The Road Not Taken: Be Useful

So what exactly does it mean to "be useful"? Celeste Harrison Forst, our new in-house columnist, explains.

Ed. note: Please welcome new columnist Celeste Harrison Forst, who will be writing about legal career paths, including advice and thoughts based on her work as an in-house lawyer.

I wasn’t the smartest person in my class. I didn’t go to a Tier 1 school. According to conventional wisdom, I deserve to be homeless and unemployed. I’m not. I have a delightful in-house job that my friends who followed the rules would kill for. How did I get it (and the jobs that got me here)? Not by being the smartest person in the room. I am, however, frequently the most useful person in the room.

Welcome to The Less Traveled Road. I’ve been invited to write about legal career paths. I’m a sort-of high-school dropout (I have a state equivalency), a mediocre student at best, but I figured out ways to succeed despite my inability to perform within the rules. There’s more than one way to get what you want. If my years of trial and error can be helpful, then I am happy to share. My first tidbit of advice: Be useful.

This advice applies to lawyers across specialties. Yes, the advice is obvious. Why the hell would anyone hire you if you aren’t useful? But in this profession, you would be surprised at how useless so many of us can be. There are reasons lawyers are universally disliked, and I have to believe this is one of the reasons.

In my days at a firm, I saw colleagues give advice that essentially told a client that “it could go either way” and the opinion was “contingent on facts changing.” With all the CYA in the opinions, there was nothing useful left, but plenty of hours billed to craft an empty opinion. Now that I’m in-house with choice of counsel, if I get an opinion like that without some prior discussion from the attorney, I am unlikely to use that attorney again. Likewise, if I support my internal business customer with an opinion that tries to plays all sides, I too will be deemed useless.

What does it mean for a lawyer to be useful? Generally: It means to know what your clients need and to give it to them. Specifically, it means understanding questions in the context of their business (or life for individuals). It means knowing the tools available to you and using them to your client’s benefit. That includes tools for business, not just limited to the standard research databases. It means being able to see around the outside edges of the question to help your client find real, workable solutions to their issues. It means being brave enough to suggest a means for resolution. It means giving your client something your she couldn’t have obtained on her own.

For example, I may just want a quick email opinion to back up my own research and opinion. In that case, give me what I want. The thing I can’t get on my own is the backup opinion. But if I need outside counsel as a peer advisor, I need someone who has seen similar issues faced by other clients. I don’t expect my counsel to violate confidentiality, but I do expect my counsel to use the breadth of her experience to benefit me. Similarly, when I am faced with a novel issue with my internal business customer, my response cannot be “that’s different than what we normally do – too risky, don’t do it.” That response will immediately render me useless to my internal customer. If I am useless, I am irrelevant. As in-house counsel, I don’t serve a useful purpose only by issue-spotting (although that is part of my job). I become useful by providing a means by which to resolve the issues I spot.

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Usefulness applies to those looking for a job too. If you have been looking for a job for more than thirty seconds, you’ve probably realized that every applicant is a skilled researcher, talented writer, and exceptional advocate. If legal skills are all a candidate has to offer, the evaluation turns on fit, connections, or book of business. If, however, a candidate has additional useful skills, that becomes a game changer. Can a candidate use spreadsheets to organize and distill data? Even if he or she doesn’t actually do the work of compiling the data, knowing what to ask for (from clients or opposing parties) and how to communicate the meaning of that data is useful. Can a candidate present an opinion using minimal words and graphics (e.g., Powerpoint), so a customer can quickly support an executive meeting? If so, that is useful to a client.

Times are still lean. Back in the day, lawyers could outsource more. The world has changed; you may be smart, you may be hardworking, that isn’t enough anymore. We are all varying degrees of smart and hardworking. Set yourself apart.

Be useful. Next week: how to find your useful skills.


Celeste Harrison Forst has practiced in small and mid-sized firms and is now in-house at a large manufacturing and technology company where she receives daily hugs from her colleagues. You can reach Celeste directly at C.harrisonforst@gmail.com.

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