RETHINK YOUR RETREAT

Filament designs & facilitates unique, collaborative retreats built for innovation-focused firms. If you’re tired of business as usual and are ready to turn your next retreat into a creative problem-solving engine for your firm, it’s time to meet Filament.

Designed for Firms

Filament Retreats combine creative facilitation, focused problem-solving, and small-group exercises that transform passive attendees into active participants working together to solve your firm’s most pressing challenges.

Created for Connection

We leverage the “wisdom of the crowd” to identify creative solutions, ensure networking happens all day, and keep everyone engaged without boring them with terrible slides read from a stage.

Better by Design

Filament retreats don’t use PowerPoint. Instead, our expert facilitators are joined by sketch-artists who capture conversations, illustrate insights, and help visualize key messages and strategic imperatives before, during, and after your event.

The most expensive thing at your retreat is lawyers’ time. Will you spend it well?

Instead of boring your lawyers with presentations, “motivational” keynotes, client panels, and financial updates, what if you focused their prodigious problem-solving skills on rethinking their practice and improving your firm?

Filament Retreats Help Your Firm:

  • Reimagine your firm’s future with actionable innovation that positively impacts your lawyers, staff, and clients. 

  • Rethink how your firm can deliver remarkable client service in a hyper-competitive legal marketplace.

  • Revisit your business model by moving beyond the billable hour and basic “alternative fees” towards true win-win partnerships with clients and lawyers. 

  • Recharge your firm’s culture by creating meaningful talent strategies that increase diversity and inclusion while bridging generational differences.

  • Re-engage your lawyers by helping them think like entrepreneurs and innovators instead of employees.

Additional Offerings Include:

  • Client Service Summits invite clients to collaborate with your firm as you work together to serve them better.

  • Innovation Workshops teach new approaches to innovation, creativity, and client service.

  • Community Collaboration Events drive engagement with your communities, local schools, and nonprofits in creative ways.

  • Firm Hackathons are concentrated doses of ideation, innovation, and action centered around firm-focused challenges.

  • Biz Dev Workshops share new approaches and unique methods to find new clients and keep current ones.

Filament Knows Firms

Law Firm Expertise

Filament founder (and recovering lawyer) Matt Homann has been active in the legal innovation community for over two decades and has facilitated unique legal events worldwide.

His legal accomplishments and awards include:

  • A legal blogging pioneer, Homann wrote the first legal blog focused on innovation, creativity, client service, and alternative fees called the [non]billable hour

  • Selected by the ABA Journal as one of their first 100 “Legal Rebels.

  • Named to the Fastcase 50 — a collection of “the smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries, and leaders in the law.”

  • Inducted as a Fellow into the College of Law Practice Management.

  • Delivered legal keynotes and workshops in 25 states and three countries.

Firms Like Yours

Filament has delivered retreats for some of the profession’s smartest firms, including:

  • Armstrong Teasdale

  • Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner

  • Cozen O’Connor

  • Davis Wright Tremaine

  • Dunlap Codding

  • Gable Gotwals

  • Husch Blackwell

  • McLennan Ross

  • Sandberg Phoenix

  • Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt

  • Shook, Hardy & Bacon

  • Smith Gambrell & Russell

  • Valorem Law

  • Wilson Elser

RULES OF FIRM RETREATS

We know we’re not for everyone, but if these “Rules for Retreats” resonate with you, let’s talk!

  • When planning a retreat, the most important voice at the table belongs to your best clients. Ask them how your firm needs to improve and invite them if you dare.

  • At a good retreat, your firm's leadership should spend as much time listening as they do talking. At a great retreat, that ratio is closer to 3:1.

  • If you don’t make time for your people to improve your firm during the retreat, they’re less likely to improve it after the retreat is over.

  • The first things your attendees should learn are one another’s names. Attendees won’t care what their colleagues do until they know who they are.

  • If the retreat is the only time your people talk about innovation, it will be the only time they think about innovation. Same goes for client service.

  • Your staff knows more about how to serve your clients well than your associates do. Bring them along, value their opinions and act on their suggestions. You’ll find that the cost of their attendance is far lower than the cost of their absence.

  • The two questions every attendee should be able to answer after your retreat are: “Why should I be better?” and “What will I do better?”