Someone who knows your world because I stood in it myself.

I began my career in a firm where success had only one form: work harder, perform sharper, and above all don't let yourself show. Evenings were filled with office meetings and training, because those couldn't happen during the day. So I moved exercise to the early morning, and that was fine. I was finally a lawyer and I was enjoying every minute. I did well and grew in my profession and in my role as a lawyer.

When my firm was reorganising, I took the opportunity to start my own practice. First with a partner. And there I kept the same pattern going. In fact, I worked even harder.

Until the moment I saw that the firm I was building wasn't mine. Not in tone, not in pace, not in the way I wanted to deal with clients and cases.

What followed wasn't a career switch. It was a redesign, guided by a coach. I wanted to move towards Opsteen real estate lawyer 2.0 — that's what I called it: a more sustainable version of how I wanted to run my firm and how I wanted to practise as a lawyer, and much more as Lobke as an entrepreneur. So I stripped my work layer by layer of what I'd taught myself and rebuilt it from who I discovered I truly was. And that's how Opsteen Academy eventually came into being: a leadership programme for lawyers willing to do the same.

I deliberately work with one specific group: women with their own law firm. I do this because the combination of entrepreneurship, final responsibility and the weight of legal work creates a pressure of its own. And I know that pressure all too well.

I know how it is and how it feels to receive a file on Friday afternoon that colours your whole weekend. Or how it feels to land that big case right before your holiday, which means you suddenly have to arrange an attachment at a moment's notice. I also know what it is to swallow something in a conversation with a big client because that's how it's supposed to be. And I know that most leadership and personal-growth programmes have no answer to that, because they're written for a world where the stakes are different.

I am direct, warm and uncompromising at once. I see quickly where you walk past yourself, and I name it without circling around it. Not to be hard, but because that's what serves you most. I developed the Resilience Framework™: three layers of self-direction (in your body, in your mind, in your communication) that I train with you on cases from your own practice.

No models to talk about. No sessions you leave motivated only to fall back into your old reflex the week after. Just training until it sits in your system, exactly in the moments where it truly counts.

I see too many talented lawyers quietly getting stuck on a game they didn't design themselves. Not because they can't handle it, but because they've learned that their own way is risky. And I believe the opposite: that the real leap in your work only comes when you stop playing by someone else's rules and build on what only you bring.

That's what I stand for. That's what I train you in. And that's why I plead your cause instead of pleading in court for my clients.