical...

Seven habits. That is what separates the top 10% of practitioners from everyone else. Not talent, not experience, not working harder. Seven specific, actionable habits that most professionals either overlook or avoid entirely. This week, every single one gets unpacked so you can begin implementing them into your practice today. Most professionals believe success comes from doing more. More marketi...

You can be exceptional at what you do, the best lawyer, mediator, consultant, or coach in the room, but if people don’t know who you are or how you can help, building a thriving practice becomes an uphill climb. In fact, if you’ve ever left a conference, networking event, or even a series of great meetings thinking, “That was really valuable… so why aren’t any leads coming from it?” then you’ve al...

Most professionals are busy, capable, doing good work and yet the practice is not growing the way they expected. The issue is not effort. The issue is usually strategy, or lack thereof. Because most professionals are focused on what feels productive, not what actually drives growth. In this solo episode, Susan Guthrie walks through the seven fastest ways to grow your practice in 2026 and beyond. T...

Most people think you can simply stop practicing law one day and become a mediator the next. But as this episode makes clear, building a successful neutral practice takes years of credibility, relationships, and intentional effort. For anyone who has thought about making the transition from litigator to mediator, or who is already building a neutral practice and wondering what it really takes to s...

What if credibility does not come from sounding like an expert? What if it comes from being understood? That is the question at the heart of this week's conversation and for legal professionals trained to believe that complexity signals expertise, it may be the most important question to sit with. Susan Guthrie is joined by Lee Shainis, founder of Simplify Language, who has trained hundreds of org...

Are you building a firm, or have you really built yourself a very high-paying job? That is a question every entrepreneurial professional needs to confront at some point, whether you are five years into practice or thirty-five. This week, Susan Guthrie welcomes Andrea Steinbrenner for a thoughtful and eye-opening conversation about what it truly means to build something that can sustain itself beyo...

This is not your typical episode on profitability. Susan Guthrie welcomes guest Darren Wurz,CFP®, who brings a fresh and innovative approach to what profit really means for legal professionals. He explains why chasing higher revenue alone can actually leave firm owners feeling more stressed, stretched thin, and disconnected from the life they want their practice to support. Darren is the founder o...