Trial Lawyer View Podcast
Michael P. McCready
Michael P. McCready | Managing Partner | McCready Law
Michael P. McCready received his undergraduate degree magna cum laude from the University of Richmond in three years and continued at the University of Richmond obtaining his law degree in 1992. Following graduation, he served as a law clerk for a federal judge in Virginia. He came to Chicago the next year and began working at a law firm handling personal injury cases. After four years, he rose to partner. In 1999, he left the partnership to form his own firm, The Law Offices of Michael P. McCready & Associates.
Since venturing out on his own, the firm has grown rapidly. Mr. McCready is licensed to practice in Illinois, Indiana and Virginia as well as the federal courts, including the United States Supreme Court. He is a member of various professional organizations dedicated to protecting the rights of individuals. He has also been inducted into the Million Dollar Advocacy Forum whose membership is limited to trial lawyers who have obtained million dollar results for their clients.
Since opening McCready Law, he has helped injured victims get what is deserved due to the negligence of others.
He focuses on a range of personal injury cases such as car accidents, workers compensation, bus accidents, truck accidents, wrongful deaths, and more. In addition to being managing partner of his law firm, Michael also consults with other personal injury law firms around the country. He is a frequent lecturer on topics such as law firm management, technology, automation and most recently, on the role that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will play on the legal industry. Countless firms have benefited from his 30 years’ experience in the personal injury field.
Michael McCready on the moment he realised he was the bottleneck
Michael McCready built McCready Law from a solo practice into an operation of around 160 people, and the turning point he describes was recognising that he had become the thing slowing it down.
Winning cases and building a strong firm ask for different skills. Plenty of personal injury leaders become excellent lawyers, build a reputation, watch the phone start ringing, and then find that the abilities which created the success are no longer enough to run the business that success produced.
Legal skill gets you started and stops being enough
Competence is the entry price and there is no way around it. What it does not do on its own is create a durable business, so at some point the founder has to build a second layer covering client service, business operations, marketing discipline, leadership capacity and cultural clarity.
Firms stall when the founder keeps operating as though everything should still run through their personal output. The founder has not become less capable. The business has simply grown too complex to be held together by one person’s memory and judgment.
Letting go is harder than it sounds
Michael is honest that this rarely comes from laziness. It comes from pride, from standards and from habit. Trial lawyers are trained to trust their own preparation and to keep control, which serves them in litigation and works against them in leadership.
The questions he had to answer were what genuinely requires his involvement, what he is doing because he is best suited to it, and what he is doing because he never built the structure or the trust for someone else to do it. A founder who insists on sitting in every decision slows the team down and, in the end, gives the client a worse experience.
Operational discipline is a client benefit
Some lawyers hear terms like key performance indicators and standard operating procedures and assume the profession is being cheapened. Michael reads it the other way round.
Repeatable systems give clients consistency. Structured communication means nobody is left in the dark. Well-run intake means opportunities stop falling through. Clear roles mean work moves without confusion. That matters more in a contingency practice, where inefficiency has a direct cost, so doing routine work faster and more reliably improves the margin and the service together.
The biggest gains are in the dull parts
For smaller firms the first real unlock is usually intake. Leaders pour energy into the legal work while leaving very little structure around how new matters get captured, followed up and signed, which is where growth actually starts.
Routine client communication is the same story. Clients who do not know what is happening pick up the phone, and those calls create interruptions and extra work for everyone. Firms that get ahead of it cut the inbound noise and build trust at the same time, and even basic automation around case milestones makes a visible difference.
Adoption is the strategy, not the software
Firms that want the benefits of new technology without the implementation work tend to buy a tool, announce it and wait for results. Michael’s firm has gone further, building custom internal models around the firm’s own values.
What separates the firms getting value is attention to rollout, training, accountability and guardrails. They explain why the tool matters, watch whether people actually use it, spot resistance early and set clear expectations about confidentiality and human review. The technology supports judgment rather than standing in for it.
Building past yourself
The competitive gap between operationally mature firms and everyone else is widening, and it is being driven by infrastructure rather than advertising or trial results. Better systems, better hiring, better internal training and better use of time.
Michael’s conclusion is that you stop being the hero. You build an environment where other people can perform without constant intervention, teach the reasoning behind the work rather than just the task, and invest in leaders instead of employees.
We get into all of this on the episode. Watch it on YouTube, or listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
