Growth and Change Case

• Secured a $3M core support grant
• Tripled its overall budget, adding legal staff and creating a policy department
• Quadrupled its caseload, and greatly increased the number of victorious cases

The Law Center, an organization that brings lawsuits to correct injustices, had been operating for about eight years as a small program in a law school.  Although it was lauded for its pioneering litigation, its Director and founder had a bigger vision; he wanted to transform the Center into a much larger, enduring institution that would lead a movement for nationwide systemic legal reform.  He came to MAG on the advice of a funder, seeking expert guidance on how to translate his vision into reality.


ANALYSIS
After reading background materials, conducting intensive individual interviews with the eight staff members, and analyzing all we’d learned, MAG concluded that the Center was in fact positioned to play a central, catalytic role in the push for systemic reforms, but that it would not achieve this potential unless it overcame four big barriers to growth.

1.  Lack of Independence.  As long as the Center was part of the law school, it wouldn’t be free to engage in the legislative advocacy needed to win systemic law reforms.  MAG recommended that the Center spin off from the law school but continue to run the law student clinic (which helped staff the Center’s work) as an independent organization.

2.  Over-Ambitious Plans.  Because the Director was loath to pass up any opportunity, the Center was already spread too thin.  Yet his expansive vision called for adding no less than ten major new thrusts.  MAG noted that even if the Law Center tripled the size of its budget and staff, its capacity still wouldn’t allow it to have a serious, sustained program in more than a handful of those areas.  MAG recommended that the Law Center rethink its plans and decide which areas should become its top priority core programs, which should get limited attention, and which should be dropped entirely.

3.  Lack of Day-to-Day Leadership.  The founding Director insisted that no decisions be made or actions taken without his say-so.  But, because he was juggling so many other commitments — teaching and running a private law practice, to name just two — he could give only part-time attention to the Law Center.  He was away from the office so often, and was so overloaded and inaccessible when he was there, that work could not move forward, productivity was impaired, and the young, inexperienced staff was not held to account or given the direction, guidance, and structure they needed.   MAG told the founder that, in order to make real his vision for the Law Center, he would have to choose between two options: either commit to full-time leadership of the Law Center, or vacate the role and hire an experienced and empowered Executive Director to provide the strong management and day-to-day leadership the Center so sorely needed.

4.  Lack of Structure, Cohesion and Trust.   Most of the staff, instead of having clearly defined roles and responsibilities, simply did whatever the Director told them to do.  Their jobs had no structure and they had no sense of being a team or being part of a cohesive organizational whole.  Half the staff had been there from the start and concentrated only on individual casework.  The other half had been recently hired to begin work on systemic reforms, but the Director had never told the old-timers that the new people were coming.  They soon divided into two camps that distrusted and distanced themselves from one another.  Staff members’ lack of understanding of each other’s jobs and conflicting views about the Center’s priorities fueled suspicions further and made the alienation worse.  On top of that, although all the staff were inspired by and admired the Director’s brilliance, they increasingly resented his treatment of them as underlings rather than as professionals whose views and feelings he should take into account.  MAG recommended clarifying staff roles, making each job functionally coherent, and engaging the entire staff in a process to build a sense of team and trust.

DEVELOPING A STRATEGIC PLAN
MAG met at length with the Director to explain its analysis and recommendations and to help him understand and confront the changes he and the organization would need to make in order for the Law Center to grow.  The Director emerged from that meeting committed to making those changes.  He agreed to step down as Executive Director and assume the new role of President, in which he would continue to provide vision and set direction and strategy, while leaving day-to-day leadership and management to the new executive.

Next, MAG facilitated a day-long meeting in which the staff (including the Director) opened up communication, cleared up misunderstandings, healed relationships, rebuilt trust, and learned what they needed from one another to do their jobs more effectively. They also bought into MAG’s recommendations (which we had put into writing) and committed to operating with a greater level of structure, discipline, and accountability.

MAG then guided the Law Center through the development of a strategic plan that defined the Center’s core programs (casework, policy reform, and public education) and set the Center’s goals and priorities for the next three years.  Based on that plan, MAG designed an expanded staff and management structure, helped define or redefine each staff member’s responsibilities, and recommended a plan for phasing in 20 new positions over three years.  When shown the plan, the staff and Director were sure they’d never grow that big, but three years later the staff had expanded to include 35 members.

IMPLEMENTING THE PLAN
Over the next twelve months, MAG helped the Law Center to implement its plans by:

• Designing a job description for a new Executive Director, screening applicants, assisting in the final selection, and clarifying what responsibilities and authority the President would have and what he’d turn over to the new executive.
• Checking in periodically with the President and Executive Director to deal with any ambiguities or snags that had developed in their relationship.
• Coaching the Executive Director and staff to establish a culture of high performance and accountability.
• Guiding the staff in further planning to flesh out the strategy for winning policy reforms in four key areas and to develop a three-year fundraising plan.  
• Designing job descriptions for Directors of Policy, Development, and Finance and Administration and helping to screen candidates for these roles.
• Defining the role, responsibilities, and target composition of the Law Center’s first Board of Directors and supporting the President in carrying out the board-development plan.
• Helping to clarify, define, and structure the Law Center’s relationship with a network of partner organizations.

RESULTS
By the end of three years, the Law Center had achieved the following:

• On the strength of its strategic plan, won a $3 million foundation grant for core support, which enabled it to implement its three year expansion plan.
• Diversified and increased its funding further, quintupling its budget.
• Dramatically increased the number of cases successfully litigated.  In its first eight years, it had conducted 70 successful lawsuits.  Over the three years following MAG’s work, it won nearly 100 more.
• Successfully built a policy department that achieved a number of legislative victories at the state level.
• Strengthened its strategic communications and raised the visibility of the Law Center enormously.
• Eliminated a case backlog that had, before MAG’s intervention, numbered in the thousands.
• Spun off from the law school and recruited and engaged a prestigious board of directors that fit the targeted profile.
• Hired a highly effective Executive Director who built the institutional strength of the Law Center to the point where it is no longer dependent on its founder.

In assessing the impact of MAG’s work at the end of those three years, the Law Center’s founder and president wrote:

“When they write the history of the Center, the movement it is part of, and how they advanced justice in America, one great turning point will be the day you walked into our offices and turned our entire institution around.  We cannot thank you enough for working this miraculous transformation.  What patience you have.  What empathy. What toughness when it counts.”