Be a Next
Level Leader

Debbie Foster

CEO, Affinity Consulting Group

Debbie Foster has been in rooms that most consultants avoid. Equity partner meetings where retirement is the word nobody will say out loud. Compensation conversations that have been quietly deferred for a decade. Toxic rainmakers who've been given a pass for years because the math looked right—until it didn't.

She doesn't look for the exit in those rooms. She walks in, rolls up her sleeves, and says "hand me the baby."

After nearly thirty years working with law firms from the billing clerk's desk to the managing partner's office, she has seen every problem a firm can have—and helped solve most of them. As CEO and co-founder of Affinity Consulting Group, she's one of the legal industry's most recognized voices on leadership, firm operations, and the hard conversations that actually move firms forward. Now she's putting thirty years of that hard-won experience into this book—not as theory, but as the direct, practical guidance she's been giving law firm leaders in private for decades.

Stephanie Everett

Chief Growth Officer, Affinity Consulting Group

Stephanie Everett knows what it costs to figure out leadership alone—because she did it. She started as a practicing attorney, built her own firm from the ground up, and made most of the mistakes this book was written to prevent.

She made bad hires and kept them too long, watched the cost move through everyone around them. She tried to be liked instead of respected. She built systems that broke under growth and rebuilt them from scratch. She avoided conversations that needed to happen and paid the price for it. Every pattern this book addresses is one she lived before she learned to name it—and spent the last decade teaching to law firm leaders who were living them too.

Lawyer jokes aside, attorneys and legal professionals are good people who have simply never been taught how to lead. Stephanie has spent her career building the tools that close that gap. She's most proud of the conversation maps and scripts in this book because she knows that most leaders don't avoid hard conversations out of cowardice. They avoid them because they don't know how to start, what to say, or where the conversation goes from there. She built the tools that answer all three.