Your firm runs on experts — the legal minds, the finance jocks, the clinicians who patients trust, the rainmakers who actually bring in the work.
But your company’s future depends on something rarer: experts who can lead other experts. That is harder than it looks. It takes different skills and a different mindset.
And wanting to make this leadership transition is not evidence of being able to do it.
law firm leaders coached in 2026 — all in Am Law firms.
15
PE-owned healthcare operators coached in a 12-month leadership lab to ensure their skills matched the investment thesis goals
4
lateral partners with books of $3–5M each, landed by one practice leader we coached
23%
office profitability growth over two years under a managing partner we coached
Coaching — confidential 360 feedback and advice to help proven experts become better leaders.
Cohort programs — a group of leaders at the same transition point, inside one organization, solving a corporate problem
Standalone assessment — data driven evidence for an appointment, a succession, or a development decision.
Executive search — when the answer is a hire: an August Leadership engagement, through August's global network. Bench Strength does not conduct searches.
Law Firms
Coaching and cohort programs for partners becoming practice leaders, office leaders, and firm leaders.
The traits that make experts successful are rarely the traits that make them effective leaders. Precision becomes perfectionism that won't delegate. Skepticism becomes risk aversion. Self-reliance becomes a bottleneck. These patterns are predictable, they are measurable, and they are most expensive at the moment of appointment — a practice chair, a portfolio-company CEO, a successor. We measure them before we coach them.
The method
Assess — Validated instruments and confidential 360s measure how a leader actually leads — not how they describe it.
Develop — Coaching and cohort work against a small number of behaviorally anchored goals, in live situations.
Measure — Goals are revisited and progress is evidenced over time. Development you can point to, not just feel.
A hiring toolkit, built by one partner cohort, now used firm-wide for leadership hiring
Practice Leader, Intellectual Property Practice, top-ranked Am Law firm
The principals
Jeffrey Cohn
Leadership and succession adviser; Spencer Stuart and Heidrick & Struggles; co-author in Harvard Business Review with Jon Katzenbach.
The practice is built on 'Why Are We Bad at Picking Good Leaders?', Jeffrey Cohn and Jay Moran's award-winning book on evaluating leadership potential. — Thought Leadership
Founder-led here, globally backed
Bench Strength works in tight partnership with August Leadership, a top global talent management consultancy. The combination is the point.
Founder-led
A founder-led boutique. Both principals in the room, hands-on, responsive — the people you meet are the people who do the work.
Globally backed
August's global scale — search and leadership advisory partners across the world — and the cultural and cognitive diversity that comes with a truly global partnership.
And when a leadership gap should be filled rather than developed — a portfolio CEO, a practice chair from outside — the search is an August Leadership engagement, under a separate roof: August's search consultants around the world conduct it, and candidates can be assessed with the same rigor we bring to our own assessment work. Bench Strength itself does not conduct searches.
"We saw a real shift in how key partners delegated, developed associates, and collaborated across practices — and our lateral integration outcomes improved noticeably within a year."
Global Managing Partner, Am Law 100
Start with one confidential conversation about one live transition.
