Coaching is not a licensed profession. As of a November 2024 review by Utah’s Office of Professional Licensure Review, no US state requires a license to practice coaching. The same review found practitioners using more than 120 different self-descriptive titles.
For a lawyer that is a strange starting point. The usual way of assessing a professional, the credential that means something because a body can take it away, is not available in the same form. What follows is what actually distinguishes one coach from another, and what to ask.
Credentials: What They Mean and What They Do Not
The most recognized body is the International Coaching Federation. Its credentials differ mainly in volume of training and logged client hours:
| Level | Training | Client hours | Holders worldwide |
|---|---|---|---|
| ACC Associate Certified Coach | 60+ hours | 100+ hours | 28,508 |
| PCC Professional Certified Coach | 125+ hours | 500+ hours | 24,998 |
| MCC Master Certified Coach | 200+ hours | 2,500+ hours | 2,481 |
Requirements from the ICF credential comparison. Holder counts from the ICF 2024 Annual Report, data as at year-end 2024. All three levels also require ten hours of mentor coaching, recorded coaching sessions assessed against the ICF competencies, and a written exam.
Two things follow from that table. Fewer than one ICF credential-holder in twenty holds the MCC, so it is a genuine signal of volume. And the ACC, which half of them hold, represents a hundred logged client hours, which is real training and is not a long career. Credentials renew every three years against forty hours of continuing education, so a current credential also tells you someone is still practicing.
Outside ICF, the main body a US buyer may encounter is EMCC Global, which is predominantly European and runs four accreditation levels. A coach with no accreditation from anyone is not necessarily unqualified, but you are then assessing them entirely on their track record, and you should say so to yourself explicitly rather than letting an impressive website do the work.
Does the Research Support Coaching At All?
Reasonably, at a modest effect size and on a modest evidence base. That is a more useful answer than the one most coaching websites give.
Two peer-reviewed meta-analyses are worth knowing. Theeboom, Beersma and van Vianen (2014), in the Journal of Positive Psychology, pooled 18 studies and found significant positive effects across five outcome categories, with effect sizes ranging from 0.43 for coping to 0.74 for goal-directed self-regulation. Jones, Woods and Guillaume (2016), in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, pooled 17 studies and found an overall effect of 0.36 on organizational outcomes.
Two findings from the second paper deserve more attention than they get, including from coaches. Effects were stronger for internal coaches than external ones. And engagements that used 360-degree feedback showed smaller positive effects, not larger.
Neither finding means external coaching does not work. Both should make a buyer skeptical of anyone selling the multi-rater assessment as the centerpiece, and both are worth raising with a coach to see how they handle inconvenient evidence about their own field.
Does a Coach Need to Have Practiced Law?
Honestly: it depends what you are working on, and the advantage is smaller than lawyer-coaches usually claim.
Where it matters is context and speed. If the problem involves origination credit, how a compensation committee actually behaves, why a practice group chair has no real authority, or what a bad year does to standing in a partnership, a coach who has never been inside a firm will spend sessions being educated, and you will pay for that. It also matters for credibility in the first few meetings, which is not nothing when the work depends on candor.
Where it matters less is the coaching itself. The core skills are not legal skills. A very experienced coach from outside the profession will often outperform a former lawyer with a weekend certification, and the reverse pitch should be treated with suspicion.
The reasonable position: legal background is a strong tiebreaker and a poor primary qualification. If someone leads with it, ask what else they have.
What It Costs
Less transparent than it should be, and most of the numbers online are unsourced. Here is what can actually be cited.
The 2023 ICF Global Coaching Study put the average fee for a one-hour session in North America at $272. Two caveats matter. That figure is from calendar year 2022, so it is several years old. And it covers all coaching rather than executive coaching specifically, which runs higher.
Beyond that, be careful. There is no current published survey breaking fees down by credential level or by executive seniority, and the tiered figures that circulate on coaching industry sites do not trace back to one. Sherpa Coaching’s annual executive coaching survey, once the standard reference, appears to have stopped after 2020.
So the practical approach is to ask directly, and to ask for the engagement total rather than an hourly rate. Executive coaching is normally sold as a six to twelve month engagement, not by the hour, and comparing hourly rates between a coach who meets weekly and one who meets every three weeks tells you very little.
Ask what is included beyond the sessions: intake, stakeholder conversations, assessment, work between sessions, and what happens if you need to pause for a trial or a closing.
If Your Firm Is Paying: The Question Most People Forget
This is the single most important item on the list, and it is routinely left until after the first session, which is too late.
When a firm pays, there are three parties: you, the coach, and the firm. The ICF Code of Ethics does not set a fixed rule about what a coach may report back. What it requires is that the boundary be agreed in advance among all of them. Standard 2.2 obliges a coach to “have a clear agreement about what information is exchanged and how it is exchanged among all parties involved during all coaching engagements,” and standard 1.1 requires a coaching agreement covering confidentiality before the work begins.
So the question is not “is this confidential.” Every coach says yes. The question is:
“My firm is paying. What exactly will you tell them, when, and can I see that in writing before the first session?”
A good answer is specific and narrow: whether sessions happened, whether the goals set at the outset were met, and nothing about content. A vague answer, or one that arrives only after you have started, is the thing to walk away from.
Worth knowing separately: many firms have a coaching benefit that goes unused, and it frequently covers more people and more money than partners assume. Ask your talent or professional development contact before assuming you are paying yourself.
Questions for the First Call
Most coaches offer a free introductory conversation. Treat it as a two-way interview.
- Who do you usually work with, and who do you turn away? A coach who cannot describe who they are wrong for has not thought about it, or is not willing to say.
- What does a typical engagement look like, start to finish? You want length, cadence, what happens between sessions, and how it ends.
- How will we know whether this worked? Listen for something specific agreed at the outset. “You’ll feel the difference” is not a measure.
- Tell me about an engagement that did not work. The most revealing question on the list. Everyone has had them. A coach who has not, or will not say, is telling you something.
- What happens if I want to stop? Get the terms before you are in.
- What is your training, and when did you last do any? Credentials renew every three years. Ask what they did for the last renewal.
And one to ask yourself afterward: did they spend most of the call listening, or most of it describing their methodology? The second is a preview.
Signals Worth Noticing
Reassuring. They ask what you want to change before telling you what they offer. They are specific about who they do not work with. They name the limits of what coaching can do. They can describe their measurement without reaching for a proprietary framework. They will tell you if another coach is a better fit.
Less reassuring. A proprietary methodology with a trademark and an acronym. Outcome statistics with no source. Testimonials from people whose role is unrelated to yours. Pressure toward a twelve-month commitment on a first call. An unwillingness to put the reporting boundary in writing.
The Underlying Question
Most people arrive at coaching with one identifiable thing they want to change: a practice group that is not working, feedback that never lands, a decision about the practice that has been sitting for a year. That is the right way to arrive, and it is the thing to lead with on the first call.
Coaching is not therapy and it is not remedial. It works best with people who are already performing and have something specific in the way. If what you actually need is clinical support, that is a different discipline and a good coach will say so.
If you want to test any of this in a real conversation, how these engagements are structured is set out in detail, and a 30-minute call is the usual way to start.
