The Seasons of Your Career:
Spring, When Careers Take Root

By Ed Poll

To everything there is a season, and a law career is no different. When you enter practice, you feel independent and full of vigour. You can grow, learn, develop and contribute to others. You travel a path of growth that has established seasons every bit as full as the seasons of the year. 

By the time you have traversed the seasons, you have had the opportunity to develop and contribute mightily in many ways. Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort in each season to become the best you could be.

Over the span of your career, there is a balance of life. But, at any one time, the focus is on who you are and what you’re doing, not on what you were and what you will be. You live one life and must think holistically. In a small firm or large one, developing a career requires planning to set overall goals and specific strategies. 

Once you view a legal career as a series of business and professional development seasons, your perception changes. Career growth is no longer unstructured – it becomes a process of understanding what you ought to do in each season. Lawyers who understand how to grow a career through its successive seasons can better assess the value they provide, and better reflect it in their performance.

We will look at each of the four seasons in a lawyer’s career and examine its benchmarks, its productive strategies, its traps to avoid. Future articles will examine the seasons of summer (when careers grow fastest), fall (when hard work ripens) and winter (when lawyers should prepare for a new life outside of the law). We begin with spring, the season when careers take root for early and mid-level associates.

Learning the business of law

Most new associates begin the spring of their careers ill-equipped to handle the business of law. They enter law school with an undergraduate degree in the liberal arts. Law school curricula have little business focus, and because legal educators tend to view law as a profession, they consider any business training to be trade-oriented and therefore inappropriate for law schools. 

The result too often is that young lawyers do not understand the operation of the firm as a business (budget, collections, profit, loss), the firm’s billing structure, the firm’s and their own profitability, and the importance of clients and their own businesses. In this sense, law schools have failed their customers, their students.

The first thing that lawyers in the spring of their careers do is become sensitive to the financial needs and operation of their firms. To achieve this, lawyers need increased access to financial information and better training in using it. They also need to understand the traditional key measures of law firm performance: realization, utilization, leverage and collections. 

Associates who understand these issues can better assess the value they provide to their firms, and create new ways to provide more of it. They become cost-effective contributors to their firms, and value-added resources to their clients. These are the associates with the best chance of becoming partners in the summer of their careers.

Finding allies and mentors in the firm

Associates new to law firm life in the spring of their careers, or even those at mid-level, are at a distinct disadvantage when trying to understand the firm’s business operations. Very practical help lies in a direction too many associates do not pursue: developing a good working relationship with the firm’s senior administrators. 

Administrators who are familiar with the firm’s financial information and marketing can help associates truly grasp the essentials of business. This should involve the full range of business disciplines that administrators deal with every day. When financial and operational information can be secured and questioned personally through dialogue with an administrator, the chances are better that young associates will understand why they need to be concerned about the firm's financial health and their part in the process. Also, administrators have substantial incentive to help because they know that today’s associates can be tomorrow’s partners.

Mentoring is quite a different proposition. Large law firms often proclaim that they have formal mentoring, a practice prevalent for many years in smaller firms. Some firms actually assign a lawyer to serve as a guide and facilitate the associate’s integration into the firm. Others say that the newer lawyer must seek out his or her own mentor from among the firm’s elders.  

As law firms have increased in size and pressures to increase billable hours have intensified, there often has been no time left for old-fashioned mentoring. The simple fact is that a mentor’s career success is already established, and the senior person in a mentoring relationship holds the power to retard or advance the junior person’s career. Older partners at firms where compensation is based on individual performance only may be reluctant to encourage the next-generation lawyer who might “steal” business. For all these reasons, lawyers in the spring of their careers should be wary of leaning too much upon a mentor.

Developing clients and significant matters

Instead, associates in the spring of their careers should begin as early as possible to build relationships with potential clients apart from the work that partners assign to them. This can be as simple as communicating regularly with law school friends to discuss cases, clients, war stories – and to develop referral sources. Or it can be a more organized effort, like getting out into the public eye by writing articles and attending lunch or bar association functions, particularly when these things are done with established older partners. 

Associates should also blog (individually or on behalf of the firm), and contribute to client news updates. Social networking on LinkedIn – inviting business associates in your target market to be part of your contact network – is an excellent option. In all this, keep visibility foremost; the only limits are your creativity and time.

Such efforts allow younger associates to make a convincing argument at review time: “This is what I’ve done to promote myself and promote the firm.” Go on the offensive; detail the number of articles and blog posts and presentations you’ve done, and show how many people you’ve reached. 

Show that you read your prospects’ key industry publications and web sites to know what concerns them, that you are calling on prospects and referral sources who are having a tough time businesswiseto see what you can do to help. Targeting prospects who can provide desirable work that fits the firm’s capabilities shows that you think like a partner, and are qualified to become one in the summer of your career.

Avoiding failure by taking charge

The message to this point is simple: in the spring of your career, you must take the initiative for career building. Conversely, the most dangerous trap to avoid is failing to take charge of your career. Associates who expect opportunities to be handed to them, and then find that they are not, can become dissatisfied with their lot in life. This breeds cynicism and an attitude of, “This is a dysfunctional system, and it’s not my fault.” 

Associates beginning their careers must realize that the number one factor determining their success is whether there is enough work to justify the firm keeping them. If the answer is yes, the next question is, do the associate’s work product, work ethic and attitude create profit for the firm? Has the associate made him/herself indispensable to this firm? Does the associate’s combination of skill and attitude demonstrate potential for career growth? 

Having a negative attitude in a system where associates who do not show partnership potential are “culled” from the firm is not a strategy for success. Take the example of an associate who is frustrated because she had been working hard at several client development efforts, which suddenly and unexpectedly fell through. The best response to this situation is not to fret over it. When you do, it’s easy to get into a funk. The more rational and effective approach can be summed up simply: don’t “strategize,” do something. Those who sit back, fall back. Those who move forward, get ahead.

Developing your career in the spring of your professional life requires planning to set overall goals and specific strategies. The issue is not more billable hours, it’s what kind of billable work and what that work contributes to the firm. The firm must be able to evaluate your growth by specific standards of billable time, training and client development effort, measured against realistic near-term targets. By taking an empowered approach to such a process, you won’t just have a legal career – you’ll create one, and reap the benefits in the coming seasons.

Edward Poll, J.D., M.B.A., CMC, a law practice management thought leader and contributor to CBA PracticeLink, is currently on a national tour to speak to bar associations and law schools, sponsored by Fujitsu ScanSnap, among others. Ed’s extensive background in business and law have made him one of the nation’s most sought-after experts in law practice management. Check out Ed’s progress at www.lawbiz.com and contact Ed if you want him to speak to your group.