At the risk of making this course seem self-reverential right from the start, I'm going to talk briefly about my mission and how I uncovered it. And yes, I said uncovered. Not wrote, not drafted, not workshopped. A good mission statement requires two distinct chunks of work: First you have to discover what your mission is, then you have to try your best to capture it in language.

I help legal professionals harness the tools of modern entrepreneurship to build practices that are profitable, scalable, and sustainable for themselves and their communities.

I like it. I hope it works for you or at least piques your interest. I can recite it off the top of my head. But it was not Athena springing fully formed from my skull.

I'm not sure I can find the very first draft mission statement I used when I started my business, but here's an early version I tracked down:

It is my mission to help lawyers and legal teams harness modern ways of working like Agile, Lean, Design Thinking, and more, to improve their workflows and deliver outstanding value to their clients.

This is from around 2015. It isn't terrible; looking back I had a decent sense of what I was trying to accomplish (that first chunk of work). But it is pretty wordy, it focuses too heavily on details, and I hadn't quite found language that inspired possibility instead of sounding like work.

And that's OK.

The reason I say that a mission is something you uncover is that it usually takes work to get through the layers. I like the statement I've landed on and have been using it for several years, but who knows when I'll learn something else about what I'm trying to accomplish that will cause me to refine it further.

The thing that helped me figure out how to craft better language was diving deeper into why I even care about doing what I do. Here's what I learned about myself:

I believe the world is a better place for lawyers, their teams, and society when legal professionals are empowered to efficiently & consistently deliver quality legal services, at scale, that provide clear customer value.

In short, I'm trying to save the world by helping lawyers be better at helping people. It's a pollyannaish notion to be sure, and no way am I going to ever fix all of the things. But I think a good mission statement should be idealistic, so that even if you will never accomplish the full mission, the world will be a slightly better place for every bit of progress you make.

Besides, it sounds better than my unofficial elevator pitch, which is "I help lawyers suck less."

Next we'll look at some typical law firm mission statements (names changed to protect the innocent) and try to get at why so many of them leave so much work to do.

Example 1: The Agile Attorney Mission

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