What Comes Up Most
Across the women lawyers Tara coaches, the work tends to concentrate in three areas. Much of it starts before partnership, and several clients come to it as senior associates and counsel.
Client relationships. Excellent lawyers who do the work but aren’t the person the client calls. Relationships built on real trust rather than on a selling style borrowed from someone else. Existing relationships are almost always the starting point.
Firm leadership. Getting into the conversations where decisions get made, and being effective once there. Sometimes that means building a specific skill. Sometimes it means separating what can be influenced from what can’t, which is its own kind of progress. Sponsorship comes up constantly, and it is different from mentorship.
Sustaining it. Performing at this level for another fifteen years, alongside everything else. This is rarely a matter of resilience. It is usually a design problem, and design problems can be solved.
The information was incredibly helpful, and the speaker was knowledgeable and genuinely engaged with our group. We came away with valuable, practical tools. I would tell any colleague that this program was excellent.
Bridget Bailey Lipscomb, Women’s Bar Association of D.C.Where the Work Goes
Client Relationships
- Becoming the person a client calls, not the person who does the work
- Starting from existing relationships, which is nearly always the fastest route
- Trust that survives a handoff, a bad result, and a fee conversation
- Relationships that don’t require performing someone else’s style
Stepping Into Firm Leadership
- Where decisions actually get made at your firm
- Presence and authority that don’t require performing someone else’s style
- Sponsorship, which is different from mentorship and matters more
- Leading a practice group made up of your peers
Sustaining High Performance
- Recovery and attention as performance inputs, with the research behind it
- Boundaries that hold up against a real deadline
- What to stop doing, usually the hardest and most productive question
How the Engagement Runs
Some partners prefer a peer group to one-on-one work. Meridian is a confidential forum for partners, with its first cohort in 2027.
See Meridian →Common Questions
Why a separate page for women lawyers? Is the coaching different?
The method is the same. What differs is what comes up. A large share of Tara’s coaching practice is women partners and senior women lawyers, and a consistent set of issues recurs: building client relationships in a system where credit is sticky, being the only woman in a leadership conversation, and carrying a practice alongside everything else.
That doesn’t call for a different approach. It does mean the context doesn’t need explaining first.
Do you coach business development?
Only one part of it. The relationship side is the work: trust, being the person a client calls, and starting from relationships you already have. Selling technique, pitch preparation, and pipeline discipline are a different specialty, and there are people who do that well.
The distinction matters because the two get conflated. Excellent lawyers often conclude they are bad at business development when what they actually dislike is one style of selling. That is a real problem and it is not solved by more selling advice.
I have been passed over for a leadership role. Where does coaching start?
Usually by separating what you can influence from what you can’t. Then it gets specific: where the decision actually gets made, what evidence exists, and what a realistic route looks like. Sometimes the honest conclusion is that the route runs through a different firm. That is a legitimate answer and we will say it.
Can I do this as part of a group instead?
Meridian is built to cover much of this ground with a curated group of partners from other firms, and some partners prefer that to one-on-one work. Its first cohort runs in 2027. The in-firm version can be scoped to a firm’s women partners specifically.
My firm has a women’s initiative. Is this the same thing?
No, and the difference matters. A women’s initiative is usually programming: events, panels, networking, sometimes a mentoring match. Coaching is a sustained one-on-one engagement against goals you set. They work well together, and several firms bring Tara in for both.
Is it confidential if my firm is paying?
Yes. Where the firm funds the engagement, the reporting boundaries are agreed in writing before the first session, and they normally cover only whether sessions happened and whether the stated goals were met. The content of the conversations is not reported.
Start With a Conversation
Book a 30-minute call. If we’re not the right fit, we’ll tell you, and point you to someone who is.
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