Leigh Riley on Elevating Partner Development with Foley's PEAK Program – 'We can't stop learning'
Foley & Lardner LLP partner Leigh Riley appeared on the Big Law Life podcast to share how Foley is redefining professional development to meet the needs of the firm’s partners and the demands of modern legal practice.
Riley discussed the origin and growing impact of Foley’s PEAK (Partner Excellence Actionable Knowledge) program, a comprehensive firm professional development initiative designed to support partners throughout their career. She described how traditionally in the legal profession, training ends at new partner orientation — leaving a major gap just as partners begin to encounter the nuanced challenges of their new responsibilities.
“We can’t stop learning,” Riley said of the decision to launch PEAK in collaboration with the firm’s Talent team. “We can’t stop growing. We can’t stop developing simply because we’ve been made partner. We have 20 or 30 more years of your career after that, so we have to do something about that.”
She described how PEAK’s curriculum was developed to align with the attributes of what makes a successful Foley partner, including across people and administrative management, client relations, and business development.
“The people management was probably the biggest one of these,” Riley explained. “We are very people focused and people centric here, in part because we recognize that what we are selling to clients — our value proposition — is our people. If we don’t take care of our people first, that hurts client relationships.”
“So I would say that was a big focus and maybe something that’s different from other law firms, to talk about how we relate to each other as human beings, but also when you get good at that internally, you also get good at that externally,” she continued. “And you know, it helps with the client relationships as well.”
Another of PEAK’s aspects that Riley highlighted is the program’s recognition that “each partner is unique” and enters partnership with varying strengths and backgrounds. “We approached this almost with the view of ‘let’s train everybody on everything, and our partners can pick and choose what is important to them.”‘
Asked what sets PEAK apart from training programs at other firms, Riley returned to the firm’s people-first philosophy.
“This is different in the sense that it is universal,” she concluded. “We are trying to help every single partner in the firm become better at whatever it is they need to become better at.”
The full episode is available across major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Audible, and Spotify.
