What Is Your Personal Strategic Plan For Success?

By developing your own personal skills, you will in turn make the firm’s services more valuable to clients.

What, precisely, is going to make you special (or even more special) in the marketplace over the next few years? Would you like to develop a specialized expertise in a particular technical area, in certain types of transaction, in the problems of certain types of clients? You probably can develop cutting-edge expertise in any one of these, but not all of them simultaneously. The choice is yours. All the firm asks of you is that you focus and stretch; that you pick a career-building goal and work towards it. -David H. Maister, <a href="Managing The Professional Services Firm.

Very few new lawyers begin their career with a plan — largely to their detriment. It’s not something that is ever addressed in law school, the need to have a plan for your career. In the current legal job environment, most new lawyers merely put their nose to the grindstone and churn out work fast and furiously whether within an organization or on their own. The concern for employment and a paycheck trumping almost every other thought or need. But as has been said many times — if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

Toiling away like a cog in the machine does nobody any good. Developing success as an associate is not merely meekly accepting whatever task is tossed along towards you, but instead seeking out interesting work and assignments. Picking an area of practice and pursuing it with vigor. Learning about the clients and their business and industry far outside of the required bare minimum to complete your work. It is choosing a path of development and doing everything in your power to go down it.

Discovering this path is not your managing partner’s responsibility. It is yours.

This is just as true if you hang your shingle. If you are in a small firm in a rural area, you will likely need to be a generalist. But if you are going to be in a small firm in a metropolitan area, you are going to have to do something that makes you stand out from the crowd of other lawyers fighting for business.

It is a client’s (buyer’s) market at this point in time, with firms desperate for clients’ business. Many firms will attempt to compete on price. But as previously stated, competing on price is only setting up the client to leave you for someone else cheaper. You must compete on value: providing specialized quality services to the client that makes them feel as though they are getting a deal. You just have to discover what those specialized services are.

No one is going to be able to decide for you what shape your work takes. You have to develop yourself personally because that will in turn develop the firm as a whole.

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Again, Maister: “Developing a strategy is fundamentally a creative activity, not an analytical one. It’s about finding new ways of doing things that provide an advantage over the competition.” By developing your own personal skills, you will in turn make the firm’s services more valuable to clients.

So I pose this question to you: Have you found a new way to do something lately or are you just following the herd?


Keith Lee practices law at Hamer Law Group, LLC in Birmingham, Alabama. He writes about professional development, the law, the universe, and everything at Associate’s Mind. He is also the author of The Marble and The Sculptor: From Law School To Law Practice (affiliate link), published by the ABA. You can reach him at keith.lee@hamerlawgroup.com or on Twitter at @associatesmind.

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